Scholarly Interests:
Lin Young is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Languages, and Cultures. Her teaching and research areas include 19th Century Literature and/or Children’s Literature. Her interests involve anything spooky, Queer or cartoonish. Most of her work focuses on the 19th Century natural history museum, examining how early horror, science fiction and fantasy novels unsettled seemingly-unassailable systems of social categorization. In children’s literature, her work mostly centres on Queer web and print comics and the occasional videogame.

For her dissertation and other publications, she won the A.C. Hamilton Prize for top English dissertation of 2020 at Queen’s, as well as Queen’s’ “Outstanding Humanities Thesis” in 2020, the 2018 Mary Eliza Root Prize (the Victorian Popular Fiction Association), and is the author of the 2016 Hamilton Prize-winning essay on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in Victorian Review.

Teaching Statement: 
I try to craft classes that balance traditional lecture with more active learning and immersive experiences. Some days will be focused on hard skills (close-reading, lecture) and some on more holistic ways of engaging with and relating to the material (group work, immersion studio days, active learning). Some examples include assigning each student different Cinderella stories from around the world and asking them to exchange; annotating comic pages with post-its in the immersion studio, archive visits, salon-style discussion days, or themed annotation activities.

Selected Publications:
“Queer the Beast!: Transformation and Hydridic Masculinity in Beauty and the Beast.” The Hidden Queer, Wayne State UP.

“Digitizing the Epistolary: Dracula Daily and Embodied Contemporary Reading,” Adaptation. 20.

“Pixel Fantasies and Futures: Narrative ‘de-Othering’ in Queer Webcomics.” The LGBTQ Comics Reader, edited by Jonathan Lent and Allison Halsall. University of Mississippi Press.

“Curating the Vampire: Queer (Un)Natural Histories in Joseph Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla.” A Feast of Blood: The Vampire in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Brooke Cameron. Routledge Press.

“Vital Sparks and Spirit Threads: Georgiana Houghton, Medium Memoirs, and Philosophies of Spirit Fashion.” Women’s Studies: Special Issue on Ghost Stories.

Selected Grants, Honours and Awards:
2023 “Best Comic Scholarship.” Eisner. (Chapter in winning book, The LGBTQ+ Comics Reader)

2020 A.C. Hamilton Prize for Outstanding Merit on a Doctoral Dissertation, Queen’s University, English Department.

2018 Mary Eliza Root Prize. Victorian Popular Fiction Association.