I'm a Scotsman in Manchester, a reader, and someone with a keen interest in music. My specialisms are in early-twentieth-century literature, particularly literary modernism and the Gothic of the period. I also have a penchant for literary theory, including, but not limited to, psychonalytic (Freud, Lacan, Kristeva) and Derridean thought.
I see the classroom as a potentially inspirational space: both for me, as I learn from the perspectives of my students, and hopefully for those whom I teach too. It's rare to be in a room made-up purely of readers and the potential to have a great conversation -- finding some critical insights along the way, of course -- about literature is the main reason I stil love teaching.
Live and read in equal measure.
I'll be enthusiastic and the work student-centred.
I am currently the administrator of the International Gothic Association's Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prizes. At MMU, I sit on the Faculty Research Ethics and Governance Committee for Arts and Humanities.
If you read good books for long enough, you get to live a thousand lives, and learn from a thousand perspectives.
Critical Dialogues
Nineteenth-Century Writing to Modernism
Modern Gothic
Modernism; Gothic Literature; Critical Theory
M. Foley (2023). Gothic Voices: The Vococentric Soundworld of Gothic Writing. Cambridge University Press.
S. Lawrenson, M. Foley Melmoth's Global Afterlives. S. Lawrenson. Gothic Studies.
M. Foley, R. Duncan (2019). Patrick McGrath and his Worlds Madness and the Transnational Gothic. Routledge.
M. Foley (2017). Haunting Modernisms. Springer International Publishing.
M. Foley, N. McRobert, A. Stephanou (2012). Transgression and Its Limits. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
M. Foley (2016). ’My voice shall ring in your ears’: the acousmatic voice and the timbral sublime in the Gothic Romance. Horror Studies. 7(2), pp.173-188.
M. Foley (2021). Gothic, the Great War and the Rise of Modernism, 1910‒1936. In: The Cambridge History of the Gothic: Volume 3, Gothic in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Cambridge University Press,
M. Foley (2020). Dark Modernisms. C. Bloom. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.1109-1120.
M. Foley (2019). Tyranny as Demand: Lacan Reading the Dreams of the Gothic Romance. In: Lacan and Romanticism. SUNY Press,
M. Foley (2018). Towards an Acoustics of Literary Horror. KE. Corstorphine, L. Kremmel. In: The Palgrave Handbook to Horror. Palgrave,
M. Foley (2017). The Ghosts of War. S. Brewster, L. Thurston. In: The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story. Routledge, pp.319-327.
M. Foley (2015). Voices of Terror and Horror: Towards an Acoustics of Modern Gothic. J. Sacido-Romero, S. Mieszkowski. Brill-Rodopi, pp.215-242.
M. Foley (2012). Gothic 1900-1950. W. Hughes, D. Punter, A. Smith. In: The Wiley Encyclopedia of the Gothic. Wiley-Blackwell, pp.287-294.
M. Foley (2013). In Conversation with Alice Thompson. The Gothic Imagination.
I have presented recently at the following conferences and seminars:
Co-organiser of 'Trangression and Its Limits', University of Stirling, 2010
Organiser of 'Asylums, Pathologies and the Themes of Madness: Patrick McGrath and his Gothic Contemporaries', University of Stirling, 2016 (supported by the Wellcome Trust and the International Gothic Association)
January 2016: Wellcome Trust Small Grant: ‘Asylums, Pathologies and the Themes of Madness: Patrick McGrath and his Gothic Contemporaries’ Symposium
January 2016: International Gothic Association: ‘Asylums, Pathologies and the Themes of Madness: Patrick McGrath and his Gothic Contemporaries’ Symposium
October 2008-2011: University of Stirling Departmental PhD Fees Awards