Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

I am professor of English at Central Michigan University, the Los Angeles Review of Books associate editor in charge of horror, the founder and president of the Society for the Study of the American Gothic, the founder and general editor of the peer-reviewed journal American Gothic Studies, and the co-founder and past chair of the Modern Language Association’s Gothic Studies Forum.

I am the author or editor of 32 books and more than 100 essays and book chapters on the Gothic, American literature, cult film, and pop culture. In 2024, I received the Science Fiction Research Association’s Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service to the field of speculative literature and media studies, as well as being named “Humanities Scholar of the Year” by the Humanities Learning Center at Delta College in Midland, Michigan (a regional award “recognizing outstanding work by those in the mid-Michigan region who preserve and foster the humanities). In 2019, I received the Poe Studies Association’s annual James W. Gargano Award for the best scholarly article on Poe in the preceding year.

My research focuses on the “cultural work” performed by the Gothic in its various manifestations—the ways in which Gothic texts and practices give shape to culturally specific anxieties and desires. This interest has led me from considering, for example, how 19th- and early 20th-century American women made use of Gothic conventions as a strategy to express discontentment with their circumscribed roles to thinking about the ways contemporary monsters reflect shifting American fears and aspirations.