Dr Kevin Corstorphine

Lecturer

Faculty of Arts, Cultures and Education

School of Histories, Languages and Cultures

k.corstorphine@hull.ac.uk

01482 353266

Kevin Corstorphine lectures in American literature, with a particular interest in horror and Gothic fiction, both literary and popular.

His research interests are mainly centred around representations of space and place, including haunted houses, tainted and abject spaces, thresholds and forbidden rooms.

He is currently editing a major handbook to horror literature throughout history, and has published on many authors of the weird and macabre such as Bram Stoker, Ambrose Bierce, H P Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and Clive Barker.

Research

Research Interests

Gothic literature
The intersection of literature and science
Representation of space and place in horror and Gothic fiction
The ‘weird tale’
American literature and culture

Research groups

International Gothic Association
Irish Network for Gothic Studies

Publications

Corstorphine K, ‘Marks of Weakness, Marks of Woe: Books of Blood and the transformation of the weird', in Clive Barker, Dark Imaginer, ed. Sorcha Ni Fhlainn, Manchester University Press (2017)

Corstorphine K, 'The Girl Who Wouldn't Die: Masculinity, Power and Control in The Haunting of Hill House and Hell House', in Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment, ed. by Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing, Rowman and Littlefield (2016)

Corstorphine K, 'Stoker, Poe, and American Gothic in The Squaw’, in Bram Stoker and the Gothic: Formations to Transformations, ed. Catherine Wynne, Palgrave (2016)

Corstorphine K and Murray C, ‘Co(s)mic Horror’, New Critical Essays on H P Lovecraft, ed. David Simmons, Palgrave Macmillan (2013)

Corstorphine K, ‘The Blank Darkness Outside: Ambrose Bierce and Wilderness Gothic at the End of the Frontier', EcoGothic, ed. William Hughes and Andrew Smith, Manchester University Press (2013)

Full list

Teaching

Programmes taught on

Modules list

American Gothic
American Rebels: Reading Twentieth-Century US Counterculture
Transformative Texts of American Literature
American Revolutionary Readings
Contemporary America in Context

Research PhDs

Dr Corstorphine especially welcomes PhD applications from students who would be interested in the following areas: Gothic literature, American Gothic, literature, science, and the supernatural, ‘weird fiction’ writers, popular horror fiction and film.

Current PhD supervisions

Gul Dag, Depictions of disability and body modification in 1980s cyberpunk
Matthew Crofts, Tyranny in Gothic Fiction from 18th Century to Present
Nicola Beech, Virtual Space in Fiction: Representations of the Telegraph, Internet, and Artificial Intelligence
Sandra Mills, Monstrous Objects & Performing Bodies: A Study of Puppets