Earlier this month, iSchool Professor and Associate Dean Michelle Kazmer spent two days at the Agatha Christie: Investigating the Queen of Crime conference at Solent University in Southampton, UK. Agatha Christie (1890-1976), was an English author known for her famous murder mystery novels. Recently, Christie’s work has become legitimized as a major influence of twentieth and twenty-first-century popular culture. The conference’s website says that the conference “seeks to finally establish Christie Studies as an academic discipline, extending across and beyond the humanities.”

While at the conference, Dr. Kazmer presented her paper ‘Intelligence, guided by experience’: Hercule Poirot and Nero Wolfe and their use of information agents. She says, “I have been involved in this scholarly community since I gave a paper at the First International Agatha Christie Conference. I have applied theories and models from information science, such as the theory of information worlds and the imposed query model, to Golden Age detective fiction and specifically to the works of Agatha Christie. It is intellectually energizing and invigorating to participate in these conferences with researchers, scholars, and fans worldwide who bring different analytic approaches to Christie’s work. The papers at this conference are always top-notch and the scholarly community is rigorous, respectful, joyful, and super smart. I’m lucky to have found them, and my research has been enriched by their feedback and support.”