Michael Newton

Fields of interest

I am a cultural historian, film critic, literary critic, editor and essayist, with a strong interest in our engagement with representations of the state of nature and with ‘the fantastic’, whether in art or in life. I am the author of two books of cultural history, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (Faber & Faber, 2002; Picador USA, 2004) and Age of Assassins: A History of Conspiracy and Political Violence, 1865-1981 (Faber, 2012). On film, I have written Show People: A History of the Film Star (Reaktion, 2019) and three books for the British Film Institute’s Film Classics series, on Kind Hearts and Coronets (2003), Rosemary’s Baby (2020), and It’s A Wonderful Life (2023). I have edited Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (2004), Victorian Fairy Tales (2015), and an anthology, Origins of Science Fiction (2022) for Oxford World’s Classics, and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (2007) and The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (2010) for Penguin Classics. With Evert Jan van Leeuwen, I have edited Haunted Europe (Routledge 2019), a book of critical essays on how Britain has imagined Europe as a Gothic space.

Research

I am presently writing a cultural history, Blithe Spirits and Demon Lovers: A History of Hauntings, Visitations and Other Encounters with the Supernatural World, both for Oxford University Press – and an essay on George MacDonald’s fairy romances for a book of essays on the body in Victorian fantasy literature.

Curriculum Vitae

I was both an undergraduate and postgraduate in the English Department at University College London. From 1994-95, I was a visiting research fellow at Harvard University. In 1996, I was awarded a PhD for The Child of Nature: The Feral Child and the State of Nature; my supervisor was Professor Philip Horne, and the examiners were Professors Roy Porter and Tony Tanner. In London, between 1992 and 2003, I taught on a part-time or temporary full-time basis in the English Departments at UCL and Roehampton University, in the Cultural Studies Department at Central Saint Martins College, and also taught the Junior Seminar for Princeton University’s Study Abroad Programme at UCL. In 2003-4, I was a visiting lecturer at the Department of English at Princeton University. From 2004-6, I was a freelance writer, based in Berlin. I have been teaching English literature and film at Leiden University since 2006. In the spring of 2023, I was a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study in Amsterdam, where I worked on links between literary Bohemia and radical assassins in London from the 1870s to the 1910s.

In addition to my academic writing, I co-wrote and co-edited The Movie Book (Phaidon Press, 1999), was a theatre reviewer for What’s On Magazine, wrote interviews for Arts International, and have written reviews and articles for The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement, Poetry Review, The New Statesman, and London Review of Books. In 1992, I was awarded the Fabian Society’s Webb Essay Prize, and in 2010 I won the Royal Society of Literature’s V. S. Pritchett Short Story Prize.