Faculty Member, English and Creative Writing
Senior Lecturer in English Literature
About
I specialise in Victorian and contemporary literature and culture, and my particular research interests incorporate Gothic literature, film, and popular culture, and fashion and dress in literature.
My first book, Fashioning Gothic Bodies, published in 2004 by Manchester University Press, explores the relationship between fashion discourses and constructions of the body in Gothic texts, from the French Revolution to contemporary Goth subculture. It examines the ways in which the bodies represented in Gothic novels and films are influenced by historically specific debates about clothing, from the flimsily-attired heroines of the late eighteenth century, through the lunatics and dandies of the nineteenth century, to the Goths of the late twentieth century.
My second book, Contemporary Gothic (Reaktion 2006), reflects my continuing interest in the relationship between Gothic and material culture. With discussion ranging from the significance of Gothic images in advertising to the exploitation of Goth style in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it investigates in a variety of twenty-first century contexts what it means to go 'Gothic Shopping'.
The Routledge Companion to Gothic, a collection of 26 essays by some of the major researchers in the field, co-edited with Emma McEvoy of the University of Westminster, was published in 2007.
I am currently on AHRC-funded research leave, working on a new monograph entitled Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic. The book will explore such phenomena as the perennial revival of Gothic style on the high street, the advent of the sparkly vampire and Gothic tourism in Whitby, in relation to developments in twenty-first century subcultures. It will be published by Continuum in 2013.
I am also co-editing two collections of essays inspired by the Ninth Biennial Conference of the International Gothic Association, 'Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects', July 21-24 2009, which I co-organised with Professor Fred Botting of Lancaster's Department of Media, Film and Cultural Studies (now at the University of Kingston).
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