About Me: The Short Version

I’m Steele Alexandra Douris, an author, artist, and Victorianist, freshly graduated from an English PhD program and newly returned to my hometown of Austin, Texas. I’m the author of Spirits, Seers & Séances: Victorian Spiritualism, Magic & the Supernatural, a celebration of mysticism, folklore, occultism, and all things spooky during the Victorian era. I write about Victorian women, crime fiction, and spiritualism; the Gothic in its manifold forms; and the intersection of myth, mysticism, and creativity. I make YouTube videos about keeping journals and sketchbooks; fiction writing and worldbuilding; finding the fun in research; staying sane and creative during and after grad school; and my thoughts on living a varied and creatively fulfilling life.

Contact Information & Links

My book, Spirits, Seers and Séances, is available now at many independent bookstores and all major retailers, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org. It’s also available on my publisher’s website.

 If you’d like to connect with me, you can follow me on Instagram or subscribe to my YouTube channel. My handle is @steelearcana on any social media platform I’m active on. I’m also available by email at: steelearcana@gmail.com.

The (Way Too) Long Version

Academic Background & Research

As an undergraduate, I studied anthropology with a focus in archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin; I adored my major, which allowed me to participate in an archaeological dig, sit in the dark observing the nocturnal social behavior of mouse lemurs (the world’s smallest primates!), and work with fossils and human skeletons.

 As a graduate student, I earned an MA and a PhD in English at Stanford University. At Stanford, my research coalesced around a few key interests, particularly the relationship between gender, form, and genre. In a broad sense, my research traces the evolution, from the 18th century to the present, of popular (genre) fiction, including gothic horror, romance, and crime fiction. Specifically, I’m interested in the history, reception, cultural context, and politics of popular genres most likely to be written by women, for women, and about women. In the 18th and 19th century, those genres included gothic novels and sensation fiction; in a contemporary context, romance novels, fanfiction, true crime, and cozy mysteries all come to mind. I also created and taught my own courses as instructor of record at Stanford, including: “Haunted Daughters: Race, Gender, and the Family in Gothic Fiction,” and “The Victorian Ghost Story.”

 The Dissertation

My PhD dissertation, Forgers, Mediums & Spies: Gendered Labor and Generic Evolution in Victorian Popular Fiction, is about real Victorian women who occupied some rather unconventional professions during the late 19th century – including spiritualist mediums and the infamously daring “stunt girl” investigative reporters. My research connects the lives of those women to the characterization of female protagonists (and antagonists) in Victorian detective fiction, sensation fiction, and gothic novels. As a researcher, I’m most in my element digging through Victorian newspapers and perusing accounts of centuries-old mysteries and scandals; archives, whether physical or digital, are my happy place.

 FanFiction & Zines

I also have a deep love of some more contemporary genres, especially those that are self-published and/or informally circulated, like fanfiction and zines. While I was a graduate student, I launched a digital humanities research project at the Stanford Literary Lab, analyzing the development and evolution of various fanfiction subgenres. The Literary Lab is one of the major digital humanities research groups at Stanford, and my project was the first Literary Lab project to take up fanfiction as a subject of inquiry – that was a very exciting milestone for me, since I’d been fascinated by the genre since I was 13!

The Book

Perhaps because of my enthusiasm for informal, DIY genres like fanfiction and zines, I love building bridges between formal academic research and more creative, community-oriented, unconventional, or public-facing projects. My book, Spirits, Seers & Séances: Victorian Spiritualism, Magic & the Supernatural, combines my love of Victorian history and my fascination with new religious movements that are feminist, Goddess-based or otherwise center women. I was one of those teenagers who could reliably be found browsing the Wicca section at my local library, and I remain intrigued by mysticism and spirituality beyond the bounds of mainstream religion, even though I identify as 90% agnostic (…as for the other 10% — I’ll leave that to your imagination!).

Spirits, Seers & Séances was an incredibly fun project, not least of all because I got to release a book about Victorian spiritualism with a publishing house originally founded by a Victorian astrologer (my publisher, Llewellyn, is the largest and oldest independent new age publisher in North America). The book isn’t a debunking of spiritualism, or a catalogue of its scandals, but rather a light-hearted celebration of mysticism, folklore, occultism, and all things spooky during the Victorian era. If you time-traveled back to 1882 and made friends with a Victorian spiritualist who was really into all things supernatural, then this is the book you’d want to refer to. It has chapters on séances, trance and mesmerism, automatic writing, spirit photography, ghost-hunters, fairies and folklore, fortune-telling, gothic novels, Pre-Raphaelite art, and Victorian celebrations of Hallowe’en and Christmas. Every chapter also includes exercises to try, if you really want to step into the shoes of a Victorian spiritualist...

 Creative Writing & Visual Arts Practice

 Growing up as a homeschooled kid, I wrote constantly, and fiction and poetry were my two great loves. I experimented with self-publishing in my late teens and early twenties; I released several novels under pennames, but I took them down while I was in graduate school. However, since finishing my PhD and releasing Spirits, Seers, & Séances, I’ve returned to my roots and recommitted to fiction and poetry. I now have a few novel manuscripts on the go, and I’m putting together a poetry collection — among other projects. On the fiction front, I particularly enjoy writing fantasy, historical fiction, and gothic horror, but I’m a deeply omnivorous writer and I’ll try any genre once. I also love incorporating my research into my creative writing, and one of the novels I’m working on is historical fiction about Victorian spiritualists.

In 2020, after years of dabbling, I seriously committed to a visual arts practice, which is one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself and my creativity. Fiction was my first language, but drawing and painting have given me another way to meet my characters and visualize the worlds they live in; I particularly enjoy fantasy illustration, character portraits, and creature design. I love building elaborate worlds for my characters to inhabit, and learning to draw and paint has added an extra layer of joy (and effort!) to that practice. I’m at a very experimental stage with my visual arts practice, so I regularly explore different mediums, but a lot of my pieces are created using watercolor, gouache, markers, or the digital painting app Procreate. I also like experimenting with 3d artforms like bookmaking and zine creation. One of my proudest moments as a visual artist came in 2023, when I won an Arts + Justice grant from the Stanford Arts Institute for my project, Unreliable Narrator, a gothic horror zine exploring discrimination and violence in the American healthcare system.

What’s Next?

These days, I can be found practicing every visual arts medium I can get my grubby hands on, journaling excessively, drafting all of the fiction projects that were on the backburner while I dissertated, researching VEVs (Very Eccentric Victorians!), and generally letting my creativity breathe after years in grad school. You can watch videos exploring all of that and more on my shiny new YouTube channel.