PhD students

Samiha Begum

Title: Female Gothic Sublimes: Heroines, Landscapes, and Gothic Ecologies, 1789-1849

Sophie Haywood is a White Rose College of Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH) funded PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield. Her thesis explores representations of space in the work of Ann Radcliffe, the 'Great Enchantress' of eighteenth century Britain. She is particularly interested in how the Gothic mode constitutes its own distinct space within literature, and how Radcliffe's novels play with its form and structure. She has helped organise conferences on consumption and transgression in the Gothic during her time at the University of Sheffield, and has presented a special lecture for the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies on contemporary horror cinema's origins in the feminine Gothic. She has also edited a special issue for Oxford Research in English titled 'Transgression'. Sophie has a love of both classic Gothic texts and modern horror, particularly those works often overlooked by academics. She maintains a great love for all things vampire-adjacent!

Zhengxin Lin

Title: Contemporary British Gothic and Doublings

Zhengxin is a third-year postgraduate research student at the University of Sheffield, focusing on Contemporary British Gothic and the theme of doubling in her thesis. 

Her passion for the Gothic genre began in her teenage years, inspired by reading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. The imagery of the red room that confines Jane and the decaying grandeur of the Heights sparked her imagination, and Wuthering Heights remains one of her favourite novels, which she enjoys rereading endlessly. 

Outside of her research, Zhengxin loves travelling, particularly to haunted houses and ruins. She also leads the Sheffield Gothic reading group.

Ellesse Patterson

Title: Monstrous Reproduction and Nation in the Long Nineteenth-Century British Gothic

Ellesse's research interest lies primarily in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature with a focus on the Gothic. In addition to her on-going PhD thesis, '"A Misbegotten Race": Monstrous Reproduction in the long Nineteenth-Century British Gothic', she has also conducted research on death and slave narratives in the American Gothic through the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the impact of Jack the Ripper on notions of Gothic London, as well as the intersection between occultism and the Gothic in Victorian literature.