Representations and Contexts Seminar

Dr James Lesslie and Dr Elizabeth Parker will present their papers on representations and contexts.

Dr James Lesslie will present his paper titled "He had now wandered out of his way": Early explorations in the novels of Helen Craik' and Dr Elizabeth Parker will present Into the Woods: The Tangled Roots of Our Forest Mythologies.

Dr James Lesslie

James currently teaches the Gothic Cultures module at St Mary's and also teaches Romanticism at City, University of London. He was awarded his PhD from Birkbeck College in 2020 for his thesis entitled 'British Women Writers and the Culture of Wild Nature: 1781-1815'.

He has recently published a chapter on Ann Radcliffe in the collection Wild Romanticism (Routledge, 2021). His research interests include women’s writing in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Britain - particularly representations of the natural world and their interconnections with revolutionary-era political and ideological debates - as well as historiography, travel writing, Gothic literature, and regional cultures and identities in Britain during the long eighteenth century. 

Dr Elizabeth Parker

Elizabeth is the author of The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination (Palgrave Gothic, 2020). She is the founding editor of Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic and television editor for The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies.

She has published her work in various titles such as Plant Horror!: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, The Palgrave Companion to Horror Literature, and Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on the Environment. She has co-organised several conferences on space, place, and the relationship between the Gothic and the nonhuman, including the biennial Gothic Nature conferences.

She has taught English Literature and courses on Popular Culture at a number of universities across the UK and Ireland and currently works at St Mary’s University, Twickenham.