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Dr Bernice M. Murphy B.A. (QUB), M.A. (QUB), Ph.D. (Dublin), F.T.C.D. Associate Professor in Popular Literature.

My teaching and research interests lie in popular literature and American horror and gothic fiction and film. I undertook my undergraduate and MA studies at Queen’s University, Belfast, and did my PhD on the work of Shirley Jackson here at TCD. I held an IRCHSS Post-Doctoral research fellowship from 2006-8 and was took up my post as a lecturer in the School of English in October 2008. I was made a Fellow of the College in April 2017. I will be on research leave in Michaelmas term 2023.

Research

I specialise in the study of place and space in American horror and gothic narratives. To date, I have published four monographs in this subject area: The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (2009); The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror and the Wilderness (2013), The Highway Horror Film (2014), and The California Gothic in Fiction and Film (2022). I have also edited (or co-edited) the collections Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy (McFarland, 2005), (with Darryl Jones and Elizabeth McCarthy), It Came from the 1950s! Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties (2011), and with Professor Stephen Matterson, Twenty-First Century Popular Fiction (2018)

My textbook Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction was published in 2017 and Lost Souls: Essays on Horror and the Gothic’s Neglected and Forgotten Personages (co-edited with Elizabeth McCarthy) appeared in 2016. Twenty-First Century Popular Fiction, which I co-edited with my colleague Stephen Matterson, appeared in 2018. Along with Elizabeth McCarthy, I co-founded The Irish Journal of Horror and Gothic Studies in 2006 and I co-edited the journal until 2012: I am now a member of the journal’s editorial board, as well as the board of several other journals and academic book series.

My recent monograph on representations of California in American horror and Gothic narratives received research funding from the Arts and Social Sciences Benefaction Fund. I also worked alongside editor Laurence Jackson Hyman as the academic consultant to The Letters of Shirley Jackson (Penguin Random House) which was published in July 2021.

Teaching

My undergraduate modules in 2023/24 will include Pulp: Introduction to Popular Literature. I will also contribute to Imagining the Contemporary: No Future and Cultures of Retelling. My HT 2024 Sophister options are Demons, Devils and Ghosts: The Supernatural in Contemporary Fiction and Film and It Came From the 1950s! American Popular Fiction During the Cold War Era. I will also be contributing to the M.Phil. in Modern and Contemporary Literary Studies.

Conferences

I have presented my research at many national and international conferences, including numerous International Gothic Association (IGA) biannual conferences; the 2012 Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association annual conference held in Boston, and the 2019 ASLE conference held at the University of California, Davis. I have keynote addresses at conferences including the July 2018 IGA, the ‘Madness in Popular Culture’ conference held at Edinburgh University in May 2018, ‘Folk Horror in the Twenty-First Century’ (Falmouth, UK, September 2019), and Fear 2000: Horror Unbound (Online, Sheffield Hallam, July 2022). I also (along with Dr Christina Morin of the University of Limerick) co-organised the 16th International Gothic Association Conference, which was held here at Trinity in July 2022.

Research Supervision:

My current PhD student Janice Deitner is working on the Provost’s PhD Award funded project ‘Shirley Jackson: Beyond Hill House’. I have previously supervised PhD theses on the horror genre and child-related controversy, on representations of forests in the gothic, and on American eco-horror. In addition, I have supervised numerous M.Phil. and undergraduate dissertations, many on topics related to popular literature and American literature and culture. I am particularly happy to respond to supervision inquiries from prospective research students interested in twentieth and twenty-first century American horror and gothic fiction. Queries from students interested in working on Shirley Jackson and related authors/topics are also welcome. 

Publications:

Monographs:

The California Gothic in Fiction and Film, Edinburgh University Press, 2022.
The Highway Horror Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Editions:

(Academic consultant), The Letters of Shirley Jackson, edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman, Random House: New York, 2021.

Edited Collections:

(Edited with Sorcha Ni Fhlainn), Twentieth Century Gothic: Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

(Edited, with Stephen Matterson), Twenty-First Century Popular Fiction. Edinburgh University Press January 2018.
(Editor, with Elizabeth McCarthy), Lost Souls of Horror and the Gothic. North Carolina: McFarland, 2016.
(Editor, with Elizabeth McCarthy and Darryl Jones) It Came From the 1950s: Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
(Editor) Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, North Carolina: McFarland, 2005.

Text Books:

Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Recent Book Chapters/Articles:

‘Black Boxes: Tradition and Human Sacrifice in American Folk Horror’ (in) eds. Dawn Keetley and Ruth Heholt, Folk Horror: New Global Pathways, University of Wales Press, 2023.

‘Masks of Sanity’: Psychopathy and the Twentieth-Century Gothic’ (in) eds. Bernice Murphy and Sorcha Ni Fhlainn, Twentieth-Century Gothic, Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

‘American Folk Horror’ (in) eds. Stephen Shapiro and Mark Storey, The Cambridge Companion to American Horror, Cambridge University Press,2023.
‘Psychoanalysis and the Popular Gothic’ (in) eds. Catherine Spooner and Dale Townshend, The Cambridge History of the Gothic, Volume 3, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021.
‘I Mean, I Told You Not to Go in that House’: Place, Space and the Reconfiguration of White Trash Monstrosity in Get Out. (in) ed. Dawn Keetley, Approaches to Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2020, pp.72-86.