The History of Gothic Graveyards & Horror - Talks in the Pub

Talks in the Pub, from the team behind Seed Talks. A pint, pub snacks, and the strange history behind our obsession with Gothic graveyards. We are running two talks this evening, for tickets to "The Gothic History of Manchester - Talks in the Pub", please click here. From eighteenth-century poems and eerie European paintings to Victorian vampires and modern horror films, we’ll uncover how cemeteries became the perfect setting for stories of ghosts, decay, revenge and the supernatural. We’ll meet vampires, mournful poets and mysterious graveyard figures, with stories from Sheridan le Fanu's Carmilla, the horror film The Woman in Black, and Caspar David Friedrich’s haunting paintings. We’ll also take a look closer to home at the wonderfully unsettling angel statues of Manchester’s Southern Cemetery. Doors open at 8pm, talk starts at 8:15pm - come down early to grab a good seat! Please be aware this talk will take place on the 1st floor and there is no lift. Your speaker: Dr Emma Liggins is a Reader in English Literature in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University and Co-Director of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. She has published widely on the short story, Victorian women’s writing and the supernatural. Publications include (with Andrew Maunder and Ruth Robbins), The British Short Story (Palgrave, 2010), The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories, 1850-1945: Gender, Space and Modernity (Palgrave, 2020) and a chapter on ‘The Edwardian Supernatural’ in The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Gothic (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). She is currently researching memorial cards, cemetery headstones and dark tourism for a new book on Victorian and Edwardian Death Spaces: Gender and Memorialisation for Manchester University Press.