Mary Johnson is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Â鶹ÍøÕ¾. She is primarily interested in creative writing and children's literature, with a focus on ecofeminist approaches to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century girls' fiction.
Her novels are published with Penguin Random House under the pseudonym Mary Averling.
Ecocriticism (particularly ecofeminism); climate and environmental humanities; genre fiction (particularly horror); girlhood and body image; animal studies; mental health and disability studies; coming-of-age stories; Victorian and Edwardian literature; juvenilia.
Conferences
[Forthcoming] 2025: Michigan College English Association Conference, Michigan College
Panel: Survival & Healing
Paper: How Girls Become Birds: Bodily Poetics as Disability Justice
[Forthcoming] 2025: Delicious, Nutritious and Fictitious: Food in Popular Culture, Popular Culture Research Network (Virtual Conference)
Paper: Cannibals and Custards: Surviving the Female Robinsonade in Ann Fraser Tytler's Leila
2025: ACCUTE, George Brown College, Ontario
Panel: Children's Literature Through Time and Space
Paper: Juvenile Perspectives: Barbara Newhall Follett's Empathetic Environments
2025: Conference of the Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale, Middle Tennessee State University (Virtual Conference)
Panel: Children's Literature and Juvenilia
Paper: Negotiating Normalcy in Charlotte Bronte's Angria Tales
2024: Kingston Writersfest, Kingston, Ontario
Panels: Steve Heighton Happening; Authors at Schools
2024: Spooktastic Book Festival, Boston
Panel: Writing Horror for Children
2024: International Young Scholars' Conference, University of Stettin (Virtual Conference)
Panel: Representations of Animal Bodies and the More-than-Human World
Paper: Unscientific Creatures: Becoming Girl, Becoming Animal in 19th and Early 20th Century Children’s Literature
2023: ACCUTE, York University, Ontario
Panel: When the Body Speaks: Expressions of Bodily Pain in Creative Writing
Paper: What Does It Mean For A Body To Be Wrong?: Dysmorphia and Healing in Children's Verse Novels
2021: Research Ethics Conference, University of Exeter (Virtual Conference)
Poster: I Dream Regardless: Ethics, Ambition, and Emergent Genres in Adolescent Fiction
2021: Kaleidoscope, University of Cambridge (Virtual Conference)
Theme: Responding to Ruptures: Speaking Back to Power
Poster: Darkly, Academia: Reclamations of Power in the Transgressive Spaces of Young Adult Literature
Academic Publications
[Forthcoming]: "Render Her A Tempting Morsel: Unholy Appetites and Disordered Bodies in Florence Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire." Chapter in Disability, Illness, and the Vampire in Literature and Culture, edited by Brooke Cameron and Drumlin Crape. Routledge.
[Forthcoming]: "All The Wild Was Ready To Make Friends: Ecofeminist Childhoods in Barbara Newhall Follett's The House Without Windows." Chapter in Women Who Write Animals: Female Literary Representations of the More-Than-Human World, edited by Lorraine Kerslake and Diana Villanueva. Brill Press.
[Accepted]: "The Scientific Fairy Tales of Lewis Carroll and John Cargill Brough." Chapter in Bugs in 19th Century Literature and Culture: Gender and Genre, edited by Brooke Cameron, Michaela Wipond, and Alyce Soulodre. Peter Lang Publishing.
[Accepted]: "Mine is Daughter of Hers: Adolescence and Epistemological Nostalgia in Premee Mohamed's The Annual Migration of Clouds." Chapter in Eco-Futures: A Companion, edited by Simon Bacon and Lorna Piatti-Farnell. Peter Lang Publishing.
Short Fiction/Poetry
2024: "wound maintenance." The Angle. Summer 2024.
2024: "heartwood genesis." ROOM Magazine. Issue 46.4.
2022: "Last House." FreeFall Magazine. vol. 32. no.1. (Environmental Special Issue)
Novels
[Forthcoming] 2026: The Burn Beast, G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers/Penguin Random House
2025: The Ghosts of Bitterfly Bay, G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers/Penguin Random House
2024: The Curse of Eelgrass Bog, Razorbill/Penguin Random House
