Staff

Dr Emma Liggins

A Reader in English and Co-Director of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. She specialises in Victorian Gothic and women’s writing, and has written extensively on ghost stories, dark tourism and fin-de siècle fiction and periodicals, such as the Yellow Book and the Strand. She is currently working on a new project Death Spaces: Mourning and Memorialisation in Victorian and Edwardian Culture.

Dr Eleanor Beal

A Lecturer in English Literature and Film, Co-Director of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and on the Executive Committee for University English. She works primarily on contemporary Gothic of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, where her theoretical interests lie in Gothic approaches to being (ontology) and the theological and religious afterlives of the Gothic. Currently, she is engaged in a study of wonder and horror as both indexes and instruments of ontological crisis and transformation. 

Dale Townshend

A Professor of Gothic Literature in the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. He works primarily on British Gothic and Romantic writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 

Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes

A Reader in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he researches and teaches modules on modern and contemporary Gothic literature and horror cinema. He is co-president of the International Gothic Association and a founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and the Horror Studies special interest group of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies.

Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn

A Reader in film studies with a specialism in American film at Manchester Metropolitan University and leads the Popular Screen Cultures Network. Her work is largely rooted in socio-cultural and historical approaches to film studies, cultural studies, popular and contemporary American literature and popular cinema. She also specialises in Gothic studies and horror cinema, with a focus on vampires (fiction, culture, and film), postmodern subjectivity, serial killing, and monster studies.

Dr Matt Foley

A Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University and the administrator of the International Gothic Association’s Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prizes. His research interests include twentieth-century representations of ghosts and spectrality, orality and gothic voices, and the postwar novel. He is currently researching the writings of Ira Levin and has also published widely on gothic modernisms.

Dr Matthew Carter

A Senior Lecturer in Film at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research focuses on frontier mythology and the Hollywood Western, and on the transposition of mythological themes and Western tropes into other genres like Horror and Science Fiction – analysing the underlying mythic and ideological structures that give them their cultural force. More recently, he has been researching for a book on the films of Tobe Hooper.

Dr Emily Brick

Chloe Germaine Buckley 

A Reader in the Department of English and co-director of the Manchester Game Centre. Her research cuts across Gothic Studies and Game Studies and draws on approaches from ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Her latest monograph, The Dark Matter of Children’s Fantastika Literature (Bloomsbury, 2023) explores gothic, fantasy, the Weird, and other forms of speculative fiction. Her research on gothic games includes articles on materialism in horror LARP, occultism and ‘the magic circle’, and the ecogothic in roleplaying games.

Andrew Michael Hurley

A novelist and short-story writer, first book, The Loney, won the 2015 Costa First Novel Award and the 2016 British Book Industry awards for Debut Novel and Book of the Year. Devil’s Day was published in 2017 and went on to jointly win the 2018 Royal Society of Literature Encore Award for best second novel. Starve Acre (2019) has been adapted into a feature film. His latest novel, Barrowbeck, is released in October 2024. 

Kathryn Starnes

A senior lecturer in international relations in the department of History, Politics and Philosophy. Her research focuses on using narrative research methods to understand and challenge dominant understandings of international relations theory. Her previous work has explored fairy tales as a means to disrupt canonical boundaries, while her current work uses folklore to explore how people traditionally excluded from international relations can re-imagine political possibilities for themselves and their communities. 

Susan Barker

The author of four books. Her third novel, The Incarnations, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Notable Book, a Kirkus Reviews’ Top Ten Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. An excerpt from for fourth novel Old Soul (published 2025) won a Northern Writers’ Award for Fiction in 2020, as well as funding from Arts Council England and The Society of Authors. Susan currently lives in Manchester, where she is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Dr Marta F Suarez

A Senior Lecturer in Latin American Cultural Studies (Screen Media). She works across a range of screen media (film, television and video games), specialising in portrayals of race and identity. With a PhD in Screen Studies, her current research explores speculative fiction on screen media, unveiling the tensions and the dialogues existing between these portrayals and the societies from within which they are imagined. 

George Jepson

A writer, researcher, and editor. He is currently a Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain scholar, completing his doctoral studies at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, under the supervision Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria Giudici. Alongside this, he is tutor in Architectural Humanities at Manchester School of Architecture and course assistant on the Projective Cities MPhil Programme at the AA.

He has previously taught History and Theory at the Architectural Association, the Royal College of Art, and University of Edinburgh. For Summer 2022, he was doctoral resident at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and was appointed the Giles Worsley Fellow at the British School at Rome [2023].

Dr Beccy Kennedy-Schtyk

A Senior Lecturer in Art History and Curating at Manchester School of Art and Programme Leader for Art Theory and Practice degree programmes. Her research and curatorial practice has examined contemporary art practices from South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan and their diasporas, considering themes of border politics, belonging and the Postcolonial Gothic. She is currently developing her creative practice for The Stones Project as a form of affective research-praxis into ancient and modern, ritual standing stones and their sociohistorical and material representations within Late Modern, Gothic and Folk Horror televisual / filmic texts.

Dr Sonja Lawrenson

A Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she co-directs the ‘Long Nineteenth-Century Network’. Her research specialisms include Irish transnationalism, Romantic Orientalism and Irish theatre history. With Matt Foley she is editor of a special issue of Gothic Studies entitled Melmoth’s Global Afterlives (2024) and she is currently preparing a short monograph entitled Maria Edgeworth and the Gothic for the Cambridge Core Elements in the Gothic series.