There are two strands to my research: the American Gothic and the literature of the sea. I am interested in these as both individual and overlapping areas of study.
My research on the nineteenth-century American Gothic concentrates on the many voices that emanate from this literature – haunted, haunting, disembodied, from beyond the grave, unintelligible, and animal. This forms the basis of my first monograph, Gothic Utterance: Death and the Voice in Nineteenth Century American Gothic (under contract with the University of Wales Press). This work investigates the profound significance voice and speech have within the American Gothic tradition of the nineteenth century, unpacking the extent to which death haunts acts of speaking in American Gothic writing and interrogates the troubling foundations of the American experience. The Gothic is a noisy genre, suffused with the sounds and the voices of the dispossessed and the marginalised. As such, it is a genre eminently suited to exploring the peculiar valences of the emergence of a uniquely (and troubled) American voice across the nineteenth century. My work explores the presence of the Gothic voice in several uniquely American spaces and the voices that occupy them, including the frontier, the plantation, and the Civil War battlefield. More broadly, this work seeks to further our understanding and theorising of literary voices, emphasising the predominant features and cadences of literature’s Gothic voices.
The other strand of my research – the literature of the sea – overlaps and stands distinct from my Gothic work. This work focuses on explorations of voice and subjectivity in maritime writing, and the representation of oceanic depths in fictional and nonfictional texts. I am interested in how being at sea changes how we write about the self, how the self changes at sea (and how the sea itself is an agent in that change), and how we get to grips with and think about the creatures, dangers, immense abysses, and voices of the ocean’s depths. For this work, I am interested in both British and American writing, from the Romantic era to the present day. I am at the beginning of a new project on the cultural history of the deep sea with Dr Laurence Publicover (Bristol). My research engages with a wide variety of texts, from novels and poetry, to diaries written on shipboard, such as that kept by Charles Darwin or passengers aboard the ss Great Britain, to the logbooks kept by American whalers.
A third research interest emerges again at the intersection of the sea and the Gothic: Britain’s Gothicised coast. I have recently started to think about the long legacy of the coast as a key location in the British Gothic tradition; my work to date has offered readings of the political significance of coastal spaces in contemporary British Gothic fiction.