Frances Chiu

Frances Chiu

Board Member

A graduate of Smith College (A.B.) and Oxford University (D.Phil), Frances Chiu studies and teaches literature (mostly horror) and history at The New School in New York City. Her topics of research are focused on the relationship between horror and politics, whether it is 18th-century Britain, 19th-century Ireland or 20th-century America. She has published in Eighteenth-century Life, Gothic Studies, Notes and Queries, and Romanticism on the Net.

In 2006 and 2008, she prepared the first modern editions of Ann Radcliffe’s Gaston de Blondeville and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s The Rose and the Key for Valancourt Books. She has also written for Occupy.com, contributing articles on Theodore Dreiser, Marilyn Monroe, Oscar Wilde and other historical topics.

As an admirer of Thomas Paine, she not only taught the first class in America devoted to Paine and his contemporaries but also chaired a conference on Paine during the bicentenary of his death in 2009. More recently, she published The Routledge Guide to Paine’s Rights of Man.

She is currently on the editorial board of Anthem Press Gothic studies in addition to developing the emerging Reading the Gothic series at Manchester University Press, which offers contextualized readings of great Gothic classics. Her present projects include monographs on Matthew Lewis’ Monk and Stephen King’s Shining for the latter series.