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Reader

Email:

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FAB 5.48
Faculty of Arts
University of º£½ÇÉçÇø
Coventry CV4 7AL

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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. Nominated four times for the º£½ÇÉçÇø Awards in Teaching Excellence and a winner in 2021; shortlisted for 'Academic Staff of the Year' by the º£½ÇÉçÇø SU in 2026.

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. 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.