The School Shooting Fiction Archive

School Shooting Fiction, Nonfiction, & Activism

A collage image I created showing the covers of books I have identified as "school shooting fiction": books which feature a school shooting as a major plot point. Many of these books are marketed as young adult fiction.
A collage image I created showing the covers of books I have identified as “school shooting fiction”: books which feature a school shooting as a major plot point. Many of these books are marketed as young adult fiction.

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.