Christine Peffer

Biography

Christine Peffer is currently a PhD candidate in the English Department at Michigan State University. Her research interests sit at the intersection of weird fiction, ecology, and theology. She holds a BA and MA from Gannon University, where she taught freshman composition and served as the assistant director of the university’s Writing Center. Her current dissertation project, tentatively titled “Fungal Sacraments: Weird Fiction and Apophatic Ecology,” explores a long 20th century of ecologically-invested weird fictions, from Lovecraft to Kiernan and VanderMeer. Drawing on the long history of apophatic theology, her project argues that writers of the weird have developed an apophatic ecology by considering fungi as both privileged subjects and as theoretical framework in disrupting Western conceptions of human/more-than-human relationships.