Ian M. Clark is a third-year PhD candidate in the Department of English Literature. His research focuses on the intersection of gender and sexual queerness in the monstrous or transformational body, particularly in long nineteenth-century British Gothic literature. His work has appeared in The Journal of Dracula Studies, MONSTRUM, and Revenant, for whom he co-edited the forthcoming special issue, "Vampires: Consuming Monsters and Monstrous Consumption," with Dr. Cameron. Upcoming projects include co-writing the entry “Victorian Slums” for Oxford Bibliographies, a chapter on allegorical vampirism and class for Rowman & Littlefield’s collection on Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla (both with Dr. Cameron), and an article on queer cruising in Eric Stenbock’s “The True Story of a Vampire” for The AnaChronisT Journal. Other research interests include Victorian queer history and culture, the supernatural, drag, and depictions of the metaphoric Other in contemporary film and television.
- Victorian Literature and Culture
- Romantic Literature
- Queer Theory
- Gender and Sexuality Studies
- Gothic Studies
- Monster Studies
- Animal Studies and Posthumanism
- Victorian Sexology
- Contemporary Film and Television
- R: “Infectious Queers: HIV/AIDS and the Vampiric Body in Interview with the Vampire (1994).” Journal of Dracula Studies, no. 24, 2022, pp. 28-58.
- Review: “Virginia Fusco’s The Symbolic Potential of the Hybrid: Anita Blake and Horror and Vampire Literature.” MONSTRUM, vol. 5, no. 1, 2022. pp. 78-81.
- Forthcoming: “Slumming.” Co-authored with Dr. S. Brooke Cameron, Oxford Bibliographies.
- Forthcoming: Guest co-editor for Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural. Special Issue: “Consuming Monsters and Monstruous Consumption.”
- Forthcoming: “Kevin Dodd’s The Tale of the Living Vampyre: New Directions in Vampire Studies.” Revenant, Issue 8.
- Accepted: “On Class in Le Fanu’s Carmilla.” Co-authored chapter with Dr. S. Brooke Cameron, untitled collection. Edited by Simon Bacon, Rowman & Littlefield.
- Accepted: “The Social Darwinism and Repressed Colonial Anxiety of Grant Allen’s Canadian Folk Horror.” Co-authored chapter with Dr. S. Brooke Cameron for The Cursed Earth: Places and Spaces of Terror and Environmental Revenge (publisher TBD).
Supervisor
Second reader
I examine nineteenth-century depictions of vampiric bodies (diseased, decayed, distorted) in tandem with emergent medical discourses on sexuality, race, and gender. Identity is strongly tied to the body, so how do conceptions of identity shift when presented in a monstrous body, and what if this body is medicalized?
My dissertation uncovers the pre-fin-de-siècle history and cultural production of the modern queer male by revealing how literature—Gothic fiction, specifically—created an alternative, encoded space for fluid gender and sexual expression as “homosexuality” developed and homophobia intensified through the century.
