School Shooting Fiction, Nonfiction, & Activism

Growing in part out of the dissertation, my recent work investigates the growing genre of school shooting fiction — 91 books, at my count, published between 1977 and 2020.
I’m presently working on a digital humanities project tentatively titled The School Shooting Fiction Archive, in which I bring together text mining and publication analysis to identify & visualize patterns in how we talk about school shootings. Read about my initial findings in a presentation for the American Literature Association’s Annual Meeting below.
I extend that analysis to think about the effects of these texts & events on children and young adults. You can read more about this in a recent presentation for the Children’s Literature Association below.
You can view the in-progress version of The School Shooting Fiction Archive here: https://www.ssfarchive.org
Click here to review my recent presentations on school shooting fiction & activism“Pathologies of Mad Violence: Curating an Archive of School Shooting Fiction,” American Literature Association Conference. Boston, MA, 25 May 2019.
“Madness & Empathy in School Shooting Fiction and Activism,” Children’s Literature Association Conference. Indianapolis, 15 June 2019.