Roger Luckhurst

Roger Luckhurst is Professor and Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck, University of London's School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication. He joined Birkbeck in 1994, became a full professor in 2008, and assumed his current endowed chair in 2020. His academic leadership includes serving as Programme Director for the MA in English Literature starting September 2025.

His educational background includes a BA from the University of Hull (1988), an MA in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex (1989), and a PhD from the University of Hull (1993). His visiting appointments include Mellon Distinguished Visiting Professor at Columbia University (2016) and a Research Fellowship at the University of Heidelberg (2025).

Luckhurst specializes in literature, film, and cultural history from the 19th century to the present, with particular expertise in Gothic fiction, science fiction, trauma theory, and death studies. His research reveals a sustained engagement with the intersections of pseudo-science and literature, the cultural history of the occult, and architectural spaces of modernity. His current projects include editing Ghost Club materials and authoring 'The New Dead' on post-mortem states throughout history.

His recent publications demonstrate consistent output across film criticism (particularly in Sight & Sound), cultural history essays (in National Geographic and Financial Times), and scholarly articles exploring Gothic, horror, and psychical research. The thematic threads connecting his work include spatial theory, the history of the occult, and the cultural construction of death and trauma.

Luckhurst has supervised 20 successful PhD completions, with current doctoral research focusing on M.R. James, post-cyberpunk fiction, and representations of the afterlife in film. His teaching modules cover modern literature, Gothic fiction, and narrative medicine. He is affiliated with Birkbeck's Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and the Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image (BIMI).