Bernice M. Murphy

My major teaching and research interests lie in the areas of 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 thesis on Shirley Jackson at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland between 2000-2003. I took up my post as a lecturer in the School of English in 2008 and I am now an Associate Professor in Popular Literature. I was made a Fellow of the College in April 2017.

I edited the first ever essay collection on the American writer Shirley Jackson (Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, 2005), and have since published numerous articles and book chapters on her work. I also acted as academic consultant for The Letters of Shirley Jackson (Penguin Random House, 2021), working closely with the volume editor, Laurence Jackson Hyman, Jackson's eldest son. Additionally, along with my colleagues Dara Downey and Janice Deitner, I established the project 'Reading Shirley Jackson in the Twenty-First Century', which helped bring fresh academic attention to Jackson's lesser known and under-appreciated works of fiction and non-fiction.

I also 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 edited (or co-edited) five academic essay collections, most recently the 2022 volume Twentieth-Century Gothic (with Sorcha Ni Fhlainn). My textbook Key Concepts in Contemporary Popular Fiction was published in 2017.

Along with my colleague Clare Clarke, I am the co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to True Crime.