Claire Qu

Provisional thesis title: Uncanny Resource Imaginaries in Gothic World Literatures

Supervisor: Professor Pablo Mukherjee

Research interests: Gothic fictions, world literature, colonial and post-colonial literature, 18th- and 19th- century writing, energy systems in literature, women's writing, food

Doctoral research: My project tracks the permutations of the Gothic mode in global extraction economies centred around resources such as sugar, coal, gold, timber, rubber, and oil. Taking a materialist approach in my analysis of fictional and non-fictional texts across multiple media, I examine how Gothic forms, motifs, and conventions are used both to render the colonial spaces of the plantation, mine, rig, etc. uncanny in the encounter with the commodity frontier, and to unsettle or otherwise speak back to these imperial constructions.

Publications:

'Bush Studies: Barbara Baynton's Ghostly Legacy,' Bluestocking Oxford, October 30, 2023.

Conference papers:

'"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.