Dr Eleanor Beal is a Lecturer in English Literature and Film, Co-Director of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and on the Executive Committee for University English. She works primarily on contemporary Gothic of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Her theoretical interests lie in Gothic approaches to questions of being (ontology), including the Gothic’s cosmologies, occultisms, theological (re)turns and religious afterlives. She is also interested in new ontological developments, such as new animism, non-dualism and the study of human-nonhuman relationships, particularly in relation to indigenous Gothic and nautical Gothic fictions.

Currently, she is engaged in a study of wonder and horror as indexes and instruments of ontological crisis and transformation. This emerges from research for her book Postsecular Gothic, which seeks to expand the reach and meanings of theological horror, through an interdisciplinary reading of the Gothic’s pursuit and production of re-enchantment. She is also conducting research on representations of purgatory in Gothic literature and cinema of the post- WWII era to present day, focussing on the role of purgatorial myths in the reorganisation of structures of being during and after crisis. These projects reflect her continued interests in what she terms as the poly-ontological cosmologies and theologies of the Gothic and their relationship to being, belonging, and otherness.