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%

Long lost Mighty Boosh joke:

‘I told you not to mess with the occult!’
‘Really? I thought it was good for your digestion.’
‘No, that’s Yakult.’

Still no apology for Celia Imrie's fart. Completely disgusted.

This morning's best autoreply so far, sadly not from Vampire Quarterly, however: 'You have already been uninvited.'

Reposted by Roger Luckhurst

I pressed the button on this AIPhone in the elevator and a voice told me I was Montgomery Clift and that the telephone was invented by Carthusian monks in the 11th century

Airport waiting lounge logic: it’s now 12 noon, you can legitimately commence shovelling lunch even though breakfast was 3 hours ago.

Fantastic clash: what if Academic Board just read some Heidegger?

🎶 Moibye it’s becoise I’m a Londoner that I loive mass murder so 🎶

Gearing up for a couple of sessions at #Festival42BCN later this week, around Spanish edition of the Graveyards book!
Festival 42 | Ajuntament de Barcelona
From November 5 to 9, the lobby of Fabra i Coats will be filled with books during the 42 Festival of Fantastic Genres.
www.barcelona.cat

Reposted by Roger Luckhurst

"In working on this project, I developed a kind of double vision – reading the signs of the metropolis for the necropolis that is always hidden inside it."

Be sure to check out Graveyards author @theprofrog.bsky.social's new essay: press.princeton.edu/ideas/scratc...

#ReadUP #History #Halloween
Scratching the surface
Death confronts us all as the ultimate rupture and mystery at the very heart of life. That existential challenge has been met, it turns out, of an almost infinite variety of customs and rituals.
press.princeton.edu

I did this interview with the lovely Mark Lynch for WICN Public Radio. Gotta love your NPR stations, people! Happy Halloween.
Roger Luckhurst - 90.5 WICN Public Radio
On this episode of Inquiry, we head to the graveyard. Our guest is ROGER LUCKHURST. He is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. His new book is a historica...
wicn.org

The life of the mind: one minute you're grappling with Kant's divisions on the deduction of pure aesthetical judgments, the next minute you're absently smearing crumbs of raspberry muffin into your cardigan.

Always a sucker for haunted tower blocks and motorway service stations — a lovely coherent collection, this

Is it a foreign dove, coming over here and eating all our native seed?

I’m still waiting for the news to go less racist but it doesn’t seem to be happening and I’m running out of the Three Bean Salad podcast back catalogue and what am I supposed to do then?

Sunday evening, checking out Monday morning

Spanish edition in the wild
It's less than a week till #Halloween !
Get in the spooky mood with these reading ideas for the gothest of seasons - starting with #Gothic by @theprofrog.bsky.social introducing the reader to the Gothic #aesthetics from architecture to #folklore & #monsters & concepts from around the globe
After submitting a FOIA request UKRI, I obtained success rates by three grant call scheme and I can only say that I am disheartened by the results:

- AHRC Responsive Mode 2025: 2%
- ESRC New Investigator Grant 2025: 1%
- ESRC Research Grant Round 2025: 1%

Wrote this piece for Unseen Histories website as intro to the Graveyards book but also with extra material that didn’t make it into the book about the storied St Pancras Old Church burial ground
Meet me at the Cemetery Gates - Unseen Histories
Roger Luckhurst, the author of the book, Graveyards, takes us back to St Pancras Old Church.
www.unseenhistories.com

Email: tell us about your upcoming contribution to Academic Mental Health.

Me: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGHHHH

🎶 Cos tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 2021 🎶

Rare and damning photo of the heads of the German Red Army Faction, the political wing of the provisional IRA and FARC

Christ, not again

Wise people in the Wellcome bookshop!

Lunch in the old school Italian they use now and then, completely unchanged, for Jackson Lamb’s meetings with spooks in Slow Horses.

Is the true sound of our times the poorly overdubbed snickering on cat videos?