PODCAST – A Body of Horror: Jocelyn McGregor in conversation with Dr Maisha Wester and Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes

Posted on 29 October 2021

For this special Halloween podcast Jocelyn McGregor met with Dr Maisha Wester and Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes ahead of her solo exhibition at Castlefield Gallery in 2022 to consider our changing perspectives towards horror. Thinking about the relationships between horror cinema, body horror, surrealism and McGregor’s work they discuss the enduring power of horror’s transgressive nature and how it might speak to or challenge our understanding of gender, race and the politics of our time.

Dr Maisha Wester is a visiting lecturer at the University of Sheffield, sponsored by the British Academy’s Global Professorship fellowship. Her home institution is Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on racial representation in Gothic Literature and Horror film, Black Diasporic Gothic literature, and sociopolitical appropriations of Gothic and horror tropes in racial discourses. She is the author of African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places (2012), co-editor of Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (with Xavier Aldana Reyes, 2019) and author of numerous essays including Gothic in and as Race Theory and Nineteenth-Century British and American Gothic and the History of Slavery. She is currently at work organising the exhibition His House to Our Home as part of the Being Human festival; the project will also feature a global digital gallery of community-generated artwork.

Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes is Reader in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University and co-lead of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. He is author of Body Gothic (2014), Horror Film and Affect (2016) and Gothic Cinema (2020), and editor of Horror: A Literary History (2016) and Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (with Maisha Wester, 2019). Xavier is chief editor of the Horror Studies academic book series published by the University of Wales Press.