Research | Dr Joan Passey

Research Areas

My research focuses on: cultural and literary histories of seas and coasts; the Gothic from the eighteenth century to the present day; Cornwall in literature and culture; queer ecologies; nineteenth-century literature and culture; and the works of Shirley Jackson, Wilkie Collins, and Ann Radcliffe.

I am interested in the dark, the anxious, the fractured, the transgressive, and where discomfort is found in the seemingly idyllic. Please find more detailed information below.

I am open to invitations to write and collaborate and welcome inquiries from prospective PhD students. Please email me at joan.passey@bristol.ac.uk.

Seas and Coasts

I research cultural and literary histories of seas and coasts with a focus on the nineteenth century. I am interested in the construction of the 'great British seaside' as a transgressive space in labour and queer histories; representations of regionality; the history of leisure, tourism and dark tourism; seaweed; beachcombing and natural history collecting; shipwrecks; ecocolonial seascapes and coasts; malacology and shell collecting; queer ecologies of coasts, seas, and swimming; seasickness, thalassotherapy, and health of and at the coastline.

Cornwall

I research the representation of Cornwall in literary and cultural sources from the nineteenth century to the present including novels, poetry, short stories, scientific writing, travel writing, tourist materials, periodicals, folklore collections, and visual sources. I am interested in mining histories and mythologies of the subterranean; shipwrecks, piracy and wrecking; Tennyson's Arthurian Cornwall, dark tourism, and disappointing tourism; railway history and access; regional literature; antiquarians and folklorists; ghost story traditions; and the works of authors including Bram Stoker, Thomas Hardy, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, F Tennyson Jesse, Margery Williams, Sabine Baring-Gould and Robert Stephen Hawker.

The Gothic

I research the Gothic and horror from the eighteenth century to the present. I frame the Gothic as a political, radical and transgressive force that serves to subvert and undermine binaries, hierarchies, and authorities, providing space and vocabulary for experiences and articulations of marginalisation. I am particularly interested in the ecogothic/gothic ecologies, folkhorror and folklore, Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, the queer gothic, and the works of Shirley Jackson, Wilkie Collins, Ann Radcliffe, and Helen Oyeyemi.

Shirley Jackson

I am a leading expert in the works of twentieth-century American author Shirley Jackson. I am particularly interested in Jackson's economies (as Gothic, as gendered, as aesthetic), Cold War iconography, race and national identity, ageing and gender, and food and consumption in her works.

Pedagogies and the Arts and Humanities

As a teacher I research teaching practices in the arts and humanities with a focus on AI as tool in the higher education classroom and neurodiversity and neurodivergence of students and staff. I am very interested in collaborating and mentoring in these areas.

Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

I work primarily on the nineteenth century, with a focus on how emerging environmental discourses overlap and intersect with other vocabularies and articulations of extractivism, exploitation, marginalisation, and consumption. I am currently working on two overlapping projects: one focusing on imperial ecologies/the ecocolonial seascape in the Victorian novel and one on queer ecologies in the nineteenth-century imaginary.