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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 recent research has focused on cultures of American empire, and a project about the ways ancient Rome figures in the historical imagination of US imperialism is soon to appear in a forthcoming book from Oxford UP: Time and Antiquity in American Empire.

My first book, Rural Fictions, Urban Realities: A Geography of Gilded Age American Literature (OUP, 2013), examined the effects of late nineteenth-century modernisation and urbanisation on the literary representation of rural America, and argued for a reconceptualisation of 'American regionalism'. A 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 provisional work on a monograph, and, with my colleague Stephen Shapiro, as editor on a forthcoming entry in the Cambridge Companions series: The Cambridge Companion to American Horror.

Teaching and supervision

In 2019-20 I will be convening Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and co-teaching American Horror Story: U.S. Gothic Cultures, 1790-Present. I also supervise dissertations in the field of American literature. At postgraduate level 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

• Rural Fictions, Urban Realities: A Geography of Gilded Age American Literature. New York: 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).