We are interested in all aspects of Gothic writing from novels, drama, short stories, chap books, poetry, and romance. We spend their time exploring themes such as ghosts, sex, sin, dismemberment, occult rituals, gendered identities, transgression, devils, degradation, the grotesque, death, the auditory experience of gothic writing and more! Our researchers have published on topics that range from the architectural imagination to the question of slavery in eighteenth-century Gothic writing. They have published on Victorian ghost stories written by women and explored the ghostly aesthetics of modernism. 

Our interests also extend beyond the page, to explore the role of Gothic in the history and practice of heritage making and tourism. We have administered a number of projects exploring the nature of Gothic heritage, and how the meanings and political and economic functions of Gothic cultural production, such as artefacts, artworks and buildings, change over time and in different contexts. 

Recognising that the Gothic is rooted in empire and colonialism, our researchers are also interested in exploring, challenging, and dismantling the Gothic’s dominant views of colonised peoples, as well as exploring the post-colonial imagination as it manifests in Gothic and horror writing, heritage and the arts. 

Partnerships include the Centre for Migration and Postcolonial Studies (MAPS), English Heritage and numerous Yorkshire Abbeys, MMU Special Collections, John Rylands Library, Manchester Cathedral, Cheetham’s Library, The Portico Library, Manchester Museum and Art Gallery, The Whitworth, The Whitaker Museum.

You can see video lectures on some of our research here:

Related Publications

Aldana Reyes, X. (2016) Horror: A Literary History. London: British Library Publishing.

Dickinson, R. (2019) Ruskin’s Manchester: ‘Devil’s Darkness’ to Beacon City. [Exhibition] MMU Special Collections, 24/6/2019 – 23/8/2019.

Dickinson, R. (2019) ‘Ruskin and a Generation Worth Remembering.’ Journal of Victorian Culture, 24(3) pp. 303-310.

Foley, M. (2023) Gothic Voices: The Vococentric Soundworld of Gothic Writing. Cambridge University Press.

Lawrenson, S., Foley, M. (2024) Melmoth’s Global Afterlives. Gothic Studies.

Lawrenson, S. (2024) Maria Edgeworth and the Gothic. Cambridge University Press.

Liggins, E. (2022) ‘“Meddling with Sorcery”: Hypnotism, the Occult and the Return of Forsaken Women in the 1890s Ghost Stories of Lettice Galbraith.’ Women’s Writing, 29(2) pp. 177-195.

Liggins, E. (2020) The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories Gender, Space and Modernity, 1850-1945. Palgrave Macmillan.

Ní Fhlainn, S. (2022) TWENTIETH CENTURY GOTHIC. EUP.

Townshend, D. (2024) Matthew Gregory Lewis The Gothic and Romantic Literary Culture. University of Wales Press.

Townshend, D. (2019) Gothic Antiquity History, Romance, and the Architectural Imagination, 1760-1840. Oxford University Press.

Wester, M., Aldana Reyes, X. (2019) Twenty-First-Century Gothic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.