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About

Mark Storey is an Associate Professor and the department's Director of Teaching and Learning.

His research and teaching interests lie broadly in American literature. He was a founding member of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA), and has held fellowships at the University of Virginia and the Houghton Library at Harvard.

Research interests

In general, I write about and teach American writing and culture, particularly since the late nineteenth century.

My new book, Time and Antiquity in American Empire, looks at how ancient Rome figures in the cultures of American empire. Taking up the 'analogy' as both its object of analysis and methodological trope, the book ranges from the present to the late eighteenth century and attempts to bring together narrative culture, classical reception, and the philosophy of history into a new reckoning with American empire's temporal imagination.

I have previously published Rural Fictions, Urban Realities: A Geography of Gilded Age American Literature (OUP, 2013), which examined late nineteenth-century modernisation and the representation of rural America, arguing for a reconceptualisation of 'American regionalism'. A more recent essay for the Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism represents an updated version of these arguments.

I am also developing new projects from my long-standing interest in gothic and horror. This includes, with my colleague Stephen Shapiro, editing a forthcoming entry in the Cambridge Companions series: The Cambridge Companion to American Horror.

Teaching and supervision

In 2021-22 I will be convening Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and American Horror Story. I also supervise dissertations in the field of American literature. At postgraduate level I sometimes teach my MA module Narratives of American Empire, and I supervise relevant student research at MA and PhD level.

I am happy to consider dissertation and thesis proposals in my fields of interest.

Selected publications

[For a full list see 'Publications' above]

Books

• Time and Antiquity in American Empire, Oxford University Press, 2021.

• Rural Fictions, Urban Realities: A Geography of Gilded Age American Literature. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Recent essays

• 'Local Color, World-System; or, American Realism at the Periphery' in The Oxford Handbook of American Realism, ed. Keith Newlin (2019)
• 'Sarah Orne Jewett's Foreign Correspondence' in The Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing, ed. Celeste-Marie Bernier, Matthew Pethers, and Judie Newman (2016).

• 'Ben-Hur and the Spectacle of Empire'. Studies in American Fiction, 42.1 (Spring 2015).

• 'Spectacular Distractions: P.T. Barnum and American Modernism'. Modernism/modernity. 21.1 (Jan 2014).