Rate My Professor Helen Marshall

Associate Professor Helen Marshall serves as Director of Teaching and Learning and Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Arts within the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Queensland. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy and a Master's degree from the University of Toronto, where her doctoral research examined the codicology and palaeography of late medieval English manuscripts, analyzing production and dissemination networks for Middle English bestsellers such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and the anonymous Prick of Conscience. She also earned a Bachelor of Arts with Honours from the University of Guelph. Prior to academia, Marshall was Managing Editor at ChiZine Publications, Canada's largest independent genre press, managing editing, marketing, and business operations. Her scholarly and creative work focuses on "weird" fiction, a subgenre blending supernatural, mythical, and scientific elements, which she views through modern cognition theories as mechanisms to defamiliarize traumatic experiences. Recurring themes include apocalypse, metamorphosis, legacy, and publishing cultures, spanning medieval and contemporary contexts. In 2016, she researched the publishing history of Stephen King's Carrie (1974), illuminating social, economic, and cultural shifts in the industry.

Marshall's short story collections Hair Side, Flesh Side (2012, ChiZine Publications) and Gifts for the One Who Comes After (2014, ChiZine Publications) collectively received the World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Award, and Shirley Jackson Award for excellence in psychological suspense, horror, and dark fantastic literature. Her debut novel The Migration (2019, Random House Canada/Titan UK) draws parallels between the fourteenth-century Black Death and twenty-first-century ecological crises, emphasizing hopeful transformation. Other key works include The Gold Leaf Executions (2022, Unsung Stories), Tomorrow's Language (2023, Brainjar Press), and forthcoming titles The Lady, the Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death (2025, Titan) and Story Thinking and the Real-World Applications of Sci-Fi and Fantasy Writing (2025, Bloomsbury Publishing, co-authored with Kim Wilkins and Lisa Bennett). She has edited collections such as The Year's Best Weird Fiction. Marshall applies creative methodologies transdisciplinarily, collaborating with the UK Ministry of Defence on future threat prediction, CERN on future technologies, Australia's Department of Defence on AI innovation (funded $260,000), and leading the Ursula Project for technology foresight with the Defence Science Technology Group (Web 3.0, funded $89,097). Recent publications include "Stories and Systems: Exploring Technological Impact in Complex Systems Through Creative Writing Techniques" (2024, Technological Forecasting and Social Change) and "Becoming Breadthrog: Role-Playing Games, Metacognition and the Creative Writer" (2024, TEXT).