Time: 12 pm EST
Admission: $8 - Tickets HERE

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The word Gothic conjures associations with the dark and melancholy, the weird and feared, and haunted places and people. In his new book Gothic, Roger Luckhurst offers readers an unprecedented look at the ways this uncanny style has manifested itself through architecture, literature, film, art, video games, and more. From the works of Victor Hugo and E. T. A. Hoffmann to Southern Gothic, ancient folklore, and classic horror movies, Luckhurst explores how an aesthetic that began in the margins has been reinvented through the centuries to become part of mainstream global culture.

Organizing his wide-ranging history by theme, Luckhurst begins with Gothic architecture and form, including such elements as the arch, the house, and ruins. He considers how the Gothic is depicted in rural and urban settings, as well as in the wilderness and borderlands. And he delves into Gothic traditions and settings around the world, from the sublime Alps and Australian outback to the Arctic wasteland, from the dark folkloric realm of the forest to the postindustrial landscapes of abandoned hospitals and asylums, and then beyond the bounds of the planet to unknowable cosmic horror. Luckhurst investigates the monsters that mirror ourselves and society, and demonstrates that as the Gothic has traveled across the globe and through time, it has morphed according to the shape of our changing fears and anxieties.

This talk will offer a spin around the compass rose, looking at the Gothic North, South, East and West, locally and globally, and will enthrall anyone yearning to lift the veil on our fascination with the eerie, morbid, and supernatural.

Roger Luckhurst is a British writer and academic. He is the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth Century Studies in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and was Distinguished Visiting Professor at Columbia University in 2016. He works on Victorian literature, contemporary literature, Gothic and weird fiction, trauma studies, and speculative/science fiction. Luckhurst is notable for his introductions and editorships to the Oxford World's Classics series volumes -- Late Victorian Gothic Tales, Dracula, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Portrait of a Lady, H.P. Lovecraft's Classic Horror Tales, King Solomon’s Mines, and The Time Machine -- and for his books on J. G. Ballard (1997), The Invention of Telepathy (2002), Science Fiction (2005) The Trauma Question (2008), The Mummy’s Curse: The True Story of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford University Press, 2012), and Zombies: A Cultural History (Reaktion Press, 2015). He has also written two books for the British Film Institute classic film series on The Shining and Alien.

Luckhurst has written pieces for the Guardian and the Financial Times, and has written features for the film journal Sight and Sound and wrote and presented a BBC Radio 4 documentary about mummy curses. He is currently working on an edition of texts from the secretive London society, The Ghost Club.