Professor Roger Luckhurst

BA (Hull), MA (Sussex), PhD (Hull)
Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature

020 7631 6082
r.luckhurst@bbk.ac.uk

Current Research
Books
Edited Books
Editions
Edited Special Issues
Articles
Chapters in Books
Forthcoming

Academic Year 2009-10

This year, I’m teaching two BA courses, ‘Gothic Romance 1764-Present’ and ‘Literature 1945-79’. At MA, I’ll be co-teaching two options on Contemporary British and American literature with Joe Brooker.

Upcoming speaking/events this autumn:

• October 10 ‘Magics and Mysteries of Relation’ at Dickens Day, Birkbeck College
• From October 10, the gallery Zitter/Ramet has a show by the painter Dolly Thompsett, for which I’ve done the catalogue essay.
• October 17 I’ll be introducing special free screening of David Lynch’s masterpiece, Mulholland Drive at the Birkbeck Cinema at 2pm.
• October 31 I’ll be giving a paper at Tate Modern for their symposium on David Lynch
• December 8: I’ll be giving a public lecture at the Bishopsgate Institute in the City on ‘London: City of the Deranged and Disorderly Dead’

   

Current Research

1) The Mummy’s Curse and other Dastardly Tales of Egyptian London
This book will explore the true story of the curse of the British Museum mummy, first brought to prominence in about 1904 with the death of the journalist Fletcher Robinson, and which haunted the Edwardian imagination, preparing the way for the later frenzy around the tomb of Tutankhamen. This cultural history of a rumour will provide numerous contexts for the curse story: Egyptianised architecture and environments in Victorian London; the return of the Gothic romance in popular fiction; the sensational trials of the time that featured Egyptian Magick and the alleged mesmeric powers of ‘killer willers’; imperial occupation of Egypt from 1882 to very limited independence in the 1920s.

2) An edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula
This is for Oxford World’s Classics (due for publication 2011)

3) 19^th Century Anthology
With Justin Sausman, I am co-editing a volume of primary materials on ‘heterodox science’ in the Victorian period, including sections on phrenology, mesmerism, cheiromancy, spiritualism, psychical research, Theosophy and ritual magic. This is part of a multi-volume ‘Science and Literature’ series for Chatto and Pickering edited by Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman, to appear in 2012.

4) Book of essays, Science Fiction in the Expanded Field
This is an ongoing project to pull together my interest in looking at different kinds of science fiction that emerge in spaces outside genre texts – in apocalyptic religions, in narratives of alien abduction, in museums, fine art, photography exhibits and found-footage film works – cultural forms that have largely been considered inimical to SF forms.

Major Publications

Books

1) 'The Angle Between Two Walls': The Fiction of J G Ballard
Liverpool University Press/St. Martin's Press, 1997: xix + 213.

2) The Invention of Telepathy
Oxford University Press, 2002: xii + 324.

3) Science Fiction
(Cultural History of Literature series)
Polity Press, 2005: vii + 305

4) The Trauma Question
Routledge, 2008.

Edited Books

1) Literature and the Contemporary
co-edited with Peter Marks, University of Sydney,
Longmans, 1999: ix + 216.

Essays by Bill Ashcroft, Steven Connor, Thomas Docherty, Mandy Merck and others.

2) The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c.1880-1900
co-edited with Sally Ledger,
Oxford University Press, 2000: xxiv + 354

This anthology uses contemporary documents to offer inroads into a complex era. In 13 chapters, each with a contextual introduction and explanatory notes, we aim to introduce ideas of Degeneration, Outcast London, London as Metropolis, the New Woman, Literary Debates, The New Imperialism, Socialism, Anarchism, Scientific Naturalism, Psychology, Psychical Research, Sexology and Anthropology.

3) Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century
co-edited with Josephine McDonagh, Linacre College Oxford.
Manchester University Press, 2002: xi + 195.

Essays by David Amigoni, Isobel Armstrong, Carolyn Burdett, Steven Connor, Roger Luckhurst, Lindsay Smith, Rebecca Stott, Lynnette Turner and Paul White.

