Dr Jimmy Packham

• BA (English Literature and History; Keele University)
• MA and PhD (English; University of Bristol)

After completing a BA in English and History at Keele – following a brief foray into Music – I moved to Bristol to pursue an MA with a particular focus on English Romanticism, sowing the seeds for a long-standing interest in the Gothic imagination and all things watery. At Bristol I completed my PhD, ‘Treacherous Lines: Death and the Limits of Language in Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville’, which fostered another enduring interest in theories of poststructuralism and deconstruction. I joined the University of Birmingham in 2015.

My teaching and supervision focuses primarily on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, though I have taught widely across the discipline. I convene a number of modules for English Literature and American & Canadian Studies students. Courses I currently convene include:

• Literature at Sea (Level 3, co-convenor with Dr Fariha Shaikh)
• American Frontiers: Nation and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (Level 3, convenor)
• Gothic (Level 2)

Other courses I teach, or have taught on, include:

• Nineteenth-Century Senses (MA)
• Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century (MA)
• Victorian Literature (Level 2)
• Uses of Genre (Level 2)
• Tragedy (Level 2)
• New World Orders (Level 2)
• Plays & Performance (Level 1)
• Prose (Level 1)
• Discovering North American Literature (Level 1)
• Research Skills in American and Canadian Studies (Level 1)

I would be delighted to supervise postgraduate work and research projects, and invite expressions of interest, in any of the following areas: - Nineteenth-century American literature – especially Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Ambrose Bierce, Charles Chesnutt, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Henry Dana Jr. - The Gothic – I have research specialisms in American Gothic, maritime Gothic, contemporary British Gothic, and sonic Gothic, but I maintain an interest in the genre across periods and regions. - Maritime writing, the deep sea, and coastal studies; critical theory – especially oceanic studies (the Blue Humanities), animal studies, ecocriticism, and poststructuralism; the American frontier.

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Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

I work in the fields of the blue humanities, coastal studies, and Gothic and ecoGothic studies. My current research focuses on two main topics:

• The human history of the deep ocean, and especially the seabed.
• The relationship between Gothic literature and coasts, particularly as they relate to issues of national and political identity.

I have also recently begun working on literary depictions and the ghost stories of inland waterways, such as the canals of the English Midlands.

My work on the seabed has often been undertaken in collaboration with other scholars, especially Dr Laurence Publicover (Bristol). Laurence and I have recently co-authored a book on this topic, entitled The Seabed: A Human and Literary History (forthcoming, late 2026, with University of Chicago Press). The book’s focus ranges from classical tragedy to contemporary politics, and explores the long and substantial history of humanity’s imaginative and material engagements with the bottom of the ocean – addressing issues related to sea burial and memorialisation, scientific expeditions to the seafloor, the deep-sea cables, salvage operations, and extraction and deep-sea mining. Building on this work, I am currently extending my work on the literary and cultural history of human seabed habitations, and beginning a project on the poetry of the deep in the long nineteenth century.

I have also recently published Coastal Gothic, 1719–2020 (Cambridge University Press), which examines the role of coasts in Gothic fiction and the ‘Gothic rhetoric’ that is frequently used to speak about issues pertaining to a nation’s coastline (most visible in anti-migration discourse). The book – beginning with Robinson Crusoe and ending around the time of ‘Brexit’ – offers an account of the role of the Gothic coast in relation to ideas about national and political identity, focusing especially on British and Irish authors and coastlines.

Other recent work on the literature of coasts and inland waterways has explored the politics of container shipping, focusing on work by Horatio Clare, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Emily St. John Mandel, and Lucy Wood; the affect of canals in Robert Aickman, Elizabeth Jane Howard, and LTC Rolt; and coastal haunting in the New England regionalism of Sarah Orne Jewett and Celia Thaxter; seaweed in Herman Melville’s poetry; the life-writing of US whalers; and ecologies and more-than-human soundscape of East Anglia’s Fens in Caryl Churchill, Daisy Johnson, and Susan Hill.

My first book, Gothic Utterance: Voice, Speech and Death in the American Gothic (UWP, 2021), explored the many voices we hear in nineteenth-century American Gothic writing: haunted, haunting, disembodied, from beyond the grave, unintelligible, and animal. I am still substantially motivated by careful attention to strange, disruptive, outlandish “Gothic” voices. I’m especially motivated by the ethical imperatives that are often loaded into encounters with Gothic voices.

I also co-convene the Haunted Shores research network. In 2022, we published an anthology of gothic fiction, Our Haunted Shores, with the British Library. This network is open to anyone who is interested in the representation of coastal regions in the Gothic, or in how a Gothic vocabulary frequently infuses how we speak about the liminal, shifting sands of our shorelines.

I’m currently Admissions Tutor, alongside Dr Eleanor Dobson, for English Literature and for American & Canadian Studies.

Through my work on the sea, I work closely with the Perspective from the Sea research cluster, an interdisciplinary research group established at the University of Bristol.

I have reviewed for Gothic Studies, The Journal of Victorian Culture, MLR, and American Literary History.