Hear how the origins of the ghost story are rooted in horror, madness, and even humour. Followed by Q&A.

Across time, ghosts and ghouls have continued to inspire and mesmerise authors. Since their inception, literary ghosts not only haunt and horrify, but also ask readers to turn inwards. From ideas of madness prompted by Shakespeare’s ghouls, to the laughter that Dickens’s phantoms inspire, this talk will explore how the history of the ghost story is more human than you might think.

Join Dr Emily Vincent on a journey through endlessly popular classics like A Christmas Carol, alongside lesser-known spectral tales, to see why the ghost continues to stubbornly haunt our pages. Not forgetting its funny phantoms, this talk discovers how humour is an unexpected but important part of the ghost story’s history: from Robert Browning’s poem mocking séance mediums, to Oscar Wilde’s amusingly old-fashioned ghosts. Whether you are a seasoned lover of gothic fiction or simply curious about the spirits that haunt literature, prepare to see these classic phantoms in an illuminating new light.

Doors open at 7pm, talk starts at 7:30pm - come down early to grab a good seat!

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Speaker Bio:

Dr Emily Vincent is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield and a Tutor in English at the University of Oxford where she has taught on ghost stories and the Gothic for the Astrophoria Foundation Year. Emily holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham and her first book on nineteenth-century spiritualism, women’s ghost stories, and maternal grief is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. She is the editor of Summoned to the Séance: Spirit Tales from Beyond the Veil for British Library Publishing’s Tales of the Weird series and is currently co-writing a book for Manchester University Press on popular literature and culture inspired by influenza epidemics.

Alongside academic lecturing, Emily has delivered public talks for Seed Talks London, the Museum and Archives of North Vancouver, and has been interviewed for ‘The Ghost Story Book Club’ podcast. Emily co-runs the Gothica network and has research and editor roles at Durham University’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International (CNCSI) and for the Taylor and Francis Journal Advances in Nineteenth-Century Research.

This talk is 16+

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