The History of Folk Horror & Hauntology
About this Event
Hauntology begins with a simple but unsettling idea: some histories and lost futures refuse to disappear. They linger as cultural echoes, shaping how we experience places, memories, and traditions. Folk horror gives these eerie historical traces narrative form, revealing how the past continues to unsettle the present through landscapes, ritual, and inherited anxieties.
Join Prof Robert Edgar as he explores hauntology’s origins and its connection to folk horror. Drawing on thinkers such as Derrida and Mark Fisher, he examines why contemporary culture remains fascinated by memory, lost futures, and the feeling that the past is not finished with us.
Doors open at 7pm, talk starts at 7:30 - come down early to grab a good seat!
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Speaker Bio:
Prof Robert Edgar is Professor of Writing and Popular Culture in the York Centre for Writing at York St John University, UK. He is one of the series editors of Bloomsbury Academic, Spectres, Hauntings and Horrors. He has published on Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition (Bloomsbury 2023), The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror (Routledge 2023), Haunted Writing (Bloomsbury 2026), and many more, including numerous works on folk horror, adaptation, music culture, and hauntology.
His work has been published in books and journals including P.O.V. and the Journal of Writing in Popular Culture. He is co-convener of the Hauntology and Spectrality Research Group and regularly runs creative and critical workshops and presentations, including organising the annual folk horror events for the York Literature Festival.
This talk is 16+
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Agenda
🕑: 07:00 PM
Doors open
🕑: 07:30 PM
Talk starts
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
GBP 13.00 to GBP 35.00
