Catherine Spooner is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University , where she specialises in post-1830 literature and culture. Her particular research interests incorporate Gothic literature and film, the representation of youth subcultures, and fashion and dress in literature. 

 Catherine’s first book, Fashioning Gothic Bodies, published in 2004 by Manchester University Press, explores the relationship between fashion discourses and constructions of the body in Gothic texts, from the French Revolution to contemporary Goth subculture. It examines the ways in which the bodies represented in Gothic novels and films are influenced by historically specific debates about clothing, from the flimsily-attired heroines of the late eighteenth century, through the lunatics and dandies of the nineteenth century, to the Goths of the late twentieth century.

Her latest book, Contemporary Gothic (Reaktion 2006), reflects her continuing interest in the relationship between Gothic and material culture. With discussion ranging from the significance of Gothic images in advertising to the exploitation of Goth style in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it investigates in a variety of twenty-first century contexts what it means to go ‘Gothic Shopping’.

Two collaborative projects, the co-written Beginning Gothic (Manchester University Press) and co-edited The Routledge Companion to Gothic (both with Emma McEvoy of the University of Westminster ) are due out in late 2007. She is currently working on a book on youth subcultures in fiction, and a long-term project about the representation of ghosts from the nineteenth century to the present.