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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 four 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.

My current project is about genre fiction and the role of fear in US political life since the 1960s. This has led onto a wider interest in the cross-disciplinary field of affect studies (especially where it meets politics and narrative culture), and founding ‘The Fear Network’ to bring together people from across the university who work in this area. Related to this I’ve been writing about horror: this includes, with my colleague Stephen Shapiro, editing the Cambridge Companion to American Horror.

Previously, my second book grew out of an interest in two (seemingly) separate fields: US imperialism, and the ‘temporal turn’. Time and Antiquity in American Empire (OUP, 2021) examines 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; my first book, Rural Fictions, Urban Realities (OUP, 2013), is about that. 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.

Teaching and supervision

In 2024-25 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, postwar 'Dirty Realism', and American ecohorror. I am open to proposals in my general fields of interest but am not currently taking on any new research students for 2025-26.

Selected publications

[For a full list see 'Publications' above]

• 'Fiction for geeks and freaks'. Times Literary Supplement (1 Nov 2024).
• '1973 and the American Horror Film: Political Futurity in The Exorcist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre'. Horror Studies. 15.1 (2024).
• Co-edited: The Cambridge Companion to American Horror including an introduction 'American Horror: Genre and History' (CUP, 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).
• Time and Antiquity in American Empire, Oxford University Press, 2021.
• 'Local Color, World-System; or, American Realism at the Periphery' in The Oxford Handbook of American Realism, ed. Keith Newlin (OUP, 2019)
• Rural Fictions, Urban Realities: A Geography of Gilded Age American Literature. Oxford University Press, 2013.