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About

Mark Storey is a Reader in American Literature and teaches on the BA and MA degrees in the department. 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. He has been nominated three times for the Warwick Awards in Teaching Excellence, and was a winner in 2021.

Research interests

I teach and write about American literature and culture.

My work has tended to focus on the idea of 'genre' -- regionalism, the historical novel, science fiction, the western, gothic/horror -- and how it connects with larger sociological and political categories; modernisation, temporality, imperialism, and so on. I’ve also written on particular authors (Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Gore Vidal, Sarah Orne Jewett). Genre fiction, and how it transforms our experience of society and politics, is the general area of my current and future research.

My most recent book, Time and Antiquity in American Empire (OUP, 2021), uses fiction, theatre, film, and photography to explore the way a particular cliche of political commentary since the eighteenth century -- the analogy drawn between ancient Rome and the United States -- can alter the way we think about time, imperialism, and the methods of literary criticism. I also have a long-standing interest in nineteenth-century American regionalism, or 'local color' writing as it's sometimes known; Rural Fictions, Urban Realities (OUP, 2013) is my book about that, and a more recent essay for the Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism represents an updated version of the arguments. I've returned to the work of the New England writer Sarah Orne Jewett on several occasions, and with Cécile Roudeau I'm currently editing a new edition of The Country of the Pointed Firs for Oxford World's Classics. Finally, I've been developing new projects from a lifelong interest in gothic and horror: this includes, with my colleague Stephen Shapiro, editing the Cambridge Companion to American Horror, an essay on 1970s horror films coming soon in Horror Studies, and starting a longer thing on fear and political subjectivity since the 1960s.

Teaching and supervision

In 2023-24 I am convening American Fiction since 1918 and American Horror Story, and supervising undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations on American literature and culture.

I have supervised, or am supervising, PhD students working on topics that include lawyers in fiction of the American South, post-crash financial novels, the radical cultures of early twentieth-century Chicago, and postwar 'Dirty Realism'. I am always open to proposals in my general fields of interest.

Selected publications

[For a full list see 'Publications' above]

Books

• Co-edited: The Cambridge Companion to American Horror, Cambridge UP, 2022
• 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

• With Stephen Shapiro, 'American Horror: Genre and History'. Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to American Horror. (2022)
• 'Antiquity/Modernity: An Issue of Puck Magazine, 1889' in Crossings in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Ed. Edward Sugden (EUP, 2022).
• 'Roma Redux: The Analogical Nineteenth Century' in Neither the Time Nor the Place: The New Nineteenth-Century American Studies. Ed. Christopher Castiglia and Susan Gillman (Penn Press, 2022).
• '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).