Roger Luckhurst
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theprofrog.bsky.social
Roger Luckhurst
@theprofrog.bsky.social

academic/freelance writer, on Gothic, Science Fiction. Next up: Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead (October 2025).

Roger Luckhurst is a British writer and academic and since 2020 the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth Century Studies at Birkbeck College. He was appointed professor in modern and contemporary literature in the Department of English, Theatre, and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London in 2008 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, and Zombies: A Cultural History. He has also written two books for the British Film Institute classic film series on The Shining and Alien. .. more

Philosophy 28%
Art 23%

podcast pitch: Speculative Bollocks Hour, in which Chris Mason, Laura K and Henry Z, impersonated by former contestants of RuPaul's Drag Race, sit in salon chairs + gossip bitchily about Jenrick's hair, Starmer's tight-ass walk and the size of the Russian bulge in Richard Tice's pocket.

Mondays are always a bit weird, but I really wasn't expecting an email from a garment maker in Milan asking for my measurements so that they can make me a bespoke vampire cape

Monday, 8.05am email: Tell us about your forthcoming submission to Academia Mental Health. Ok:

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My view of the Barbican towers from my window suggests the concrete is reacting poorly to this weather

The Essex town where I grew up. There was a lot of National Front activity there in the 1970s; decisions to let forms of social mobility like universities go just gives the town back to a swell of Reform support. Complacency in govt is going to bite them (and the rest of us) quite hard quite soon.
Everything in this report reflects on what we value, for communities, for peripheral places, for young people, for education, for the future - and it looks like we’ve got it all wrong.
‘If I think about what this means, I want to cry’: what happens when a city loses its university?
When Essex University’s Southend campus opened, it was a message of hope for a ‘left behind’ UK seaside town. Its closure will be felt far beyond its 800 students, some of whom will not get their degr...
www.theguardian.com

This week I’m going to Switzerland to go up a mountain to give a talk at the 50th anniversary celebration of Club Dracula. All this seems fine and completely plausible and I foresee no problems once I have sorted out the fact that my ticket was accidentally booked in the name of Jonathan Harker
Mandelson commissioned the Browne review which led to the current mess in English HE ...

Fascinating early science fiction just as impressive as his late noirs, written in that distinctive, radically clipped prose. A writer really worth checking out. RIP.
Author James Sallis died on Jan 27 at age 81. Although he might be best known for _Drive_, he had a long & distinguished career, incl. this well-respected biography of Chester Himes
elizabethfoxwell.blogspot.com/2026/02/Sall... #BlackHistoryMonth

Reposted by Roger Luckhurst

Author James Sallis died on Jan 27 at age 81. Although he might be best known for _Drive_, he had a long & distinguished career, incl. this well-respected biography of Chester Himes
elizabethfoxwell.blogspot.com/2026/02/Sall... #BlackHistoryMonth

I wish the UKRI would stop talking about research buckets, particularly when future plans seem to imply the AHRC will feature largely under the section ‘Bucket, Kicking the’
Open letter from Ian Chapman to research and innovation community
UKRI Chief Executive outlines changes to UKRI investment approach, addressing concerns about research funding and the financial position of STFC.
www.ukri.org

It’s not remembered now of course but Christopher Walken’s hairstyles won several acting prizes of their own in the early 1980s, as here in The Dead Zone

Lovely little mock-doc by Bo Wang on MUBI, An Asian Ghost Story, presenting a compelling case about why all that long dark hair might be haunted. TV News interview with a pontianak worth the entry alone!

Professorial book chat about mainstream contemporary literary fiction

Rewatching Sinners: doesn’t quite have the hallucinatory weirdness of first viewing but my god the craft of it is breathtaking

The Topography of Terror in Berlin opens with a detailed early history of how German police forces, law courts, employment law and paramilitaries were steadily aligned in the early 30s to create the National Socialist state. I think it was meant to be a warning, though, not a blueprint
Home
www.topographie.de

Call me old fashioned, but wouldn’t it be great if Andy Burnham just followed through on what he always said about being a metropolitan mayor who actually got some things done instead of being yet another disappointing Westminster politico destined to also fail
Tomorrow (Jan 23) at 12:00pm EST, tune into a virtual event with @theprofrog.bsky.social, author of Graveyards, hosted by Smithsonian Associates! Come hear about the cultural history of graves and graveyards, from the earliest known burial sites to today’s green burials

Get tickets: buff.ly/U5WiGEc

… for £4.20

Live feed from Davos

Wednesday

Amazon just asked me 'did Combined and Uneven Apocalypse meet your expectations?'

Soundtrack forJanuary

If Europe has to negotiate after all, could Macron suggest an exchange of Greenland for reversing the Louisiana Purchase and restoring the state to France? They had boats there, also

Reposted by Lesley A. Hall

Has anyone thought about reviving the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award, then we could offer that to Trump too?

At the end of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple my friend leant over and said “Someone should lock Alex Garland up.”