Lucinda Holdsworth is an Early Career Researcher working at the intersection between English Literature, Theology and Cultural Theory. She attained her PhD at the University of Glasgow, where she also worked as a Research Assistant and Graduate Teaching Assistant in English, Comparative Literature and Theology. In 2022 she joined the University of Strathclyde as a Tutor in English, and now works as a University Teacher in English at Loughborough University.
Lucinda’s previous research explored the relationship between depictions of the devil and child abuse across media since the 1980s; the lasting impact of the Satanic Panic, Recovered Memory Therapy and accusations of Satanic Ritual Abuse on depictions of child abuse and trauma; the impact of the Children Act of 1989 on depictions of childhood; and the clash between these new understandings of a child’s rights with biblical understandings of the rights of a child of God. Her current research explores the prevalence of psychiatric sexism in Satanic Panic Memoirs. Lucinda’s other research interests include transmediality, comics, TV studies, fantasy, science fiction, horror and the gothic.
Lucinda leads the final year module ‘Twenty-first Century Literature’ and contributes to the MA in Contemporary Literature and Culture, as well as a number of first year modules.
- Holdsworth, Lucinda. ‘The Devil’s Changing Role in Literature’ in Realms of Imagination: Essays from the Wide Worlds of Fantasy, ed. Tanya Kirk and Matthew Sangster (London: The British Library, 2023)
- Holdsworth, Lucinda, ‘Children of God: Divine Abuse and the Devil in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman’, in Religion and Horror Comics, ed. Brandon Grafius and John Morehead (Claremont: Claremont Press, forthcoming)
- Holdsworth, Lucinda, ‘Gothic Hungers: Genre as Critique in Aliette de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen’, Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies, 8. 2 (2021)
- Holdsworth, Lucinda, ‘The Problem of Evil in Pseudo-Taoist Secondary Worlds’, in The Evolution of Evil in Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Francesca Barbini (Edinburgh: Luna Press, 2019)