Appalachian Folklore & Myths If you drive the back roads of Appalachia long enough, someone will eventually warn you about a girl in white who may be waiting just past the next curve. Sometimes she is a bride on her wedding night. Sometimes she is simply “the lady in white,” a stranger who steps out of the fog and into your car. She asks for a ride, rides in silence, and then vanishes before you reach town.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths In a bend of the Red River in Robertson County, Tennessee, a farming family named Bell took root in the early nineteenth century. Two centuries later, their homestead is remembered less for corn and tobacco than for a talking spirit that slapped children, quoted Scripture, and claimed it had murdered the family patriarch.

Appalachian Folklore & Myths On clear nights above the Catawba Valley, Brown Mountain does not look like much. It is a low, flat ridge that runs along the Burke and Caldwell county line in western North Carolina, roughly twelve miles northwest of Morganton and just west of Wilson Creek. From overlooks on the Blue Ridge Parkway or from the Brown Mountain Overlook on Highway 181, the ridge is an even, dark skyline. It should be unremarkable.

The dawn of a new era: AMNH FR 34089, a caudal vertebra of the giant extinct croc Thecachampsa , backlit to show the neural canal ridges. This is not just my favorite specimen with NCRs, it’s one of my favorite images of any fossil ever. Photo by William Jude Hart. New paper out: Hart, W.J., Atterholt, J., and Wedel, M.J. 2025. First occurrences of neural canal ridges in Crocodylia. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 70(4): 749–753.

Émile Bréhier BRÉHIER, Émile. O fim do mundo antigo (trad.

"I did not sufficiently counterbalance that with skepticism and verification at the moment it mattered... I did not enforce the standard you expect: only claim access to evidence I can actually see"

The above quote, spoken by MI5 agent Tom Quinn to CIA agent Christine Dale (Megan Dodds), illustrates a key plot point in episode 2.6, but also illustrates a key point in the interplay between geopolitics and international co-productions.  That interplay, here between the UK and US, permeates not only the episode but the characterisation and aesthetics across the run of the series.

Two of the most beloved gen-x writer heroines have been widowed in recent years: Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Bridget Jones (Renee Zellweger). With the death of Big in the series premiere of And Just Like That (2021-2025) and Darcy in Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy (2025), audiences who have grown up alongside […]

Slow conference: 6-17 July 2026 This slow conference will run over two weeks online to avoid Teams fatigue and allow people to schedule the conference around other commitments.

I am pleased to announce a call for papers for the first edited volume devoted to the Netflix limited series Ripley (Zaillian, 2024). Perspectives on Netflix’s Ripley seeks to explore the myriad ways in which this striking adaptation reimagines Patricia Highsmith’s iconic character for a new era of streaming television.

International conference hosted by the Metropolitan University in Prague and the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon/ULICES 6-7 March, 2026 | Online This online conference will focus on the representation of violence in contemporary audiovisual production, specifically in television series.