Get to know us

The following Eiffel Foundation Members read, administer, and vote in two rounds on the Eiffel Awards for the Best Books of the Year. Current Members hail from China, England, France, Ireland, Italy, Spain, USA, and Wales. They represent a wide variety of experiences and perspectives, specialisms and careers, ages and accomplishments, but they all love cinema and the books that help us to love, appreciate, and understand film more.

ADVISORS

Born in Spain, Dr. Xavier Aldana Reyes (Manchester, UK) teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University, and his research spans modern and contemporary literature and cinema from the early 20th century to the present, with specialisms in Gothic and horror film and fiction, corporeal representation and embodiment, aesthetics and affect, transnational modes and genres, and Gothic/horror as mediator of personal and national trauma.

Xavi has been interviewed by BBC Radio 3, CBC, Swedish radio, Turkish TV, and major newspapers, and has appeared in documentaries including Why Horror? (2014) and Wonderland: Gothic (2023). He is also chief editor of the University of Wales Press’s Horror Studies series. Xavi is a founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and co-President of the International Gothic Association, which awards yearly prizes for superior achievement in the field. A recent monograph of his is Body Horror: Biology, Biopower, Biotechnology (2026)

Laurent Vauchad (Paris, France) is a scriptwriter for the big and small screens. He collaborated on the scripts of two films by Jean-Paul Salomé, Arsène Lupin (2004) and Les Femmes de l'ombre (2008). More recently Laurent published the novel Les Femmes de l'ombre (Women in the Shadows), inspired by the screenplay co-written with Salomé for the film of the same title.

A film critic for the magazine Positif since 1987, he is also the co-author of the book Brian De Palma, Entretiens avec Samuel Blumenfeld et Laurent Vachaud (Calmann-Lévy, 2001, and Carlotta Films, 2019). It has been translated into English and reissued in multiple formats, including a 2024 paperback edition by Sticking Place Books, De Palma on de Palma: Conversations with Samuel Blumenfeld et Laurent Vachaud. Laurent has covered cinema before for the magazines So Film and Vanity Fair, interviewed many North American and European actors and directors, as well as regularly appearing on national radio, from France Inter to France Culture. Beyond writing episodes on series for the channels France 2 and TF1, he co-wrote in 2020 for France 3 the TV movie Murders in Granville, directed by Christophe Douchand, with Florence Pernel and Raphael Lenglet, which attracted 6.36 million viewers (or audience share of 26.5% of total viewers), placing the channel in a leading position for Saturday night viewership.

JUDGES

Chenxi Chen (Shanghai, China) is a creative writer and a graduate student in the English Literature and Studies Program at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology. When not studying, she enjoys traveling, biking, and rapping. Academic interests she investigates and writes on come from a range of languages (French, Russian, Bulgarian, Korean, and Mandarin): from Baudelaire to Nabokov, and from Julia Kristeva to the 2024 Nobel Prize-Winner for Literature, Han Kang.

A recent co-authored publication of hers, in the American annual print journal Weird Fiction Review, is "A Korean Gothic: Phrogging, Dehumanization, and the Class Divide in Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite,” displaying her love of Korean cinema.

Alessandro Licata (Pagani, Salerno, Italy) is an artist and devoted film lover. He is also an Art Historian and Museum Assistant at the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, and has guided many actors visiting Pompeii through the ruins, from Brad Pitt to Tom Hiddleston to Russell Crowe.

Alessandro’s expertise is deeply focused on the 18th century, with a specialization in graphic arts and the intricate world of Vanvitellian illustrations. This dual role allows him to balance the preservation of cultural heritage with a continuous investigation into the historical roots of visual representation. A recent article by Alessandro, first given at an international conference for the 250th anniversary of the death of architect Luigi Vanvitelli, appears in print as a chapter in the book, Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi. Luigi Vanvitelli, il Maestro e la Sua Eredità. 1773-2023 (Il Lavoro Editoriale, Ancona, Italy, 2024).

Lisa Morton (Los Angeles, CA, USA) is a lifelong Californian, making a career in fiction and nonfiction focused on horror, terror, psychological distress and asylums, the supernatural and ghostly, and Halloween history. Morton began working in the film industry in her teens as a modelmaker and special make-up effects sculptor, later becoming a screenwriter behind cult favorites like Meet the Hollowheads and the vampire thriller Blood Angels. She has authored over 200 short stories and novellas, many of which have appeared in award-winning publications such as The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, Dark Delicacies, and Cemetery Dance. In 2003, she compiled The Halloween Encyclopedia — the first encyclopedic reference on the holiday.

A six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, Lisa was made a Lifetime Achievement Award Winner in 2026 from the Horror Writer’s Association at Stokercon, an honor held by few. A lavish recent book of hers is The Art of the Zombie Movie (Applause).

