Post-Doc, School of English
IRCHSS Post-doctoral scholar
Trinity College Dublin
Thesis Title: "Unsettling America:
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Dr Darryl Jones
Prof Stephen Matterson |
About
I am currently researching the relationship between fin-de-siecle American women's ghost stories and material culture, in preparation for a monograph on the subject. I focus primarily on little known authors such as Elia WW. Peattie, Harriet Precott Spoffard, Emma Frances Dawson, Mary Austin and Madelene Yale Wynne, as well as more familiar writers including Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Louisa May Alcott.
My other research and teaching interests include American Gothic/uncanny literature and popular culture more generally, along with gender studies, the eighteenth century and children's fantasy.
My PhD thesis focused on the motif of the malevolent house in American literature from 1850 to 2000, and covered writers as diverse as Henry James, Shirely Jackson, Stephen King and Mark Z. Danielewski, as well as many of those that form the backbone of my current research. Leading on from this work, I am primarily interested in producing readings of supernatural and Gothic/ horror texts that move away from the conventional post-Freudian or otherwise psychologically driven interpretations that dominate much recent Gothic criticism, and towards a more materially grounded, socio-economically aware sense of the role of the horrific or unspeakable in American literature and culture.
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