Shane McCorristine

I am a Reader in Cultural History at Newcastle University.

I am an interdisciplinary historian with interests in what I call the 'night side' of modern experience - namely social attitudes toward death, dreams, ghosts, hallucinations, and the 'more than rational'. My research argues that, far from being peripheral, these aspects of life were central in making people (especially in western societies) feel modern. In looking at these topics I draw on a variety of approaches and literatures from cultural history, human geography, environmental humanities, and medical humanities.

Born in Dublin, Ireland, I was educated at University College Dublin where I received my PhD in History in 2008. I have been a Marie Curie Fellow and a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Leicester where I worked on the 'Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse' project. You can visit our online exhibition here. Before this I held research fellowships at Maynooth University, the Rachel Carson Center (Munich), and the Institute of English Studies at the University of London. I was also a research associate at the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, for five years.