Nick Freeman read English at Leeds University before conducting postgraduate work at the University of Bristol. He has worked in adult, further, and prison education as well as in the university sector. Before joining Loughborough in 2006 he taught at Bristol, UWE, and the Open University.
Nick is one of the original members of British Association for Victorian Studies since its launch in 2000 (BAVS » British Association for Victorian Studies). He reviews for a number of publishers and periodicals and is a consultant for Seren’s new Welsh Gothic series (We Are Seren. Welcome. - Seren). He was a co-organiser of the first academic conference on George Egerton, held at Loughborough in 2017 (George Egerton Conference – Loughborough University, 7-8 April 2017)and is a member of several editorial and advisory boards including Gothic Studies and Volupté, the journal of the BADS. He has wide experience of external examining at BA and MA levels and has examined doctoral theses throughout the UK, as well as in Canada and Brazil.
Nick co-founded the Cultural Currents Research Group, which researches the culture of the period roughly spanning 1870-1930. Much of his own work explores this historical moment, investigating authorial networks, publishing and reception history, and the development of popular genres.
Nick is internationally known for his research is in two main areas.
He has published and presented widely on the literature and culture of the fin de siècle, particularly the London of the 1890s, Oscar Wilde, and the poet, critic, and travel writer, Arthur Symons. He is the author of the influential interdisciplinary study, Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art, 1870-1914 (2007 Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art 1870–1914 | Oxford Academic ) and an innovative ‘microhistory’, 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (20131895). His edition of Symons’ Spiritual Adventures (2017Arthur Symons, Spiritual Adventures - Edited by Nicholas Freeman) is the first scholarly edition of the author’s fiction and also collects a number of his important essays on literature, music, and urban life.
Nick also works on Gothic and Weird fiction and film from the Victorian era to the present and has an especial interest in the ghost story. Alongside academic articles on figures such as E.F. Benson, Edith Nesbit, and Robert Aickman, he has edited selections of the supernatural fiction of A.M. Burrage (The Little Blue Flames and Other Uncanny Tales by A. M. Burrage - British Library Online Shop) and Elizabeth Walter (Let a Sleeping Witch Lie - Seren) , and he was the first critic to publish work on the contemporary Weird writer, M. John Harrison. The two strands of his research overlap in work on Victorian and Edwardian supernatural fiction, where he has published on Somerset Maugham, Arthur Machen, Vernon Lee, and Rudyard Kipling, amongst others.
A member of the Oscar Wilde Society (Welcome to the Oscar Wilde Society - The Oscar Wilde Society) and the Friends of Arthur Machen (Home ~ The Friends of Arthur Machen), Nick is currently at work on two book-length projects. One is a biography, Arthur Symons: A Life of Sensations, while Fill My Veins with Fire investigates the first English production of Wilde’s Salome in May 1905.
Nick has taught across the BA and MA programmes at Loughborough, contributing to modules in Victorian and Modernist literature, Decadence, creative writing, and weird fiction, and supervising dissertations on a wide range of topics including film, music, and visual art. He is a creative and innovative teacher who has pioneered the use of assessment packages which allow students to combine critical and creative work whatever their programme of study. Loughborough Student Union named him Lecturer of the Year in 2008, and he has won a variety of other student and staff awards.
Nick is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Current PhD Supervision:
- Rosemary Archer is researching the Victorian Socialist novelist, Margaret Harkness.
- Jill Walters is working on the journalism and literary networking of Lionel Johnson.
- Milly Harrison is exploring the Queer and the Weird in late-Victorian and Edwardian writing.
- Izzie Radley is engaged in a creative PhD about ghost signs, psychogeography, and local history.
- Abigail Mills is diving into the Watery Weird from the Victorian period onward.
Recent Completions:
- Aaron Eames, ‘Writing Wilde: Oscar Wilde, Sexuality, and Biographical Literature, 1900-54’ (2022).
- Karen Ette, ‘Don’t Be Late in the Morning’ [creative writing PhD about the Leicestershire Regiment in the Great War] (2019).
Books
- 1895: Drama, Disaster, and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
- Conceiving the City: London, Literature and Art, 1870-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2007).
Editions
- Elizabeth Walter, Let a Sleeping Witch Lie: Welsh Gothic Stories (Seren, 2024).
- A.M. Burrage, The Little Blue Flames and Other Uncanny Tales (British Library, 2022).
- Arthur Symons, Spiritual Adventures (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2017)
Recent Articles and Chapters:
- ‘In the Nightmare Country’: John Metcalfe’s ‘The Bad Lands,’ Gothic Studies 25.1 (2023), 61-75.
- ‘Essays: Defending and Describing Decadence’, The Oxford Handbook of Decadence, ed. Jane Desmarais & David Weir (Oxford University Press, 2022), 335-50.
- ‘Decadent Paths and Peregrinations after 1895’, Decadence in the Age of Modernism, ed. Kate Hext & Alex Murray (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 72-88.