Hauntology and Spectrality Research Group

The Hauntology and Spectrality group was established in 2022 to reflect and unify research in the School of Humanities and the wider York St John research community. The group includes research students and scholars and practitioners from outside York St John University.

For the latest information on the group, and a complete list of group members please visit our blog.

Visit our blog

Hauntology:

It affects and bereaves it in advance, like the ghost it will become, but this is precisely where haunting begins. And its time, and the untimeliness of its present, of its being ‘out of joint.’ To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology.
Jaques Derrida (1994) Spectres of Marx, the state of the debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge

‘…think of Hauntology as the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but that which acts without (physically existing).’
Mark Fisher (2014) Ghosts of My Life, Zero.

‘the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive.’
Colin Davis, Hauntology, spectres and phantoms, French Studies, Volume 59, Issue 3, July 2005, pages 373–379.

The group is constituted by the work of its members and exists as a place for individual members to discuss their research, provide peer feedback and support and to generate new ideas and projects for the future.

The work of members of the group covers critical and creative practice in:

• Hauntology
• Nostalgia
• Folk Horror
• Psychogeography
• Ontology and Being
• Spectres of Trauma
• Children’s Spectral Fiction
• Weird Fiction
• Folklore
• Environmental Anxieties
• The Uncanny
• Cold War Histories
• Haunting and Memoir
• Historical Horrors
• Time/dimensional slips
• Ghost Stories

… and related topics.

Get in touch

You can contact Robert Edgar on r.edgar@yorksj.ac.uk.

The group welcomes collaborate research enquiries and PhD proposals on any aspect of the group’s work. We are interested in subject specific and interdisciplinary projects. We can also consider practice based PhD projects, with group members also being part of the York Centre for Writing.