Postgraduate research students

This thesis examines a contemporary strain of literary body horror that connects depictions of infrastructural breakdown, decay, and ruination to neomedieval and counter-modern systems of power, meaning, and resistance. I argue that this literature evidences the emergence of a specific minoritarian anti-modern imaginary, characterized by the development of an archetype that I term the queer barbarian. I aim to understand the extent to which this imaginary maps an emancipatory alternative to techno-authoritarian and neofeudal anti-modernities. To do so, I examine how the body is treated as an infrastructural component and source of energy in the texts, and how it thereby becomes a site of infrastructural rupture and transformation. 

Core Research Areas

• body horror (biotechnological and bioenvironmental) 
• infrastructure theory and energy humanities
• Black and queer inhumanism
• ecocriticism and anti-anthropocentrism 
• experimental semiotics 
• philosophical materialism and libidinal theory 

Taylor, William. 2023. "'A benevolent technology': Desiring-production and the Petromodern Death Drive in J. G. Ballard's Crash', English: Journal of the English Association, 72.278: 131-147

Taylor, William. 2024 [advance article]. 'Infrastructural Closure, Rupture, and Insurgency in Lidia Yuknavitch's The Book of Joan', Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 

Taylor, William. [forthcoming]. 'Deviant Ruins: Xenophilic Masochism, Alien Grammar, and Decaying Futurity in David Roden's Snuff Memories', in The Weird: A Companion, ed. by Kristopher Woofter and Carl Sederholm

• Dr Rhys Williams
• Dr Ramona Fotiade

William Lauchlan Mann Scholarship (PhD scholarship, 2021-24)

Community and Public Engagement Grant (for the sympsoium 'Resistance Today', 2021)

Early Career Mobility Scheme (funding for a research trip to McGill University, 2024)

'Divine Butchery: Critiquing Transhumanism's Promise of Transcendence and Exploring Queer-inhuman Alternatives in Cassandra Khaw's The Salt Grows Heavy', Australasian Horror Studies Network 2024 Symposium 

'Becoming-insect, Becoming-rot: Noticing and Communing with Nature's Queer Monstrosity via Jenny Hval's Paradise Rot', ASLE-UKI Postgraduate Conference, University of Edinburgh, September 2024

'Alien Grammar: Using Speculative Fiction to Produce the "Disorganism" in David Roden's Snuff Memories', Philophantast: A Speculative Fiction and Philosophy Conference, University of Glasgow, June 2024

2A Writing Ecologies (2022)

Creation to Apocalypse (Theology and Religious Studies)

Co-organiser and host of 'Resistance Today': a research conference with keynote lecture from poet and essayist Cynthia Cruz

Peer-review coordinator and editorial writer for eSharp: Issue 30, Care (2022)

English Association Postgraduate Essay Prize (runner-up, 2023)

PGR representative for the School of Critical Studies and the University English Executive Committee (2022-24)

Co-convenor of a fortnightly reading group on infrastructure and libidinal theory (2022-23)