Gothic Research Cluster

Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes is Reader in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University and a founder member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. He is the author of Gothic Cinema (2020), Spanish Gothic (2017), Horror Film and Affect (2016) and Body Gothic (2014), and the editor of Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (2019, with Maisha Wester) and Horror: A Literary History (2016). Xavier is chief editor of the University of Wales Press’s forthcoming Horror Studies book series, and sits on the editorial boards of Dissections: The Journal of Contemporary Horror, Dark Arts Journal, Fantastika and The Journal of Stephen King Studies. He welcomes applications for PhD study in all areas of Gothic cinema and contemporary Gothic/horror literature.

Dr Eleanor Beal is a Lecturer in English Literature in the Department of English. Her research focuses on formations and interactions of religion and secularism in contemporary texts with a special interest in postsecularism and the afterlife of religion in the Gothic. She has published a range of papers on religion in the Gothic and is co-editor of the Bram Stoker Award-nominated collection Horror and Religion: New Literary Approaches to Theology, Race and Sexuality (2019). She is currently working on a manuscript for Palgrave on the Postsecular Gothic, examining Gothic's response to a set of ideas that suggest the 'failing' or 'rejection' of the secular and the claim to a contemporary postsecular 'turn to' or 'persistence' of religion and theology in the modern world. ​She is on the editorial board of the Dark Arts Journal. She is the Executive Director of English: Shared Futures, coordinating one of the largest cross-disciplinary conferences in English in 2022, and managing the ongoing E:SF online archive of recorded seminars, talks and performances. She continues this mission to celebrate, campaign for, and defend the English subject by serving as a member of the executive committee of University English.

Dr Linnie Blake is Reader in Gothic Literature and Film in the Department of English. She is founder and Head of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and leads the Gothic pathway on the MA English Studies. Beginning her research career as a specialist in nineteenth to early twentieth century American literature, she now works almost exclusively on contemporary Gothic literature, film and television. Having coined the term ‘Neoliberal Gothic’ she has produced a range of papers and a co-edited collection on the ways in which the Gothic engages with contemporary economics and the ideologies that support it. Historically, she has published widely on topics as various as seventeenth century Puritanism and zombie apocalypticism, Edgar Allan Poe and the Situationist International, Hillbilly Horror and Post 9/11 Republicanism, Japanese and Thai horror cinema and Gothic television drama. She is the author of The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity (Manchester: MUP, 2008) and has co-edited two collections: Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage Phenomenon – with Xavier Aldana Reyes (London: IB Tauris, 2015) and International Gothic in the Neo-Liberal Age – with Agniezska Soltysik Monnet (MUP: International Gothic Series, 2016).

Dr Chloé Germaine Buckley has diverse research interests within Gothic Studies and the wider field of Fantastic and Speculative Literatures. Her first book explores 21st century children's Gothic literature and film and she has also written on Zombies, Weird Fiction, Postcolonial Gothic, Witches and Games. She is currently working on two books, The Dark Matter of Children’s Fantastika: Speculative Entanglements (for Bloomsbury) and Material Game Studies (with Paul Wake). She is a member of the Manchester Game Studies Network, the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies and the Children’s Literature and Science project.

Dr Matt Foley is a Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Manchester Met. He is the author of Haunting Modernisms (Palgrave, 2017) and co-editor (with Dr Rebecca Duncan) of Patrick McGrath and his Worlds (Routledge, 2019). A member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, Matt is the academic lead for Manchester Met's ‘Haunt’ project that connects Gothic scholarship to placemaking, and he is the administrator of the International Gothic Association’s Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prizes. He works predominantly on modernist literature and on the representation of sound and vocality in Gothic literature. He would welcome PhD students keen to work on Gothic modernisms, literary acoustics, gothic haunting, or Gothic placemaking.

Dr Sarah Ilott is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University. Sarah is a postcolonial scholar specialising in genre fiction and film, particularly comedy and the gothic. She is the author of New Postcolonial British Genres: Shifting the Boundaries (Palgrave, 2015), which includes a chapter on postcolonial gothic set in England, and co-editor of Telling it Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi (Sussex Academic Press, 2017). She has recently published book chapters on postcolonial gothic, gothic multiculturalism, and gothic short stories. Her work has been published by The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Postcolonial Text, as well as in numerous edited collections in the fields of postcolonial, gothic, and comedy studies. She has acted as external reviewer for Palgrave and Bloomsbury USA, as well as academic journals including The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Studies in Gothic Fiction, and Luminary. She is interested in supervising doctoral students in the area of postcolonial gothic or intersections between gothic and comedy.

