Claire Qu

Provisional thesis title: Uncanny Resource Imaginaries in Gothic World Literatures

Supervisor: Professor Pablo Mukherjee

Research interests: Gothic fiction, world literature, colonial and post-colonial literature,  the energy humanities, 18th- and 19th- century writing, food studies

Doctoral research: My project tracks the permutations of the Gothic mode across global extraction economies centred around resources such as sugar/rum, silver, and oil. Taking a materialist approach in my analysis of fictional and non-fictional texts dealing with the commodity frontier, I examine how Gothic forms, motifs, and conventions are used both to render the spaces of the plantation, mine, rig, etc. uncanny, and to unsettle or otherwise undermine the narratives built up around these (post-)imperial constructions.

Publications:

'"The puzzle pieces fit too late": Posthumous Narratological Changes in Arthur Quiller-Couch and Daphne Du Maurier’s Castle Dor,' in Genetic Narratology: Analysing Narrative Across Versions, edited by Dirk Van Hulle (Open Book Publishers, 2024), 91-110. https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0426/chapters/10.11647/obp.0426.06.

'Bush Studies: Barbara Baynton's Ghostly Legacy,' Bluestocking Oxford, October 28, 2023. https://blue-stocking.org.uk/2023/10/28/bush-studies-barbara-bayntons-ghostly-legacy/. 

Conference papers:

'Carnivalesque Hauntings: Transgressing the Colonial Order on the Caribbean Sugar Plantation,' Postcolonial Hauntings conference (GAPS Postcolonial Narrations series), University of Augsburg, 2024.

'"My coffee walks and shaddock bowers": Experimental Aesthetics of the Plantation in Matthew Lewis' Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834),' Outdoor Aesthetics graduate conference, University of Chester, 2024.

'"At Sea": Petroleum Fantasies in Tabitha Lasley's Sea State,' Oxford English Graduates Conference, 2023.

'"I am a hopeless witness!": the Wandering Jew as historical register in Melmoth the Wanderer and its literary descendants,' Romantic Studies Association of Australasia conference, 2021.

'"Discordant unison": Surviving Social Breakdown in Melmoth the Wanderer,' 'Resilience, Renewal, Recovery' graduate conference (University of York & Enlightenment Romanticism Contemporary Culture Research Unit), 2021.