About

I’m James Sullivan, a PhD student in English at the University of Exeter. My doctoral research, Essex Gothic: Landscape, Modernity, and Representation in Literature and Culture, reframes Essex as a critical but overlooked Gothic landscape. Drawing on literature, folklore, and contemporary media – from Dickens and H. G. Wells to Sarah Perry and reality television – I examine how Essex’s coastlines, marshes, and borderland identity have been sensationalised over time, and what this reveals about the interplay between modernity, tradition, and regional identity.

My academic path has been shaped by a sustained interest in how marginal spaces are represented and reimagined. My undergraduate dissertation, ‘Everything is helpless, hopeless, unrelieved, and dirty’: Filth, Affect, and Depicting the Fin de Siècle East End, explored how late-Victorian texts and images constructed the East End as both social reality and Gothic spectacle. My MA dissertation, Haunting the Margins: Gothic Geographies in the Works of Arthur Morrison and Gustave Doré, developed this trajectory by tracing how literary and visual culture haunted urban and rural environments with Gothic atmospheres of poverty, decay, and dislocation.

Alongside these larger projects, I have pursued research in diverse but connected areas:

• Interiority and Literary Form – how short prose forms became experimental tools for articulating inner life and mental illness.

• Joseph Cornell: Deconstructing the Real – how surrealist assemblages challenge conventions of realism and representation.

• Dust – how residue and decay function as material and metaphor across art and literature.

What unites these projects is my focus on how cultural forms – literary, visual, and material – mediate experiences of marginality and modernity. I work across disciplines, combining close textual analysis, visual culture, and cultural geography, to ask how overlooked spaces and neglected forms reveal broader cultural anxieties and identities.

This interdisciplinary and cross-media approach grounds my research and shapes my contributions as an academic: whether teaching, writing, or collaborating, I bring a commitment to revealing how cultural narratives-past and present-frame the worlds we inhabit.