William Hughes is Professor of Gothic Studies at Bath Spa University, England: he has specialised in the study of Bram Stoker. He was educated at the Liverpool Collegiate School Liverpool Collegiate Institution and the University of East Anglia Norwich, and also holds a PGCE from Christ Church, Canterbury. He has presented radio programmes for the BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4, and has also appeared on live television through Living TV's Most Haunted Live!, most recently during the 2009 broadcast from St George's Hall, Liverpool.[1]
Hughes is author, co-author or editor of a number of publications connected with the subject, notably Beyond Dracula,[2] the collections Contemporary Writing and National Identity (with Tracey Hill), Bram Stoker: history, psychoanalysis and the Gothic (with Andrew Smith), Fictions of Unease: the Gothic from Otranto to "The X-Files" (with Andrew Smith and Diane Mason), Empire and the Gothic: the politics of genre [3] (with Andrew Smith) and Queering the Gothic (also with Andrew Smith).[4] He has also produced scholarly editions of Stoker's The Lady of the Shroud[5] and Dracula with Diane Mason.[6] He is also editor of Gothic Studies, the refereed journal of the International Gothic Association,[7] published by Manchester University Press. His new book, Bram Stoker: Dracula: a reader's guide to essential criticism was published by Palgrave[8] on 21 November 2009 and Bram Stoker: a reader's guide was published by Continuum[9] in the same year. With Prof Andrew Smith (University of Glamorgan), he was elected joint chair of the International Gothic Association at the biannual conference held at the University of Lancaster UK in July 2009.[7]
He is interested in supervising dissertations on all periods of the Gothic, particularly where these touch upon Bram Stoker, J. S. Le Fanu or Algernon Blackwood, and has an interest in nineteenth century medicine, pathology and criminal psychology.[10]