Dr Joan Passey

I am a Senior Lecturer in the English department specialising in Victorian coasts and seascapes. My research interests include:

• Transhistorical, transatlantic Gothic from the eighteenth century to the present day
• Victorian literature and culture
• Coasts, seascapes, the blue humanities, gothic coasts
• Queer ecologies and queer ecologies of the Gothic
• Ann Radcliffe, Wilkie Collins, Shirley Jackson, Sabine Baring-Gould
• Cornwall and regional literatures
• Dark tourism

My first monograph, Cornish Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2023), considers: dark tourism, neomedieval Arthurianism, ghosts, folklore and folkhorror, shipwrecks and seafaring, mining and the subterranean, railway travel, and travel writing.

I am currently working on two new projects:

• Queer Ecologies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. This project looks at intersections between ecological awareness and changes to queer experience in the long nineteenth century as a means of positing an embryonic queer ecological imagination amidst emerging industrial capitalism.
• Blood in the Water: Imperial Ecologies and Seascapes in the Victorian Novel. This project looks at the ways in which seas are represented as monstrous spaces in nineteenth-century literature as a response to both environmental and colonial anxieties.

My further research considers the sea as a health environment in nineteenth-century literature and culture. This includes shipboard medical treatment; illness and malady while travelling at sea (with a focus on seasickness and its cures); coastal health tourism and thalassotherapy; and the health of the sea itself, considering embryonic ideas of oceanic pollution.

Teaching:

I currently teach on:

• Critical Issues (UG year 1, convener)
• The Radical Gothic (UG year 2, convener)
• The Gothic (MA, convener)

I have previously taught on:

• Literature 1740-1900
• ELCE programmes
• Sutton Trust
• Access to Bristol
• Literature's Children (UG year 3, convener)
• Celebrity Cultures (UG year 3)
• Introduction to Literary Research (MA, Modernism and Contemporary strand)

Roles:

• Executive Committee of University English
• Co-leader of the Haunted Shores Network

Former Roles:

• Events Officer for the Centre for Environmental Humanities
• Committe of the British Association for Victorian Studies

Supervision:

I am open to queries about research supervision in any of my areas of expertise.

[email protected] and @JoanPassey on Twitter