Dr. Amy H. Sturgiswill discuss the imaginative and expressive potential for fan fiction through an examination of fan-authored stories about the long-ignored Lord of the Rings character Rosie Cotton. Dr. Sturgis will demonstrate how fan writers use Rosie as a voice for their own identities and interests (making her in turn a domestic paragon, a sexual iconoclast, and a supernatural changeling), and how they strive to make Rosie an equal to the male characters in Tolkien’s works. This academic lecture is based on Dr. Sturgis’s forthcoming article in the scholarly journal Mythlore. [More]