Nick Freeman

Nick Freeman took a BA in English at Leeds University before doing postgraduate work at the University of Bristol. He taught at Bristol, the Open University, and the University of the West of England before coming to Loughborough in 2006.

Nick’s scholarly research is a combination of literary criticism and cultural history and is largely in two areas.

He is an authority on the decadent culture of the 1890s, and the author of two well-received books, Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art 1870-1914 (2007) and 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late-Victorian Britain (2011). He has particular interests in Oscar Wilde and the poet and critic, Arthur Symons, whose 1905 story collection, Spiritual Adventures he has recently edited but he has also written on a wide range of 1890s’ literature. This includes the decadent poetry of Ernest Dowson and the gothic fiction of E.F. Benson, Arthur Machen, and Robert Hichens. His short film about Wilde’s The Picture of Doran Gray is available on the departmental webpage.

Nick’s interest in the Gothic and the Weird is longstanding, and has seen him publish articles on writers such as Robert Aickman, M. John Harrison, James Herbert, Saki, Edith Nesbit and Aleister Crowley. He was co-curator, with Dr Dan Watt, of the highly successful Loughborough Weekend of Weird in November 2016, an event which brought together writers, performers, artists, publishers and film-makers from across the country.