Horror Studies Research Group

What

First established and led by Louis Bayman in the Film Department at Southampton University, the Horror Studies research group is a collaborative multidisciplinary space designed for students and scholars interested in all tenets and manifestations of horror across literature, film, and other media. The group meets several times a semester and is open to participants from any field or discipline from Southampton and beyond (we particularly welcome the involvement of PGRs and ECRs).

This year (2023/24), participants can expect planned reading groups, screenings, guest speakers, and even field trips. See the schedule below for further details, which will be updated throughout the autumn semester.

Who

While the group is designed to be collaborative and our events will be led by its members, for the upcoming academic year (2023/4) it will be managed by Emily-Rose Baker and Giulia Champion, both of whom are current postdoctoral fellows in the English Department, and whose research engages with Horror Studies in different ways.

Emily-Rose Baker (e-r.baker@soton.ac.uk)

Emily-Rose is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of English and the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton. Her current research examines legacies of the Holocaust, neighbourly violence and horror tropes in Central and Eastern European cinema, funded by the British Academy. She completed her WRoCAH-funded PhD in the School of English at the University of Sheffield in 2021, before joining the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film, where her teaching focused on representations of genocide and the Holocaust.

Giulia Champion (g.champion@soton.ac.uk)

Dr Giulia Champion is a Research Fellow (Anniversary Fellowship) at the University of Southampton. Her project investigates different communities’ engagement with and representations of the seabed through culture, science and policy. It interrogates how these may influence marine governance and the concept of Ocean Justice, with a particular focus on “in/tangible” underwater cultural heritage and the current development of the mining code by the International Seabed Authority. In 2022, she was a Green Transition Fellow at the Greenhouse at the University of Stavanger. She volunteers for the International Commission of the History of Oceanography and is a co-convenor for the Haunted Shores Network and the Reading Decoloniality Group and a collaborator on the Ecological Reparation Project.

Why

Since its appearance in Western culture from the late 18^th century, horror, much like its Gothic predecessor, has served as a principal site of transgression and plurality. Taking on multiple cultural and historical forms within fiction and film, the genre has opened itself up to aesthetic critique as well as discourses around morality, censorship and otherness. As such, horror and its far-reaching subgenres have attracted the interests of academics across disciplines in recent decades, including literature, art, film, history, philosophy and the environmental humanities. This group emerges from and contributes to such an interdisciplinary investment in horror and its diverse cultural manifestations. Its objectives are to interrogate and expand the aesthetic and political parameters of horror and its study; to employ horror as an innovative mode with which to analyse marginalised groups; and to serve as a productive response to cultural fears of all kinds.

Fields and interests represented by current members of the group:

• Film studies, literature, art, history and philosophy
• Film practice, including animatronics and set design
• Video games and the gamification of horror film
• Zombies, ghosts, vampires and other monstrous figures
• Histories of racialisation, migration and political horror
• Horror tropes, including the final girl, serial killers
• Subgenres of horror, including ecohorror and postcolonial horror
• Horror and the gothic in children’s literature
• Reception theory

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Schedule

All events (with the exception of screenings) will be hybridised, allowing participants to participate online as well as in person. For those attending in person, we will provide snacks.

Semester 1 [25 September 2023–27 January 2024]

Autumn Term:

Week 2. 11^th October | 12-1pm, Building 65 (Room 1101)

Reading group: Thinking with and researching horror

Led by: Emily-Rose Baker and Giulia Champion

Week 5. 8^th November | 12-1pm, Building 65 (Room 1101)

Research talk: German expressionism, Nazi aesthetics and Degenerate Art

Led by: Joseph Owen

Week 10. 7^th December | 12-1pm, Building 65 (Room 1157)

Reading group*: Folk horror

Led by: Louis Bayman

*This event is accompanied by an end-of-term screening (snacks provided) of The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) on Monday 4^th December from 5–7pm, in Building 6 (Nuffield Theatre) Room 1081 (BoB link will be provided for those who would like to watch the film but cannot attend the screening).

We’ll discuss the introduction of Louis Bayman’s and K.J. Donnelly’s new edited collection entitled Folk Horror on Film: Return of the British Repressed (2023), the introduction is entitled “Introduction: What Makes the Folk Horrific?”, available on Google books here, or at the Southampton University Library.

Semester 2 [29 January–15 June 2024]

Spring Term:

Week 2. 8^th February | 12-1pm, Online

(De)colonial horror

Led by: Ranka Primorac

An online reading group on two short stories: Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s ‘The Haunting of 13 Olúwo Street‘, and Pemi Aguda’s ‘Things Boys Do‘. Ranka will talk for 20 minutes at the beginning of the session, and then lead a group discussion of these texts. 

Week 6. 7^th March | 2-3pm, Building 65 (Room 1177)

Ocean horror and gothic seascapes

Led by: Giulia Champion

For the session, please read Jamieson, Alan J., Glenn Singleman, Thomas D. Linley, and Susan Casey. “Fear and Loathing of the Deep Ocean: Why Don’t People Care about the Deep Sea?.” ICES Journal of Marine Science 78, no. 3 (2021): 797-809, available via this link.

Watch William Eubank’s film Underwater (2020), available via BoB on this link (sign in via your University of Southampton access).

(Optional: if you have time, please read the preface and introduction of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals (2021), available via this link).

**SPRING BREAK**

Summer Term:

Week 16. 12^th June | 12-1pm, Building 65 (Room 1167) and via MS Teams

Anti-Blackness, Horror & The Sublime

Led by: Tanay Gandhi

For the session, please read Meg Armstrong: “‘The Effects of Blackness’: Gender, Race, and the Sublime in Aesthetic Theories of Burke and Kant”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 54, no. 3, (1996): 213–236, pdf available below.

Watch Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining (1980), available via BoB on this link (sign in via your University of Southampton access).

Optional: if you have time, please read also Alexander G. Weheliye’s “Black Life/Schwarz-Sein: Inhabitations of the Flesh” in Beyond the Doctrine of Man: Decolonial Visions of the Human, ed. by Joseph Drexler-Dreis and Kristien Justaert (2019: Fordham University Press), pp. 237–262, pdf available below.

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