Role
Nicola Bowring is a Module Leader for Romantic Revolutions (level 2) and Gothic Rebels and Reactionaries (level 3), and teaches on Travel Writing (level 3). She also teaches on the MRes in English and supervises postgraduate students.
Career overview
Before working at NTU, Dr Bowring taught at the University of Nottingham, the University of Lincoln, the University of Leicester and the University of Derby. This teaching covered all aspects of modern literature, with a particular focus on Gothic and Fantasy. Her PhD thesis, supervised by Dr Matthew Green at the University of Nottingham, focused on monstrosity, language and communication in gothic fiction.
Research areas
Dr Bowring is an active researcher in gothic literature, and a member of the International Gothic Association. Her research currently focuses on communication, space and place in gothic fiction. She has recently joined the Centre for Travelling Writing Studies, and has an emerging research interest in place, narrative and the Gothic.
Dr Bowring’s current project is a monograph focusing on a spatial reading of communication in the Gothic. Drawing on a range of gothic texts from the eighteenth century through to the present, this work demonstrates the integral position of language and communication, both thematically and structurally, in relation particularly to the linked themes of fear and desire in the Gothic. Questions of transgression and space in relation to identity are explored in the text, in a theoretical approach to language and deconstruction in gothic works.
Following on from this research, Dr Bowring is developing further work with space and place in the Gothic, in terms of the importance of location in gothic texts and the relationship between the development of the Gothic and Travel Writing genres. The research for this has a current focus on concepts of revolution and terror, and exoticism in the gothic genre.
Dr Bowring supervises research at Postgraduate level in Gothic, Romantic and Travel literature, and welcomes proposals for research projects in these areas.
Current PhD Students:
Dawn Whatman (Co-Supervisor)
Amy Watson (Co-Supervisor)
Publications
‘Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend: Colonisation and Adaptation’ in Adaptation 8:1 (Feb 2015), 130-144.
‘Contemporary Gothic: 28 Days Later and the Gothic Tradition’ in Working with English special edition: ‘Gothic Histories’ (2015).