Current Projects
I’m currently working on (i) a book-length study of ‘fictions of radical life extension’, 1878-1918; (ii) a special issue of the journal Gothic Studies on ‘Gothic Age and Ageing’; and (iii) a second project that examines the notion of ‘allotted time’ as it appears in UK and US popular fiction.
Der Traum vom Jungbrunnen, Ernst Berger, ?1880
Fictions of Radical Life Extension: Living Forever from the Fin de Siecle to the First World War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025)
Fictions of Radical Life Extension is the first book-length study to consider how the idea of living forever was depicted in literary accounts of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries from the UK and US.
From 1878 to 1918, decisive shifts in the social, cultural, and legal statuses of age and aging had led to the establishment of old-age pensions, the creation of the ‘modern life course’, and the invention of adolescence. Responding to and helping shape these changes, so this study argues, was a series of literary thought experiments that asked the question: what would it mean to live forever? Delving across genres and into archival materials, the book establishes the scope and nature of fictional and non-fictional engagements with radically longer lives. Recovering lesser-known authors and re-evaluating more established voices, like H. G. Wells and J. M. Barrie, the study complicates our understanding of the late Victorian- and Edwardian canons, and of fiction’s socio-political impetus during these years. So too does the book revise histories of rejuvenescence by demonstrating that it became an object of biomedical and culture interest long before the seismic changes created by the First World War.
Fictions of Radical Life Extension excavates a sub-genre whose anxieties and aspirations resonate strikingly with a present pre-occupied with a global ageing population.
Cover of Melmoth the Wanderer, Four Square, 1966.
‘Gothic Age and Ageing’, a special issue of Gothic Studies (co-edited with João Paulo Guimarães)
From the fantastical youth of Wilde’s Dorian to the age defiance of Maturin’s Melmoth; from the extreme old age of Haggard’s Gagool to the uncanny paternalism of Stoker’s Count;—much of the gothic most recognizable iconography is defined wholly or in part by its age identity or relation to the process of aging. Moreover, old age and aging themselves have perennially been rendered in a gothic register, often in ways that uphold ageist tropes. Meanwhile, Marlene Goldman (2017) has observed how ‘the spectre of aging and, dementia, in particular, have acquired a gothic dimension’ in a present day anxious about the co-morbidities of old age amid a global aging population.
Despite this, scholarship on gothic age and aging has been fitful, and some of the broader questions it prompts remain underanalyzed: Why is so much of the mode’s iconography age-defined? Why are so many aspects of age and aging rendered via a gothic register and the tropes it supplies? This special issue of Gothic Studies aims to catalyze interest in this overlap and to begin addressing these questions. It aspires to deepen our understanding of age and aging as aspects of the gothic’s socio-political agenda throughout its long and varied history, and to contextualize contemporary understandings of age and aging via this longue durée perspective—their continuities with and departures from this gothic lineage.
The issue intends for essays that see age and aging as integral rather than incidental to the form and function of the gothic, and which reflect the mode’s chronological, geographical, and medial breadth (in plays, short stories, films, etc.).