Editions

1) Late Victorian Gothic Tales
Oxford World’s Classics, 2005: xlviii + 382.
Author of full introductiont and explanatory notes to text.

2) Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Oxford World’s Classics, 2006: xli + 205.
Author of full introduction and explanatory notes to text

3) Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
Oxford World’s Classics, April 2009.
Author of full introduction and explanatory notes to text

Edited Special Issues

1) ‘Remembering the 1990s’
co-edited with Joe Brooker, Birkbeck College
New Formations 50 (2003): vi + 176.

Essays by Michael Bracewelll, Joe Brooker, Steven Connor, Andrew Gibson, Robert Hampson, Peter Middleton, Roger Luckhurst, John Tomlinson and Wendy Wheeler

2) ‘Techno-Culture and Science Fiction’
co-edited with Gill Partington, Birkbeck College,
Science Fiction Studies 33:1 (March 2006)

Essays by Stacey Abbott, Mark Bould, Anthony Enns, Rob Harding, Roger Luckhurst, Kaye Mitchell, Gill Partington, Laura Salisbury and Sheryl Vint.

Articles

'Border Policing: Science Fiction and Postmodernism'
Science Fiction Studies, 18:3, 1991: 358-66.

'Nuclear Criticism: Anachronism and Anachorism'
Diacritics, 23:2, 1993: 89-97.

'The Many Deaths of Science Fiction: A Polemic'
Science Fiction Studies, 21: 1, 1994: 35-50.
(this article received the Science Fiction Research Association Pioneer Award for best original research article in the field, 1995)

'Petition, Repetition, and "Autobiography": J G Ballard's Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women'
Contemporary Literature, 34: 4, 1994: 688-707.

'Queer Theory (and Oscar Wilde): A Review Essay
Journal of Gender Studies, 4: 3, 1995: 333-40.

'Repetition and Unreadability: J G Ballard's Vermilion Sands'
Extrapolation,36:4, 1995: 292-304.

'"Horror and Beauty in Rare Combination": The Miscegenate Fictions of Octavia Butler'
Women: A Cultural Review, 7:1, 1996: 28-38.

'"Impossible Mourning" in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Michèle Roberts' Daughters of the House'
Critique, 37: 4, 1996: 243-60.

'The Science-Fictionalisation of Trauma: Remarks on Narratives of Alien Abduction'
Science Fiction Studies, 25:1, 1998: 29-52.

‘The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the “Spectral Turn”’
Textual Practice, 16:3, 2002: 526-545.

‘Demon-Haunted Darwinism’
New Formations 49, 2003: 124-35.

‘Traumaculture’
New Formations 50, 2003: 28-47.

‘Cultural Governance, New Labour and the British SF Boom’
Science Fiction Studies 30:3, 2003: 417-35.

‘Post-Imperial Melancholy and the New Wave in the 1970s’
Foundation 93, 2005: 76-88.

‘Literary London: Post-, Ex-, Trans-, Neo-?’
English Studies in Canada, 2005

‘Introduction: Techno-Culture and Science Fiction’
Science Fiction Studies 33:1, 2006: 1-3.

‘Bruno Latour’s Scientifiction: Networks, Assemblages and Tangled Objects’
Science Fiction Studies 33:1, 2006: 4-17.

‘The Two Cultures, or The End of the World as We Know It’
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 32: 1, 2007.

‘Catastrophism, American Style: The Fiction of Greg Bear’
Yearbook of English Studies, 37:2, 2007: 215-33. 

The Found-Footage Science Fiction Film: Five Films by Craig Baldwin, Werner Herzog, and Patrick Keiller’
Science Fiction Film and Television 1:2 (2008)

‘The Photographic Sublime, or Can there Be a Science Fiction Photography?’
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts (2009)

‘Reflections on Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking’
New Formations 67(2009), 91-100.
This is available as a free download at: www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/articles/67%20luckhurst.pdf

Forthcoming

‘Beyond Trauma: Torturous Times’
European Journal of English Studies (2010)

‘The Mummy’s Curse’
Critical Quarterly (2010)

‘Science Fiction and Cultural History’
Science Fiction Studies (March 2010)

Chapters in Books

'(Touching on) Tele-Technology'
Applying to Derrida, edited John Brannigan, Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (Macmillan, 1996): 161-73.

