North America is steeped in legends of cryptids, (mostly) unseen creatures woven into the fabric of its folklore. From legends told by early explorers to contemporary legends told today, these enigmatic beings shape societal perceptions and reflect c...
Recent scholarly work on the influence of the Book of Revelation on popular cinematic, literary, and visual apocalyptica has shown steady growth. These studies not only highlight the influence and the processes of de- and recontextualisation of Revel...
Elephants were first deployed in warfare by Indian and Persian armies. The Greco-Macedonian troops first encountered these fearsome creatures in battle during the campaign of Alexander the Great. Subsequently, the Successors and later Hellenistic rul...
What happens when we imagine the unimaginable? This article compares recent films inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos with that author’s original early 20th century pulp horror stories. In Guillermo del Toro’s films Pacific...
Research into snake venoms has revealed extensive variation at all taxonomic levels. Lizard venoms, however, have received scant research attention in general, and no studies of intraclade variation in lizard venom composition have been attempted to...
Drawing on Susan Sontag’s understanding of the anxieties about contemporary existence lurking beneath the surface of science fiction films, this article argues that the focus on media monitoring, mapping and materializing the giant monster in t...
Fascination with the unknown has always characterized humanity. This includes creation of mythical creatures that are believed to exist even though fully unproven. Fabricating monsters began to peak in early modern Europe. Sixteenth-century monsters...
Can we think of the legendary Wandering Jew as a monster? The figure does not easily fit the common definition of a monster and yet, the Wandering Jew is extraordinary. In the medieval and early modern sources of the legend, the Wandering Jew, who on...
This paper considers transforming forms and their purposes in the popular culture trope of the televised Monster of the Week (MOTW). In the rare televised appearances outside of Slavic nations, Baba Yaga tends to show up in MOTW episodes. While some...
Gamma-Ray Bursts(GRBs) are the most violent and energetic astrophysical phenomena, which I dare call “the Energy Monsters of the Universe”. Indeed, they show an enormous emitted isotropic energy ranging from ∼3 ×
In 2024, Eilish Quin published the novel Medea, which is a feminist approach to the Medea myth from Greek mythology. Medea’s myth is heavily influenced by Euripides’ play Medea, a play in which she kills her children to enact revenge on h...
In 1978, the American hard rock band Blue Öyster Cult released the song “Godzilla” as the first single from the fifth studio album Spectres. Despite not registering on popular charts, it would eventually evolve into an iconic song of...
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In 2009, Seth Grahame-Smith published Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, sparking a subgenre that situates itself within multiple genres. I draw from the rebellious nature of nineteenth-century proto-feminists who tried to reclaim the female monster as...
This article contextualises the history of kaijū scholarship and looks particularly at the swell of publishing that has emerged in the last decade. It argues that the release of a series of new Godzilla films has led to a greater focus on the ka...
The Monster group, the biggest of the sporadic groups, is equipped with the highest known number of dimensions and symmetries. Taking into account variants of the Borsuk–Ulam theorem and a novel topological approach cast in a physical fashion that ha...
After a decade of dormancy following the release of Tōhō Studios’ Godzilla: Final Wars (2004), Godzilla and other kaijū burst back onto the scene with Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla (2014). Several American sequels and a tele...
Phys and Math are two colleagues at the University of Saçenbon (Crefan Kingdom), dialoguing about the remarkable efficiency of mathematics for physics. They talk about the notches on the Ishango bone and the various uses of psi in maths and physics;...
Kaijū media frequently features dangerous scientific experiments as a central theme, invented by scientists who are falsely convinced that they both completely understand and control their advanced technology. In the past few decades, this has i...
The internet provides the means through which a “self-activating terrorist” may first self-radicalize through some imaginary or sympathetic connection with an organized terrorist network. Additionally, the internet allows such a self-activating terro...
Sixteenth-century Spanish accounts of the invasions of the Americas claimed that Indigenous peoples found horseback riding so shocking that they mistook cavalry for centaurs. Drawing a one-to-one connection between sixteenth-century Mesoamericans and...
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has begun to revolutionize our view of the Cosmos. The discovery of Blue Monsters (i.e., ultra-compact yet very bright high-z galaxies) and the Little Red Dots (i.e., very compact dustless strong Balmer break cos...
This paper focusses on the animal presence in the archaeological records from the Phoenician island town of Motya (Sicily), which grew to prosperity from its settlement in the 8th century until its destruction in 397 bce. Offering a preliminary revie...
I explore the view that the imago Dei is essential to us as humans but accidental to us as persons. To image God is to resemble God, and resemblance comes in degrees. This has the straightforward—and perhaps disturbing—implication that we...
Music videos of the MTV era often use gothic visual signifiers as decorative elements or creative expressions of the musician’s star persona or latest record. But several video clips from the early 1980s adapt the figure of gothic monstrosity,...
