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We provide doctoral supervision on all aspects of the Gothic, from the eighteenth century to the present day, and across disciplines, especially literature, film, television and video games. We also supervise dissertations in Gothic Creative Writing. You can browse through our specialist staff profiles for areas of expertise here.
If you would like to undertake PhD study in the Gothic, it is possible to apply for funding through the AHRC consortium for the North West. Details can be found on the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership website.
For Gothic-specific queries, please e-mail us here. For general PhD application queries, please e-mail Dr Andrew Moor here.
This project explores the singing voice as a site from which a variety of gothic transgressions emanate, examining how interactions between literary representation and interpretation enhance gothic music’s alterity and amplify vocal uncanniness. This study considers the ways gothicists from the 1820s to the fin de siècle used sonic dissonance to subvert the celestial wholesomeness of ‘divine’ vocality through the corporeality of operatic Divas and musical virtuosos, as well as choristers and monks, allowing wider scrutiny of sonic gothic motifs.
Fredrik’s thesis explores the materiality of the sea as a Weird space and ontology. Focussing on sea monsters and hybrids as representational intermediaries between human and other-than-human agencies in the oceanic context, he aims to investigate and re-evaluate literary and cultural discourses surrounding the sea, from evolutionary controversies of the nineteenth century to the ecological crises of the present day.
Contemporary British fiction reveals a topography of cultural and elemental anxiety. Turbulent landscapes frame experimental narratives that seek to recalibrate the self in this newly emerging period of post-postmodernism. My thesis investigates the relationship between phenomenological shame and time, and ultimately, its effect on the ontology of the subject.
Hayley’s thesis combines studies in queer theory, television studies and the gothic to examine issues of biphobia and bi-erasure in post-millennial gothic television. In particular, this research identifies a trend of problematic depictions of bisexuality within the gothic, and questions why the transgressive, binary-rejecting nature of bisexuality has been overlooked in queer gothic studies. Hayley previously won Manchester Metropolitan University’s Outstanding Academic Achievement Prize, is a contributing guest speaker for Romancing the Gothic, and is one of the organisers of the Absent Presences project.
Manchester, Edinburgh and Paris are often represented as gothicised cities. This thesis uses transcultural and hauntological theories and applies them to the urban space to analyse the gothicisation of these cities from the nineteenth century onwards. I argue that gothic attractions, which flourish in these cities, bring new significance to the gothicisation of the urban space.
Kerry's area of interest is the relationship between the masculine subject and domestic space in American Gothic literature. In particular, her thesis explores the ways in which American Gothic frequently generates a particularly schizophrenic and fragile male subject whose presence in domestic space seems to force that space to come to life, mutate and interact with the subject in order to bring about his death or ejection.
Charlotte’s thesis examines a notable trend in America Gothic cinema of the 1980s and 1990s that engages with the ‘Satanic Panic’, a contextual phenomenon of widespread occult hysteria in the US. Drawing upon psychoanalysis, gender theory and American political studies, the project identifies this trend’s distinct relationship to, and representation of, toxic masculinity and national identity that defined this period. Such that is now being retroactively echoed by the political landscape and, similarly Satanic, popular screen culture of the Trump administration. Charlotte has previously been published in The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies and Fantastika Journal.
Twitter: @CharGough7
David is writing a Young Adult novel, How to Draw Ghosts. His thesis also traces narrative patterns and tropes across a range of contemporary paranormal fiction aimed at Young Adult audiences, covering the period from 1970 to the present day. He evaluates existing techniques for engaging YA audiences with supernatural and paranormal themes and is building on these to develop new storytelling techniques.
Esther is writing a ‘crossover’ historical-gothic novel, told from the dual perspectives of an Irish banshee, and a young woman growing up in Dublin during the period 1916-22, who becomes embroiled in the Irish Rebellion. The novel explores a post-colonial reading of Anglo-Irish history and her critical work investigates how writers can give voice to ‘mute’ figures of history and myth.
Kirsten is writing two complementary texts (a novel and a critical thesis) that explore archetypal representations of witches and witchcraft, and of their supernatural power by examining witches in relation to biological, female reproductive cycles. She addresses the cultural uses of the witch as a scapegoat, and how accusations of witchcraft and the persecution of the accused have been historically employed to sustain and reinforce economic, political, and sexual domination.
