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.

There have been two main strands to my research to date: the American Gothic and the literature of the sea. I am interested in these as both individual and overlapping areas of study; I also maintain a long-standing interest in the work of Herman Melville.

My research on nineteenth-century American Gothic concentrates on the many voices that emanate from this literature – haunted, haunting, disembodied, from beyond the grave, unintelligible, and animal – which I explored in my first monograph, Gothic Utterance: Voice, Speech and Death in the American Gothic (UWP, June 2021). The aim of this work is twofold. First, to establish the profound significance of voice and speech within the Gothic tradition. Second, this work seeks to further our understanding and theorising of literary voices, emphasising the predominant features, timbres, and cadences of literature’s Gothic voices. In particular, it wonders what ethical imperatives are loaded into encounters with “Gothic” voices: What do these voices demand? What do we gain by listening to them (or lose by ignoring them)? How does the Gothic voice help us comprehend the limits and shortcomings of our own worldview? What does it mean to commune with monsters?

The other strand of my research focuses on the literature of the sea – especially in nineteenth-century writing, in whaling literature, and gothic literature. I am currently involved in several projects that explore the cultural histories of our seas and beaches.

• With Dr Laurence Publicover (Bristol), I’m writing a book titled The Seafloor: A Human History, exploring the profound human presence that exists in a region that is so frequently imagined as being beyond the ken of the human.
• I co-convene the Haunted Shores research network. 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.
• My second monograph will explore the coastal tradition of the Gothic in British writing from the 1700s to the present; my work on this to date has offered readings of the political significance of coastal spaces in contemporary British Gothic fiction. Another off-shoot of this is my abiding interest in the Gothic literature of the Fens in East Anglia – especially in work by Caryl Churchill, Daisy Johnson, Susan Hill, and Michelle Paver.

More recently, I have become interested in the literary culture local to Birmingham and the Midlands. This has developed into an emergent research project on the Gothic literary history of the region: I am currently editing a special issue of the Midland History journal (for 2024) exploring the ‘haunted Midlands’. My particular interests here are on works by writers such as Elizabeth Jane Howard, Robert Aickman, Francis Brett Young, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Machen, and Washington Irving.

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.