Introduction: Hip abductor strength is essential for pelvic stability, lower limb alignment, and injury prevention. Weaknesses of the gluteus medius and minimus contribute to various musculoskeletal conditions. Lateral band walks and monster walks ar...
In 1748, an image of Our Lady of Sorrows brought from Mexico by Marcos Torres, an Indiano born in Tenerife who made his fortune in New Spain, was enthroned with a festivity and sermon. The image of the Virgin was accompanied by a stuffed crocodile th...
This paper (re)construes the remains of a bulk timber carrier called Optimist that reportedly wrecked in the port of Greenville, Liberia during the Liberian civil wars (1989–2003). Its monstrous hull is an uncanny reminder of militarization, in...
Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction provides an ideal means of appreciating and interrogating the duality central to both Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and its adaptations. Moreover, because deconst...
The conservation of information of evaporating black holes is a very natural consequence of unitarity, which is the fundamental symmetry of quantum mechanics. In order to study the conservation of information, we need to understand the nature of the...
Moana (2016) continues a tradition of Disney princess movies that perpetuate gender stereotypes. The movie contains the usual Electral undercurrent, with Moana seeking to prove her independence to her overprotective father. Moana’s partner in her adv...
Though green readings of Beat works are a relatively new phenomenon, the Beat aesthetic easily meets Lawrence Buell’s criteria for ecocritical texts. Indeed, many writers associated with the Beat movement, such as Diane di Prima and Anne Waldma...
Good solutions for sustainable development promote social, ecological, and economic aspects in synergistic ways. Wind energy projects have a large potential to achieve this, if their locations are carefully selected. On the contrary, placing wind tur...
To explore Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s rise from obscure rural Haiti to become the nation’s first democratically elected president—by a landslide—is to enter into a world and a swirl of events that reads like surreal fiction or m...
In this paper, we study the effects of viscosity on the evolution of the double tearing mode (DTM) in a pair of adjacent Harris sheets based on the resistive MHD model in the NIMROD code. Similar to the tearing mode in the conventional single Harris...
In recent years, the consumption of energy drinks by young adults and athletes has risen significantly, but concerns have been raised about the potential health risks associated with excessive consumption. These concerns include cardiovascular proble...
Supernatural entities are often described as ambiguous, but ambiguity is underdetermined and undefined. This article has a twofold goal: first of all, it constructs an ideal-type model for identifying and specifying ambiguity in supernatural beings;...
In Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Lisa Sterle’s graphic novel Squad, protagonist Becca and her new friends at Piedmont High are not human adolescents but a pack of werewolves who must kill to stay alive and select teenage boys—“the WORST on...
The search for extraterrestrial life, recently fueled by the discovery of exoplanets, requires defined biosignatures. Current biomarkers include those of extremophilic organisms, typically archaea. Yet these cellular organisms are highly complex, whi...
The presence of hunting imagery in Beowulf has often been noted, but the significance of the figures of the stag and the wolf to the thematic design of the poem has yet to be fully explored. In this article, I first analyse the sustained presentation...
One amongst many of the defining characteristics of so-called ‘late stage’ capitalism are human-animal relationships that have become acrimonious, hostile, or even monstrous in nature. A foundational premise of monster theory, and one tha...
The popular yet demonic guardian of ancient Egypt, Bes, combines dwarfish and leonine features, and embodies opposing traits such as a fierce and gentle demeanor, a hideous and comical appearance, serious and humorous roles, an animalistic and numino...
This essay proposes to read the classic cycle of Godzilla films (roughly, 1954–1995) using a posthuman perspective that makes its emphasis on animal, vegetal and mineral life. We will use posthuman and materialist philosophy to analyze hybrid m...
Acinetobacter baumannii is a Gram-negative pathogen responsible for a variety of community- and hospital-acquired infections. It is recognized as a life-threatening pathogen among hospitalized individuals and, in particular, immunocompromised patient...
Distinct from normal differentiated tissues, cancer cells reprogram nutrient uptake and utilization to accommodate their elevated demands for biosynthesis and energy production. A hallmark of these types of reprogramming is the increased utilization...
Chris Bush’s Faustus: That Damned Woman (first performed in 2020) is a feminist and contemporary adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. The magus is a woman who travels through time from the seventeenth century to the far dis...
Lady White Bone, a demon from the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West (Xiyou ji 西遊記), has grown into one of the most celebrated femme fatales in popular imagination. This paper explores the formation of this monster as a...
This essay re-examines several examples of non-performance based artworks from the perspective and history of performance art. For instance, the photomontages I produced as an undergrad art student were based on repeated acts of stealing posters from...
In this article we discuss videogame adaptations of the Alien series of films, in particular Alien: Colonial Marines (2013) and Alien: Isolation (2014). In comparing critical responses and developer commentary across these texts, we read the very dif...
In season one, episode 15 of the television show Once Upon a Time, viewers are given a glimpse into the history of Ruby/Red, the series’ version of Red Riding Hood. The episode reveals that, contrary to most oral and written versions of the ATU 333 t...
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