A native of Wales, Dr. John Llewellyn Probert (now in Bristol, UK), besides being an accomplished urologist and medical school lecturer, is a creative writer, horror-historian, and blogger with feverish interest in Italian horror and British Hammer films and all sorts monster-media widely scorned and abandoned, but which time may yet find to be classic. His addictive, informative, witty, and highly active blog, House of Mortal Cinema, is quotable among horror connoisseurs and features detailed reviews and behind-the-scenes insights on a wealth of scary films.

John’s rich insights have led to nonfiction titles for PS Publishing and others, including Midnight Movie Monograph: Theatre of Blood (2016). John has also written a wealth of short stories, some presented in single-author collections from Coffin Nails (Ash-Tree Press, 2008) to his recent Twilight Zone-framed Made for the Dark (Black Shuck Books, 2026). He is married to the singularly haunting author of terror, Thana Niveau (aka Kate Probert).

Dr. Walter Rankin (Fairfield, Connecticut, USA) is an academic with specialization in comparative literature, German language and studies, and film. He serves as Fairfield University’s Vice Provost for Graduate, Continuing and Professional Studies. In his role at this private Jesuit university, he oversees research and development for the creation and launch of new academic programs; implements and enforces academic policies approved by the faculty; and identifies campus resources for students, while coordinating summer and winter intersessions.

Prior to joining Fairfield, Dr. Rankin was the Senior Advisor to the Provost for Accreditation and Special Projects and the Deputy Dean of the School of Continuing Studies at Georgetown University, where he also had a chance every day to walk down the infamous steps that Father Damien Karras dies upon in The Exorcist. That is a film on which Walter has written, along with other films of horror and psychological depth, including The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, all in a series of horror studies in print from Centipede Press.

Coming originally from Ireland, Dr. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn (Manchester, UK) is a Reader in Film Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she also serves as Co-Director of the Popular Screen Cultures Network. She is a Senior Fellow at Britain’s Higher Education Academy and has held leadership roles, including Chair of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies from 2021 to 2022.

Her academic specialties include vampire fiction, horror cinema, and gothic studies; American movies and popular culture; and postmodern subjectivity and monstrosity. A recent study of hers—and a Lord Ruthven Award Winner in Non-Fiction—is Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture (2019). For the Manchester University Press, Sorcha is Series Co-Editor of Multiplexities: Popular Screen Cultures.

Anna Taborska (London, UK) is a poet, an essayist, writer of short stories and novellas, and anthologist who has won the Bram Stoker Award among others. Her single-author collections include For Those Who Dream Monsters (Mortbury Press) and multiple-author anthologies including Discontinue If Death Ensues: Tales from the Tipping Point (Flame Tree Collections, 2025).

The daughter of immigrant Polish linguists and poets, Anna has worked on over twenty film and TV productions, including directing and writing the award-winning TV drama The Rain Has Stopped. She was also involved in the making of two major BBC television series: Auschwitz: the Nazis and the Final Solution and World War Two Behind Closed Doors--Stalin, the Nazis and the West.

As Co-Head of Programming for the largest yearly premiere of independent films in Britain--the Raindance Film Festival, established in 1992 by Elliot Grove—she helps determine which first-time director’s work is shown. Raindance has hosted before the remarkable UK premieres of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Blair Witch Project, Dead Man’s Shoes, Memento, Humpday, Love Exposure, Ghost World, Capturing the Friedmans, Down Terrace, I Origins and Old Boy. Moreover, the Festival has brought to its London screens such guests and filmmakers as Christopher Nolan, Shane Meadows, Ken Loach, Marky Ramone, Iggy Pop, Anton Corbijn, Quentin Tarantino, Faye Dunaway and the late Lou Reed.

PRESIDENT

Dr. Danel Olson (Houston, TX, USA), a professor and editor of fantasy, horror, the gothic, and film, earning his PhD in literature at the University of Stirling, Scotland in 2017. He has lectured at colleges and universities in China, Canada, and America, and volunteer-taught in Palestine. He has been a film screener for London’s Raindance Film Festival since 2023, and presenter/panelist at Stokercon, World Fantasy Conventions, the ASANOR Conference in Oslo, and Comicpalooza. His most recent books include 9/11 Gothic: Decrypting Ghosts and Trauma in New York City’s Terrorism Novels (Lexington Books, 2021) and Gothic War on Terror: Killing, Haunting, and PTSD in American Film, Fiction, Comics, and Video Games (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Joyce Carol Oates describes the latter as, “Terrifically interesting with riveting material fastidiously assembled. A major work. Amazing ... brilliant .... all encompassing. Should be required reading.”

The Washington Post has called Danel’s published work on cinema, “a major contribution to film history and scholarship.” A three-time finalist for the Bram Stoker Award® and winner of a Shirley Jackson Award and two World Fantasy Awards, Danel launched the Eiffel Awards in 2025 to celebrate the art and stories behind the year’s best cinema books.