Ellie Gardner completed her PhD at Deakin in 2021. Her thesis, titled “The quintessence of difficult: Examining the Disruptive Literary Antiheroine,” explores the representation of the antiheroine in modern Gothic and crime fiction novels and focuses on the figure’s relationship to violence, motherhood, liminality, sexuality, and abjection. It analyses novels such as Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen, Lauren Acampora’s The Paper Wasp, as well as texts by authors such as Margaret Atwood, Stieg Larsson, and Gillian Flynn. Ellie’s research has been published in international journals Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction and Papers on Language and Literature, and she is currently working on publishing her thesis as a monograph. Ellie is a tutor at Deakin and has taught across a range of units in the Literary Studies and Children’s Literature streams including ALL101: Stories We Tell: Inventing Selves and Others, ALL376: Classics and Trash, ALL153: Literature for Children and Young Adults, and ALL275/375: Shakespeare Today. Outside of her work, Ellie performs regularly in a 60s cover band and enjoys participating in local theatre productions.