From Bronze Age burial places and the ancient Greek Underworld to medieval magic, occult poetry and ecological zombies, our researchers are exploring how encounters with death, fear and the supernatural can reveal new insights into human societies.
Ghosts, monsters and magical worlds may be familiar features of Halloween. Across the arts and humanities, however, the uncanny also provides a way to examine much wider questions.
Why do societies tell stories about the dead? How have people expressed grief and remembered those they have lost? What can supernatural encounters reveal about human thought, political power and our relationship with the environment?
In the run-up to Halloween, we explore how researchers across our Faculty are investigating burial, remembrance, magic, horror and the monstrous.
What can old excavation notebooks, photographs and maps reveal about an ancient burial place that has disappeared from the modern landscape?
Recent work by Dr Michael Loy, from our Department of Classics and Ancient History, examined the Vayenas Grave Circle, a richly furnished Bronze Age burial structure excavated near the Palace of Nestor in Greece in 1957. Although the excavation uncovered human remains, burial pits and numerous grave goods, nothing of the monument is now visible. By combining excavation notebooks and archival photographs with modern aerial survey, Michael was able to ‘rebuild’ the grave in virtual 3d space so that researchers can now digitally visit this monument once again.
This work demonstrates how we can put a ‘lost’ Grave Circle back on the map. It also provides a new way to explore its burials and finds, and to interact with intangible cultural heritage.
For ancient Greek and Roman audiences, ghosts could provide a powerful means of confronting unresolved trauma and alternative versions of the past.
Dr Erica Bexley, Associate Professor in our Department of Classics and Ancient History, specialises in Roman drama, performance culture and literature from the age of the emperor Nero. Her recent book, Pseudo-Seneca: Octavia, examines a unique work of Roman theatre.
Octavia is the only complete example of Roman historical drama to survive from antiquity. It dramatises Nero’s divorce from his first wife, Octavia, and his marriage to Poppaea, events that provoke unrest among the people of Rome. Although the work was traditionally attributed to Seneca, its authorship and date remain uncertain.
The play also brings Agrippina, Nero’s murdered mother, back onto the stage as a ghost. Her presence means that the emperor’s violent family history cannot remain safely in the past. The ghost becomes part of the play’s examination of memory, political power and the commemoration of historical events through performance. Agrippina’s spectral presence ensures that her death will not be forgotten, and her cries for vengeance echo for centuries, through Renaissance and Early Modern tragedy. Like a true ghost, Octavia’s Agrippina haunts our cultural memory, refusing to depart.
Dr George Gazis, Associate Professor in Greek Literature and Philosophy, also explores ghosts, mortality and the afterlife. His research considers the function of the afterlife in Homeric epic, early Greek lyric and Platonic narratives. His first monograph, Homer and the Poetics of Hades, examines how the Greek epic tradition is retold from the perspective of the shades encountered in the Underworld.
George is now working on Ghosts on Stage: Spectres, Spectacles and Alternative Memories in Athenian Drama. The project investigates ghosts in Greek tragedy and considers how appearances by the dead may have influenced the ways early Athenian audiences experienced and understood dramatic performance.
Together, this research suggests that ancient ghosts are much more than frightening figures. Their return can challenge received accounts, introduce alternative memories and give the dead a new voice.
In medieval and early modern literature, encounters with magic and the supernatural can test the boundaries between the possible and impossible, while reflecting contemporary ideas about knowledge, belief and human experience.
Professor Corinne Saunders from our Department of English Studies specialises in medieval literature and the history of ideas. Her book Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval Romance examines the rich variety of supernatural elements found in medieval romance, placing them in their intellectual and cultural contexts. Her broader research explores mind, body and emotion in medieval literature and thought.
Romance narratives are filled with enchanted objects, prophetic dreams, magical transformations and mysterious otherworlds. Examining these encounters can help us understand how medieval writers and audiences approached questions about human perception, agency, belief and the unseen.
The relationship between literature and hidden knowledge continued to develop during the early modern period.
Dr Rachel White, Career Development Fellow in the Department of English Studies, is the author of Elizabethan Occult Poetics: Exploring Practice and Knowledge in English Poetry. The book examines how Elizabethan poetry interacted with forms of occult practice and knowledge. Rachel’s wider research includes early modern literature and the occult, authorship and the work of writers including Thomas Nashe and Fulke Greville.
Her research places the occult in the everyday and separates it from the evil or nefarious: even John Dee's conversations with angels and search for a hidden language or the use of number for efficacious effect have, at their heart, a desire for truly hidden knowledge to be beneficial for all.
Few figures are more closely associated with modern horror than the zombie. Research by Dr Kerstin Oloff, Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, reveals that its cultural history raises urgent questions extending far beyond Halloween.
Her book, Ecology of the Zombie: World-Culture and the Monstrous, argues that the zombie is a fundamentally ecological figure. It traces the zombie’s origins as a Haitian and Caribbean figure and examines its changing representation across literary and filmic texts from the Caribbean and the United States.
The book connects different forms of the zombie with histories of enslavement, colonialism and capitalist modernity. It considers how the figure can express the degradation and exploitation of land and labour, as well as forms of alienation from bodies and the environment. By placing Caribbean cultural history at the centre of the discussion, the research offers a new interpretation of the zombie and of Gothic ecologies.
The result is a much more complex monster than the mindless figure familiar from popular culture. The zombie becomes a way of examining how environmental, economic and social crises are connected.
What happens to our sense of self when horror confronts us with a body that is strange, transformed or difficult to recognise?
Dr Jordan Adshead, Honorary Associate in the Department of Philosophy, has explored horror through phenomenology, a method for probing the structures of lived experience. His work more broadly examines questions at the intersection of technology, the environment and human existence.
His presentations include Alien and the Phenomenology of Turning Inside Out and Eclipse of the Nameless: Horror and Inhibition. This research offers a philosophical lens on how horror affects our sense of embodiment, identity and the unknown.
Rather than treating horror simply as entertainment, this approach asks what our responses to unsettling images and ideas can tell us about everyday experience and the boundaries through which we understand ourselves and the world in which we are intimately embedded.
From an ancient burial place and the shades of Homeric Hades to medieval magic, ecological zombies and the philosophy of horror, these projects demonstrate the breadth of research taking place across our Faculty.
They also show why stories about ghosts, monsters and supernatural worlds continue to matter. Across different periods and cultures, the uncanny can provide a language through which people examine memory, power, grief, identity and environmental change.
This Halloween, it is worth looking beyond the fright. What appears strange or unsettling can offer another way of understanding both the past and the world around us.
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