'Memory Recovered/Recovered Memory'
Literature and the Contemporary, edited Roger Luckhurst and Peter Marks (Longmans, 1999): 80-93.

'"Something Tremendous, Something Elemental": On the ghostly origins of psychoanalysis'
Ghosts: Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, History, edited Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, (Macmillan 1999): 50-71.

‘Trance Gothic, 1882-97’
Victorian Gothic, edited Julian Wolfreys and Ruth Robbins (Palgrave 2000): 148-67.

‘Vicissitudes of the Voice, Speaking Science Fiction’
Speaking Science Fiction, edited David Seed and Andrew Sawyer (Liverpool University Press, 2000): 69-81.

‘“Going Postal”: Rage, Science Fiction and the Ends of the American Subject’
Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation, edited Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (Pennsylvania University Press, 2002): 142-56.

‘Passages in the Invention of the Psyche: Mind-Reading in London, 1881-4’
Transactions and Encounters, edited by Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh (Manchester University Press, 2002): 117-50.

‘W. T. Stead’s Occult Economy’
Cultural Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media, edited by Louise Henson et. Al. (Ashgate Press, 2003): 117-27.

‘Occult London’
London from Punk to Blair, edited by Joe Kerr and Andrew Gibson (Reaktion Books, 2003).

‘Knowledge, Belief and the Supernatural at the Imperial Margin’
The Victorian Supernatural, edited by Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (Cambridge University Press, 2004): 197-216.

‘Ending the Century: Literature and Digital Technology’
The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century English Literature, edited by Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge University Press, 2004): 787-806.

‘Introduction’
Late Victorian Gothic Tales, ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford World’s Classics, 2005)

‘British Science Fiction in the 1990s: Politics and Genre’
British Fiction of the 1990s, edited by Nicholas Bentley (Routledge, 2005)

‘J. G. Ballard’s Crash’
Companion to Science Fiction, edited David Seed (Blackwell, 2005).

‘Mixing Memory and Desire: Psychoanalysis, Psychology and Trauma Theory’’
Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, edited by Patricia Waugh (Oxford University Press, 2006): 497-507.

‘Introduction’
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Oxford World’s Classics, 2006): vii-xli.

‘The Curse of the Mummy: A Genealogy’
Magic, Science, Technology and Literature, edited by Mildorf, Jarmila; Seeber, Hans Ulrich; Windisch, Martin (eds). Münster: LIT Verlag, 2006: 126-39

‘The Uncanny after Freud: The Contemporary Trauma Subject and the Fiction of Stephen King’
Uncanny Modernity, edited Jo Collins and John Jervis (Palgrave, 2008) 

‘The Politics of the Network: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy’
In Mapping the Unimaginable: Kim Stanley Robinson and the Critics, edited by William J Burling (McFarland, 2009).

‘Pseudoscience’
In The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint (Routledge, 2009)

‘Introduction’
Henry James, Portrait of a Lady (Oxford World’s Classics, 2009), vii-xxxiv.

‘Greg Bear’ & ‘J. G. Ballard’
In Fifty Key Science Fiction Writers (Routledge 2009)

Forthcoming

‘Religion, Spiritualism, Psychical Research and the Occult’
In Handbook of Modernisms, edited by Peter Brooker et al (Blackwell, 2009).

‘Science Fiction’
In Blackwell Encyclopedia of Critical and Cultural Theory (3 vols, Blackwell 2009?)

‘Science Fiction and Fantasy’
In Oxford History of the Novel, 1880-1940, edited by Andrjez Gasiorek and Patrick Parrinder, Oxford University Press, 2010.

‘An Occult Gazetteer of Bloomsbury: An Experiment in Method’
In Gothic London, edited by Anne Witchard, Continuum, 2010