Dr Hadas Elber-Aviram is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame's London Global Gateway. She is the author of 'Fairy Tales of London: British Urban Fantasy, 1840 to the Present' (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 'Fairy Tales of London' argues for a coherent tradition of London-based urban fantasies spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. The book charts the development of fantastical London literature across the fictions of Charles Dickens, H. G. Wells, George Orwell, Mervyn Peake, Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison, Neil Gaiman and China Miéville, examining their fascination with the materiality of the city, their belief in the fantasy genre as an idiom that can affect social change, and their conviction that for good or ill, the future of humanity lies in the metropolis. This monograph contextualises its readings of a wide array of London-based fantasies within the aesthetic, ideological, and political debates around the role of fantasy literature in British society. It transcribes and analyses hitherto unpublished manuscript material from the Mervyn Peake archive at the British Library and the H. G. Wells papers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Within these contexts and drawing on this new material, this book reads the growth and development of British urban fantasy as a complex, multifaceted dialogue with a rival pastoral tradition typified by John Ruskin, George MacDonald, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis. Hadas has published articles and chapters (peer-reviewed) on topics ranging from Dickens's influence on Mervyn Peake and China Miéville, to H. G. Wells's fantastical London, to the representation of vampires in science fiction, to the affiliations between urban archaeology and urban fantasy. She was awarded a PhD from University College London, and specialises in nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban fiction, with a particular focus on (but not limited to) the urban fantastic and its adjacent genres of utopian and dystopian fiction, scientific romance, horror novels, and the ghost story. She has taught undergraduate courses and delivered lectures at the University of Notre Dame's London Global Gateway, at Tel-Aviv University, and at University College London on London in the Literature of the Fantastic, the Urban Detective Story, Narrative Analysis, Literary Theory, Victorian Literature, American Literature, and the cinematic adaptation of literature. She has consistently received glowing feedback from her students.
