May 01, 2025

Dr. Caitlin Smith, assistant professor of English, co-authored a paper with Dr. Trenton Ford, assistant professor of Computer Science at William & Mary, on Mormon science fiction and fantasy author Brandon Sanderson.

Their paper combined methods from religion and literature, and network analysis, to consider dynamics of trust in Sanderson's online fandom. 

The paper, "Trust and Authorship in Brandon Sanderson's Fandom," will appear in the edited volume "Dis/Trusting the Digital World in Imaginative Literature" (ed. Adam Kelly and Katarina Pavlivi, scholars at University College Dublin), forthcoming Aug. 2025 from Edinburgh University Press.