People
Gavin Miller is Reader in Contemporary Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Glasgow. He has a long history of interest in the psychologization of British (and Scottish) life, including the career and impact of Glasgow’s (in)famous anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing (1927-1989). More recently, he has been working on a book-historical investigation of Penguin’s list of post-war psychological titles, a list which shows the psy disciplines claiming authority over a wide range of human life and activity. The Horror and Psychologization project is an opportunity to explore not just how psychology (attempted to) claim horror in Britain, but also to work out how horror creators responded to this authoritative discourse that presumed to know the truth of their genre, its nature, origin, meaning, and effects.
Georgia Walton is Research Associate on the project. She is a specialist in contemporary literature and film with particular interests in theories of embodiment and sensation, the impact of technological change on representation, and the relationship between medicalised discourse and genre fiction. She has published on a range of different aspects of contemporary culture and her monograph, Nineteenth-Century Legacies in Contemporary US Literature: A New American Renaissance is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. Before joining the University of Glasgow in late 2025, she worked for two years on the Future of Human Reproduction project at Lancaster University where she explored how science fiction narratives shape our understanding of reproductive technologies. She is a keen horror fan and is excited to learn more about the ways in which the psy disciplines have theorised the genre.