Dr Bernice M. Murphy B.A., M.A. (QUB), Ph.D. (Dublin)

Assistant Professor

Director: M. Phil. in Popular Literature

Director: Visiting Students (Incoming)

Dr Bernice M. Murphy is Lecturer in Popular Literature and director of the M.Phil in Popular Literature. She was educated at Queen's University, Belfast and Trinity College Dublin. She undertook an IRCHSS Post-Doctoral research fellowship at Trinity from 2006-8 and was appointed a lecturer in the School of English in 2008.

Her teaching interests include Popular Literature, American Literature, gothic and horror film and fiction, and American Women's writing. She has published a monograph entitled The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2009). The study examines depictions of American suburbia in selected Gothic and horror film, fiction, and television shows from the post-world-war-two era to the present day. She is currently completing a monograph provisionally entitled Rural Gothic.
  
Dr Murphy edited the collection Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy (McFarland, 2005) and is co-founder of the online Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, which she edited with Dr Elizabeth McCarthy from 2006-12. She has contributed chapters to a number of edited collections, (see below) and has written the main entry on the horror genre for the online Literary Encyclopaedia (http://www.litencyc.com) as well as entries on horror and gothic writers such as Peter Straub, Richard Matheson, Shirley Jackson, and H.P. Lovecraft and noted comic book figures such as Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Stan Lee. Along with Dr Darryl Jones and Dr Elizabeth McCarthy she organised a conference on 1950s Popular Culture entitled “IT Came from the 1950s! Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties” held at Trinity in May 2008. She co-edited a volume of essays of the same name arising from this event for Palgrave Macmillan which was published in September 2011.

Her courses in the 2012/13 academic year include the second-year lecture courses Twentieth-Century Supernatural Literature (SF Option) and Contemporary Popular Literature, as well as the Sophister Options Modern Horror Fiction and An Invisible Literature: Twentieth Century Science Fiction. Dr Murphy will also teach the M.Phil option course American Nightmares: Horror in Fiction and Film and contribute to the core course section of the Pop Lit M.Phil. She also lectures on the JF American Genres module.

Dr Murphy is currently supervising research students working on the following:

• Internet fan fiction and genre
• The horror genre and controversy
• Vampires in YA fiction
• Monstrous maternity in modern horror
• Representations of the forest in horror and the gothic

In addition, she has supervised M.Phil. dissertations on a wide range of topics related to Popular Literature (primarily related to gothic/horror and Science Fiction texts).

She is happy to consider applications from prospective research students with an interest in twentieth-century horror and gothic studies and related topics within American literature. Prospective students interested in the M.Phil in Popular Literature are welcome to email her with their queries but should check the M.Phil home page and Graduate Studies website beforehand as many of the most commonly asked questions (regarding fees, application procedures, deadlines, etc) are answered there.

Books:

• (Editor, with Elizabeth McCarthy and Darryl Jones) It Came From the 1950s: Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
• The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
• (Editor) Shirley Jackson: Essays on The Literary Legacy, North Carolina: McFarland, 2005.

Articles/Book Chapters:

• "All that Zombies Allow: Re-Imagining the Fifties in Far From Heaven and Fido": It Came From the 1950s: Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
• "Imitations of Life: Zombies and the Suburban Gothic" (in) Eds. Sarah Lauro and Deborah Christie , "Better Off Dead": The Evolution of the Zombie as Post Human, New York, Fordham University Press, 2011.
• "White Apples by Jonathan Carroll" (in) ed. Danel Olson , Twenty-First Century Gothic, Scarecrow Press 2010.
• "Hideous Doughnuts and Haunted Housewives: Gothic Undercurrents in Shirley Jackson's Domestic Fiction" (in) Eds. Helen Conrad O'Brien and Julie Anne Stevens, A Ghostly Genre: Essays on Short Supernatural Fiction, Dublin, Four Courts, 2010.
• "You Space Bastard! You Killed my Pines!" Back to The Future, Nostalgia and the Suburban Dream." (in) Ed. Sorcha Ni Fhlainn, It's About Time: Essays on Back to The Future, North Carolina, McFarland, 2010.
• "American Parricide: Murderous Children in the Work of Shirley Jackson and Lionel Shriver" (in) Ed. Sorcha Ni Fhlainn , Conference Proceedings for the Fourth Annual Conference on Monsters and the Monstrous, Oxford, Interdisciplinary Press E-Book, pp.200 - 210, 2009.
  
• "Stephen King" (in) Wanda and James Giles, The Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Popular Fiction Writers, 350, BCL, pp.176 - 193, 2009.
• "I Am God": The Domineering Patriarch in Shirley Jackson's Gothic Fiction (in) Ed. Ruth Anolik, Horrific Sex: Essays on Sexual Differemce in Gothic Literature, North Carolina: McFarland, pp.135 - 150, 2007.
• "Dead Ends: The Decline of the recent American Horror Movie" (in) Eds. Kate Hebblethwaite and Elizabeth McCarthy, Fear: Essays on the Meaning and Experience of Fear, Dublin: Four Courts, pp.188 - 200, 2007.
• "The People of the Village Have Always Hated Us: Shirley Jackson's New England Gothic" (in) Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, North Carolina: McFarland, 2005.
• "Who Am I When I Am Transported: Post-Colonialism in Peter Carey's Jack Maggs" (in) Ed. Ian MacKean, The Essentials of Modern Literature in English, Post-1914, London: Hodder Arnold, 2004.

Contact:

School of English
Room 4010
Arts Building
Trinity College
Dublin 2
Telephone: +353 01 896 2547
Email: bernicemurphy55@gmail.com

Research System URL: http://people.tcd.ie/murphb12


THE IRISH JOURNAL OF GOTHIC AND HORROR STUDIES:
http://irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/

The European Society for Studies in English: http://www.essenglish.org/index.html