Dr Lucy Arnold
Lecturer in English Literature (Contemporary), School Research & Knowledge Exchange Coordinator
English Media and Culture
email: lucy.arnold@worc.ac.uk
tel: 01905 542198
Dr Lucy Arnold is a specialist in Contemporary literature, with particular research interests in contemporary gothic, narratives of haunting, contemporary women’s writing and psychoanalytic criticism. Her teaching experience spans a wide range of periods and genres but focusses on twentieth and twenty-first century literature. Her published work to date has concerned the writing of Booker Prize winning novelist Hilary Mantel, with her monograph, Reading Hilary Mantel: Haunted Decades, published with Bloomsbury in 2019'.
Outside of her teaching she is currently the Primary Investigator on an AHRC-funded Research Network 'Haunting Issues: Children, Spectrality and Culture'.
Dr Lucy Arnold is the School Research & Knowledge exchange Coordinator.
Qualifications
Ph.D
English Literature, University of Leeds, 2016 (Recognised for Research Excellence) Dissertation: Where the Ghosts of Meaning Are: Haunting and Spectrality in the Work of Hilary Mantel
MA
English Literature, University of Leeds, 2011, Distinction
BA(Hons)
English Literature and Theatre Studies, University of Leeds, 2010, 2:1
Teaching & Research
Teaching
ENGL2206: Spaces of Modernity
ENGL2201: Literary Criticism: Theory and Practice
ENGL3308: Queer Bodies, Queer Texts
Lucy is currently designing modules on psychoanalysis, the evolution of the ghost story, and contemporary fiction.
Research
Lucy's research interests range broadly across the field of Contemporary literature but include contemporary gothic, contemporary narratives of haunting, women's writing, contemporary life writing and narratives of mental illness. She also pursues research around psychoanalytic theory, with particular emphasis on post-Freudian thought.
Lucy would welcome PhD applications in any of her main areas of interest, including contemporary narratives of haunting, contemporary women's writing and contemporary gothic.
Professional Bodies
Member of the Higher Education Academy at the level of Fellow
Publications
'Little Monsters: Anxiety, Austerity and the Monstrous Child in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 15:3(2021) pp. 307-325
‘Beaches of Bones: Non-Human Hauntings and Legacies of Animal Cruelty in Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter’, Gothic Nature [early 2023]
‘This is a place for the dead’: Reading the Spectral Child in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing’ in The African American Novel in the Early Twenty-First Century, Brill (European Perspectives on the United States) [early 2023]
‘Something like praying’ (p. 279): Syncretic Spirituality and Racial Justice in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), in Arin Keeble, Sheri-Marie Harrison and Maria Torres-Quevedo (eds) Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays, Edinburgh University Press [early 2023]
‘Nightmares about Fossils: Spectral Children, Colonial Legacies and Intergenerational Trauma in the Work of Hilary Mantel’ in Craig Martin and Debbie Olson (eds) The Undead Child: Representations of Childhoods Past, Present, and Preserved [mid 2023]
‘Holy Ghost Writers: Spectrality, Intertextuality and Religion in the Work of Hilary Mantel’ in Hilary Mantel: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, eds. Eileen Pollard and Ginette Carpenter (London: Bloomsbury, 2018)
‘Psychoanalysis’ in The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 25:1 (2017)
‘“The heart fails without warning”: Precarious Bodies in Hilary Mantel’s Short Fiction’, Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings (Women Write Now), 18:1 (2018)
Co-Editor, Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings (Women Write Now), 18:1 (2018)
‘Only More So by Millicent Borges: Review’, Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings (World Gardens and Gardens in the World), 17:1 (2017)
‘Spooks and Holy Ghosts: Spectrality and Religion in Hilary Mantel’s Fludd and Eight Months on Ghazzah Street’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 57.3 (2016)
‘Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black’, The Literary Encyclopedia (2014) [http://literaryencyclopedia.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=26526]