Dr Emma Liggins is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author of Odd Women? Spinsters, Lesbians and Widows in British Women’s Fiction, 1850s-1930s (Manchester University Press, 2014) and The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories: Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850-1940 (Palgrave, 2020). She has published articles and chapters on Frankenstein, sensation fiction and the ghost stories of Vernon Lee, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, Arthur Conan Doyle and E. Nesbit in Gothic Studies, Studies in the Novel and Victorian Periodicals Review. She also has a chapter on ‘Victorian Sensations: Supernatural and Weird Stories’ in The British Short Story (co-authored with Andrew Maunder and Ruth Robbins) (Palgrave, 2000). She has edited editions of the ghost stories of Charlotte Riddell and Rhoda Broughton for the Victorian Secrets series. She sits on the editorial board of the journal Women’s Writing and is guest-editing two special editions on women’s ghost stories to be published in 2021. She is interested in supervising doctoral students in the area of Victorian or modernist Gothic, Female Gothic, Gothic architecture and the supernatural.

Dr Peter N. Lindfield FSA is a Senior Research Associate in the Departments of English and History at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has published widely on Georgian Gothic architecture and design broadly conceived, as well as heraldry and the relevance of heraldic arts to post-medieval English intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic culture. Currently Peter is completing his Leverhulme-funded research project exploring forged antiquarian materials in Georgian Britain, and also working on the recently re-discovered Henry VII and Elizabeth of York marriage bed. The British country house, architectural identity, collections, refurbishment and restoration, heritage, and ideas of authenticity are all of interest to Peter, and he has numerous side projects considering these themes.

Dr Angelica Michelis is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English. Her research covers a wide range of genres and themes and currently focuses on food and eating in relation to literary and cultural discourses. She is particularly interested in Fin de siècle-Gothic, the relationship between crime fiction and the Gothic and the various links between food/eating narratives and the Gothic (cannibalism, eating disorders and food confessions).

Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and American Studies and a founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. Sorcha's work is largely rooted in socio-cultural approaches to Film Studies, Gothic Studies and Popular Culture, with a particular focus on subjective monsters, American politics, and the undead. She is the author/editor of numerous publications including Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer (2017, MUP), Our Monstrous (S)Kin (2010) and The Worlds of Back to the Future (2010) and journal articles with Adaptation (OUP) and Horror Studies (Intellect). Sorcha is Reviews Editor for Gothic Studies (EUP) and Co-Editor of Open Screens: The Journal of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (Ubiquity Press, 2018 -). Her recent monograph Postmodern Vampires in Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture (2019, Palgrave) won the Lord Ruthven Prize for Vampire Non-Fiction in 2020, awarded by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. She is currently working on an extensive study on the 1980s onscreen.

Dr Anna Powell retired from her post as Reader in English and Film to become an Honorary Research Fellow with the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. She also works as a visiting lecturer and external examiner as well as running public study groups and events. Anna is the author of Deleuze and Horror Film, Deleuze, Altered States and Film and co-author of Teaching the Gothic with Andrew Smith and she is a member of Deleuze Studies and Dark Arts editorial boards. She continues to publish a wide range of journal articles and book chapters on Gothic film and literature, its affects and effects. Her most recent research topics include Jan Svankmajer, the Lancashire Witches, The Shining, occult films and HP Lovecraft. Anna enjoys creative writing and is involved with Steampunk culture as researcher and participant.

Prof. Dale Townshend FSA is Professor of Gothic Literature in the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. He works on Gothic writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and his recent publications in this field include Writing Britain’s Ruins (with Michael Carter and Peter N. Lindfield; British Library, 2017) and Gothic Antiquity: History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760–1840 (OUP, 2019). With Angela Wright, he has recently completed editing two volumes of the three-volume The Cambridge History of the Gothic (forthcoming from CUP in 2020). Current projects include a monograph on Matthew Gregory Lewis for the University of Wales Press, and a scholarly edition of Ann Radcliffe’s posthumous writings (travel journals; romances; poetry) for The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ann Radcliffe. 