Karmel’s research identifies British-born polymath, Clive Barker, as an important yet significantly undertheorized figure in the field of Gothic Studies. Her thesis argues that Barker’s unconventional and sophisticated use of the Gothic has allowed him to successfully advance, expand, and, at times, completely reconfigure the formal, aesthetic, and political limitations of multiple media, including theatre, literature, film, and the plastic arts, across a four-decade career.
James’s thesis seeks to provide a cultural history of the animated skeleton in British culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Interdisciplinary in its approach, it seeks to enrich recent scholarship on the relationship between Gothic and death with insights gleaned from the history of funerary architecture and internment.
Luke’s thesis focuses on contemporary science fiction, demonstrating its engagement with ecological anxiety and anthropocentric modalities through its incorporation of the horrific. Their work aims to demonstrate the value of considering generic hybridity through an eco-critical lens, revealing transgressive and radical potentialities for living with, and through, the Anthropocene.
Matteo’s research focuses on the study of supernatural experiences, exploring how notions of sound, vibration and resonance intervene in the sensation of the eerie. He is seeking a novel epistemological and methodological approach to highlight the mutual relationship between the material-affective and the cultural-discursive dimensions within those processual and performative dynamics, that pave the way for the possibility of the supernatural.
Leonie is researching Japanese Gothic depictions of commodity animism—that is, the symbolic animation of the material world in a commercial context. This marketing technique, emerging from the intersection of capitalist materiality and indigenous spirituality, provides a vehicle for the Gothic expression of alternative forms of horror that expose rather than reinforce the harm enacted by a socioeconomic system that desecrates the spiritual.
Ali’s thesis focuses on middle eastern gothic literature and how far this has moulded our understanding of rising hostile western attitudes towards the orient. Approaching these issues through geopolitics, the aim is to assess the postcolonial struggles through gothic texts and films, exploring how these conflicts have often represented or misrepresented events and how far this influenced our perspective of the middle east and all that it hides.
Rob’s research aims to recuperate the writing of the nineteenth-century Scottish writer Anne MacVicar Grant. It diverges from existing scholarly criticism in that, rather than interpreting Grant as politically and culturally ambiguous, it proposes Grant’s fixed adherence to a Jacobite political and cultural ethos. His research explores how Grant’s commitment to the Gaelic origins of the Scottish people conflicted with contemporary notions of Scotland’s Gothic origins.
Isobelle’s thesis investigates novels published at the intersection of contemporary queer YA and Gothic Fantasy, evaluating common literary tropes and techniques. Her creative work, the novel ‘We Build Our Girls Grieving’, adds to this body of fiction a Gothic Fantasy novel with a queer female ensemble cast. As a queer female writer, Isobelle’s brings fresh insights to critical and creative work in this area and advocates for positive representation in genre fiction.
Maartje aims to create a large corpus of annotated late eighteenth- and early nineteenth century British Gothic fiction to computationally uncover trends in (the representation of European national characters and settings in) Gothic fiction using word-embeddings. This corpus will enable a quantitative approach towards comparing different sub-categories of the Gothic by relating the texts and their meta-data to the socio-historic contexts in which they were produced.
In recognition of the growing number of Gothic postgraduate researchers at Manchester Met and in the North West, the Gothic Centre has thus far hosted two postgraduate-focused development days.
The Gothic Networking Day ran on the 12th of July 2014 and gave postgraduate researchers a unique opportunity to learn about Gothic Studies in the United Kingdom. The day included talks from the co-president of the International Gothic Association, the editor of the journal Gothic Studies, the editors of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, the commissioning editor of the Gothic Studies book series at the University of Wales Press, education professionals and representatives from Twisted Tales and Grimmfest Film Festival. The event was supported by the Higher Education Academy and was reviewed positively reviewed by the The Gothic Imagination website.
The second of these days, the ‘Gothic Studies Postgraduate Training Day’, was held in June 2017. This was an opportunity to share information about presenting at conferences, writing for journals and networking. A plenary was given by Dr Emma McEvoy (University of Westminster) on Gothic Sound in Ann Radcliffe’s fiction.
In 2019, our PGR cohort organised Absent Presences: Shifting the Core and Peripheries of the Gothic Mode (27-28 June), a two-day conference inspired by their research.
In 2021, our PGR cohort organised the Gothic Approaches webinars to showcase their current work. The series is available to watch on YouTube.