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About

Mark Storey is a Reader in American Literature. He was a founding member of the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (), and has held fellowships at the University of Virginia and the Houghton Library at Harvard. He has been nominated four times for the ÌÇÐÄTV 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

Previously, my second book grew out of an interest in two (seemingly) separate fields: US imperialism, and the ‘temporal turn’. (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, (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 2025-26 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'; object horror in American culture; and weird fiction and bureaucracy. I am open to proposals in my general fields of interest.

Selected publications

[For a full list see 'Publications' above]

• . American Gothic Studies. 1.1 (2025).
• . Times Literary Supplement (1 Nov 2024).
• . Horror Studies. 15.1 (2024).
• Co-edited: including an introduction 'American Horror: Genre and History' (CUP, 2022)
• 'Antiquity/Modernity: An Issue of Puck Magazine, 1889' in . Ed. Edward Sugden (EUP, 2022).
• 'Roma Redux: The Analogical Nineteenth Century' in Ed. Christopher Castiglia and Susan Gillman (Penn Press, 2022).
• 'Local Color, World-System; or, American Realism at the Periphery' in , ed. Keith Newlin (OUP, 2019)
• Rural Fictions, Urban Realities: A Geography of Gilded Age American Literature. Oxford University Press, 2013.