williamhughes@um.edu.mo
Tel
(853) 88224527
Office
E21-4068a
Consultation Hours
Monday, Wednesday & Thursday
16:00-17:00 (via Zoom)
William HUGHES
Introduction
William Hughes is Professor of Literature in English, and a specialist in both literary studies and medical history. His research interests embrace British and American fiction from the Victorian period to the near contemporary, and have a specific focus upon Gothic and supernatural fictions – particularly the works of the Irish author Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. He has also published widely in the field of medical history, where his research interests include Victorian psychology, anaesthetics, surgery and physiological medicine as well as the pseudosciences of mesmerism and phrenology.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and the Higher Education Academy, and a Past President of the International Gothic Association.
Education
PhD, Discourse and Culture in the Fiction of Bram Stoker (1989-1993)
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.
MA in Modern Literature (1986-1987)
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.
Postgraduate Certificate in Education (1985-1986)
Christ Church College, Canterbury, UK.
BA in English Studies (1982-1985)
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.
Research Interests
The fiction, journalism, letters and associates of Bram Stoker (1847-1912).
British, Irish and American Gothic fiction, especially in a medical context.
Conventional medicine and the pseudosciences in Victorian and Edwardian context.
Contemporary Gothic, especially the ecoGothic implications of vampires and zombies.
Post-mortem communication, including the technology of mediumship and the scientific investigation of paranormal phenomena in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.
The acting career and influence of Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905).
Courses Regularly Taught
On the BA programme this semester I am teaching ENGL3040 Special Topics in English on my research specialism, the Gothic. This is a completely different course to ENGL3051, and covers the genre from the late eighteenth century to the present. On the MA programme I will also teach ENGL7029 Ecology and Apocalypse, a course which is theoretically informed by ecocriticism and ecoGothic and which features texts from the nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries.
I have supervised seven PhDs to successful completion, and am an experienced internal and external examiner. Please contact me via williamhughes@um.edu.mo if you would like to discuss a PhD proposal in the fields of Gothic literature, Victorian studies, medical history or ecoGothic.
FRHistS – Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
FSA Scot – Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
FHEA – Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
Past President of The International Gothic Association (2009-2013): I also served as Secretary to the Association between 1991-1995, and was the founder-editor of Gothic Studies, the internationally refereed journal of the IGA from 1995 to 2019. I am a commissioning editor for the Edinburgh Companions to the Gothic series, for the International Gothic series and for the Beginnings series, both published by Manchester University Press.
In Press
Key Concepts in Victorian Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, March 2023)
In Print
The Dome of Thought: Phrenology and the Nineteenth-Century Popular Imagination (Manchester University Press, 2022).
CoronaGothic: Cultures of the Pandemic, edited by Nick Groom and William Hughes, Critical Quarterly, 62/4 (December 2020).
Suicide and the Gothic, edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Manchester University Press, 2019).
Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles edited by William Hughes and Ruth Heholt (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018.
Key Concepts in the Gothic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
That Devil’s Trick: Hypnotism and the Victorian Popular Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015)
EcoGothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013)
The Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature (Lanham MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013).
The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, edited by William Hughes, Andrew Smith and David Punter (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 2 vols.
The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
Queering the Gothic, edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Readers’ Guides Series (London: Continuum, 2009)
Bram Stoker: Dracula, Readers’ Guides to Essential Criticism Series (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008).
Bram Stoker, Dracula, with an Introduction by William Hughes and Notes by Diane Mason (Bath: Artswork Books, 2007).
Bram Stoker: A Bibliography, compiled by Richard Dalby and William Hughes (Westcliff-on-Sea: Desert Island Books, 2004).
Empire and the Gothic: Studies in the Ideology of Genre, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003).
Fictions of Unease: The Gothic from Otranto to The X–Files, edited by Andrew Smith, Diane Mason and William Hughes, eds, (Bath: Sulis Press, 2002).
Bram Stoker, The Lady of the Shroud, annotated and edited by William Hughes (Westcliff-on-Sea: Desert Island Books, 2001).
Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural Context (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2000).
Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic, edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).
Bram Stoker. A Bibliography (Brisbane: Victorian Fiction Research Group, 1997).
Contemporary Writing and National Identity, edited by Tracey Hill and William Hughes (Bath: Sulis Press, 1995).
Selected Shorter Works
‘“This Unfortunate Book”: Bram Stoker and the Edwardian Publishing Industry’, Irish Studies Review, 29/1 (2021).
‘“The evil of our collective soul”: Zombies, Medical Capitalism and Environmental Apocalypse’, Horror Studies, 12/1 (Spring 2021), 7-25.
‘Gothic and the Invention of the Railways’ in Dale Townshend, Catherine Spooner and Angela Wright, eds, The Cambridge History of the Gothic, 3 vols, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 445-62.