A Greenhouse Research Talk by Emma Davies, University of Bristol. All are welcome.
When Cuvier confirmed in 1812 that the giant deer whose skulls were hauled in their hundreds from Irish peat bogs belonged to no living species, the bog became the source of a distinctly modern dread. These skeletons were proof that the earth was ancient, that whole species of life had ended, and that there was no benevolent creator who could be relied upon to prevent the same fate from happening to humans. This talk explores the bog as an ecoGothic site in Victorian literature from Tennyson, who wrestled with new ideas of deep time and primordial slime in In Memoriam (1850), to Bram Stoker, who forty years later gives that slime agency in the shifting bog of The Snake's Pass (1890).
Emma Davies (she/her) is an SWWDTP-funded PhD candidate at the University of Bristol, where she researches literary peatlands and the ecogothic. She is also a gothic horror author and won the Penguin Michael Joseph Prize in 2025 for her forthcoming debut novel, The Hollow Saint.