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About

Mark Storey is an Associate Professor, and teaches on the English and Comparative Literary Studies programmes. 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 and teach about American writing and culture, particularly since the late nineteenth century. More specifically my recent research has focused on the ways ancient Rome figures in the historical imagination of US imperial culture, soon to appear in a forthcoming book called Roma Redux: Time and Antiquity in American Empire (Oxford UP, 2021).

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 cultures. 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).