Lore Skoulatos is a graduate student in Interdisciplinary Studies at NYU.

At NYU, Lore Skoulatos is in the XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement department, where the Masters in Interdisciplinary Studies is offered. She has taken all of her previous educational experience and melded it together here.

She focuses her research on the stories that shape us— as an individual, as a collective society, and as a history. Her follows two avenues– One is the lineage and evolution of storytelling around abject and othered feminine narratives. The second is how feminine audiences and creators are responding as a community to the changing of these narratives; how do we participate, reimagine, and heal a collective memory of commodified femininity? Each avenue converges at a nexus point of looking for stories, whether it be literature, film, comics, video games, etc., that perform as a sense of catharsis for the “grief in girlhood and womanhood”.

Particularly, she is concerned with the astounding resonance feminine audiences have with The Witch, The Persephone Narrative, and Monstrous/Supernatural Figures. She views this through the academic lenses of affect theory, feminist studies, narratology, genre studies, abject theory, mimesis, collective memory studies, the personal identity problem, and fandom studies.

Skoulatos, in her research, is tracking the archetype of The Witch from some of her earliest iterations in myth and folklore to re-envisioning of her in contemporary media. Through this tracking of The Witch, she is exploring the narrative representation in film, literature, social consciousness, feminist social justice, and religious/spiritual affiliations— which all are heavily intertwined.

In expansion to her thesis, she investigates her second dreadful woman, Persephone, in what she calls The Persephone Narrative. The essence of Persephone’s narrative has been expressed constantly in literature. There is a Persephone in most mythological pantheons. She has appeared under different names and plotlines, but much of her identity remains constant— the complex relationship between mother/daughter, the blurred transitory nature of girl to woman, the exploration and power of one’s identity, and the navigation of marriages within society’s constraints.

Persephone as a figure bleeds over into several popular feminine archetypes (The Damsel in Distress, The Wife, The Magical Girl, etc.). This makes her an incredibly dynamic representative figure and has led to an increase in appeal with contemporary feminine audiences. Persephone, as a figure in contemporary retellings, echoes the evolution of womanhood today yet the deep traumatic wound that comes from a historically patriarchal society. She offers a sense of cathartic mimesis and exploration of grief in girlhood.

The second avenue of her research is about how feminine audiences and creators are responding as a community to the changing of these narratives; how we participate, reimagine, and heal a collective memory of commodified femininity. This focuses on us, the women, who inspire the construction of The Witch and her Othered feminine sisters. She does this by addressing the feminine fandom culture’s mode of creation for the sake of the community. This creation can be so many things, it can be literature, comics, film, cosplays, merch, art, cosplay, video content, etc., but mainly literature and content creation for the sake of the community, immediately think of the driving feminine desire to create and support of free and affordable written work; think fanfiction.net, Ao3, Wattpad, and Tumblr or the late 2000s and 2010s and it’s contemporary evolution with Kindle Unlimited, self-publishing, BookTok, Bookstagram, and BookTube.