Dr Catherine Wilcox is a Lecturer in Creative Writing in the English department, teaching on the BA and MA/MFA programmes. Her background is in English Literature and Theology, and she is a published novelist and journalist (writing as Catherine Fox). Her works include three adult novels with Hamish Hamilton/Penguin, a sports memoir about judo, newspaper features, blogging and a weekly column-writing. Her recent trilogy of Lindchester novels (published by Marylebone House) is an affectionate tribute to Anthony Trollope’s Barchester, and began life serialised as weekly blogs. Her interest in The Gothic is recent, and springs partly from new developments in her own fiction. Her YA novel Wolf Tide explores Gothic themes. She is also interested in helping bridge the gap between the critical/creative in the English Department, by collaborating with colleagues to foster the writing of contemporary Gothic fiction; and in exploring the new avenues opening up in publishing (blogging, fanfic, ePublishing, print-on-demand, Twitter, Facebook).

Prof Sue Zlosnik  is Emeritus Professor in the English Department and Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has published extensively on the Gothic, often in collaboration with Avril Horner. Most recently, they co-edited the Edinburgh Companion, Women and the Gothic (2016). Author of the monograph Patrick McGrath (UWP, 2011), Sue Zlosnik has given keynote lectures at symposia on his work in Britain and Europe. She is a former co-president of the IGA and a member of the judging panel for the Allan Lloyd Smith Prize.

Dr Rachel Dickinson’s approach to the Gothic is through Ruskinian Gothic as theorised by Victorian polymath John Ruskin. His Gothic is multidisciplinary, and so is her research, which includes architecture, art, craft, dress, education, life-writing, sustainability and textiles – all framed through Ruskinian Gothic, and grounded in her disciplinary home of English literature. She is currently working on a monograph, Ruskin and the Fabric of Society. Previous publications on Ruskin include John Ruskin’s Correspondence with Joan Severn (Legenda/Routledge 2008). She serves on editorial boards, including the Journal of Victorian Culture (OUP). She has given invited lectures about Ruskin in Canada, France, Italy, the USA as well as in the UK, and was chosen as the Ruskin-specialist judge on the John Ruskin Prize for Art in 2017 and 2019. Passionate about engagement, she has curated 3 exhibitions on Ruskin. As part of global celebrations of Ruskin’s bicentenary, in 2019 she coordinated the Festival of Ruskin in Manchester, working with a dozen partners to run more than 30 events in the city. In 2019, she became the first woman to be elected as Master of the Guild of St George, an educational charity founded by Ruskin in 1871.

Dr Julian Holloway is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography in the Division of Geography and Environmental Management. His work focuses upon religion and spirituality with a particular interest in Fortean and occult topics and their geographical expression. He has published on the New Age and Spiritualist movements, spectrality and haunting, and ghost tourism and walking tours. He is currently interested in the geographical expression of haunting and horror through sound and soundscapes.

Professor Joanna Verran is Emeritus Professor of Microbiology in the Faculty of Science and Engineering. Her research focuses on the interactions occurring between microorganisms and inert surfaces (for example food contact surfaces, dentures, mobile phones). She is also a National Teaching Fellow, a Principal Fellow of the HEA, and is interested in using apparently unrelated subjects to encourage learning in and communication about microbiology. She set up the Bad Bugs Bookclub in 2009.The book club comprises scientists and non-scientists who discuss novels in which infectious disease forms part of the plot. This led to the consideration of vampires, zombies and werewolves (Twilight novel; World War Z; I am Legend, etc) as walking pathogens, enabling exploration of the epidemiology of ‘monster’ outbreaks and those of ‘real’ diseases.

Dr Kathryn Starnes is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she teaches on International Relations theory, politics and the arts, global security, and the production of knowledge through novels and fiction. Her research interests include the creation of knowledge in folklore, fairy tales and Gothic fiction as a means of exploring challenges to epistemic violence through narrative. Her first monograph, Fairy Tales and International Relations (Routledge) explores how fairy tales reflect back onto International Relations disciplining practices within textbooks that have become invisible in their familiarity. Kathryn’s research is at the intersection of international relations work on narrative and popular culture and research in fairy tales and the Gothic.  Her current work explores frame stories and epistolary novels as a means of including the voices of Others in how we write. She would welcome PhD students focusing on Narrative and Aesthetic approaches to international politics.  She is a member of the Popular Culture and World Politics research community and the Gothic Research Cluster.