Postgraduate research students

Deviant Ruins: Tracking the Decay of Modernity and (Trans)humanist Futurity in Queer Body Horror 

Over the past half-decade, neofeudalism has gained traction as a conceptual device for describing and thinking through the present. This thesis investigates how, why, and to what effect a queer strain of literary body horror connects depictions of infrastructural ruin and transformation to neomedieval and counter-modern systems of power, meaning, and resistance. I argue that the primary texts fuse science-fiction and horror to simultaneously narrate and aid in enacting the decay of (trans)humanist futurity as a science-fictional imaginary. Simultaneously, I argue that the texts evidence the emergence of a specific minoritarian anti-modern imaginary, which I term queer barbarity. I argue that this imaginary is characterized by the deployment of the queer barbarian as an evolving archetype, and I examine the extent to which this imaginary maps an effective alternative to techno-authoritarian, neofeudal anti-modernities. My close reading of the primary texts applies Georges Bataille’s concept of 'base matter' and the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive, with a specific focus on how the body is assimilated as an infrastructural component and source of energy by different regimes, and how it thereby becomes a vehicle of infrastructural disruption and transformation.

Core Research Areas

• body horror and somatechnics
• infrastructure theory and energy humanities
• Black and queer inhumanism
• ecocriticism and anti-anthropocentrism 
• experimental grammar
• philosophical materialism and libidinal theory 

Taylor, William. 2023. "'A benevolent technology': Desiring-production and the Petromodern Death Drive in J. G. Ballard's Crash', English: Journal of the English Association, 72.278: 131-147

Taylor, William. 2024 [advance article]. 'Infrastructural Closure, Rupture, and Insurgency in Lidia Yuknavitch's The Book of Joan', Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 

Taylor, William. [forthcoming]. 'Deviant Ruins: Xenophilic Masochism, Alien Grammar, and Decaying Futurity in David Roden's Snuff Memories', in The Weird: A Companion, ed. by Kristopher Woofter and Carl Sederholm

• Dr Rhys Williams
• Dr Ramona Fotiade

William Lauchlan Mann Scholarship (PhD scholarship, 2021-24)

Community and Public Engagement Grant (for the sympsoium 'Resistance Today', 2021)

Early Career Mobility Scheme (funding for a research trip to McGill University, 2024)

'Divine Butchery: Critiquing Transhumanism's Promise of Transcendence and Exploring Queer-inhuman Alternatives in Cassandra Khaw's The Salt Grows Heavy', Australasian Horror Studies Network 2024 Symposium 

'Becoming-insect, Becoming-rot: Noticing and Communing with Nature's Queer Monstrosity via Jenny Hval's Paradise Rot', ASLE-UKI Postgraduate Conference, University of Edinburgh, September 2024

'Alien Grammar: Using Speculative Fiction to Produce the "Disorganism" in David Roden's Snuff Memories', Philophantast: A Speculative Fiction and Philosophy Conference, University of Glasgow, June 2024

2A Writing Ecologies (2022-2023)

Creation to Apocalypse (literature-based course on ancient-religious mythology, 2024)

Co-organiser and host of 'Resistance Today': a research conference with keynote lecture from poet and essayist Cynthia Cruz

Peer-review coordinator and editorial writer for eSharp: Issue 30, Care (2022)

English Association Postgraduate Essay Prize (runner-up, 2023)

PGR representative for the School of Critical Studies and the University English Executive Committee (2022-24)

Co-convenor of a fortnightly reading group on infrastructure and libidinal theory (2022-23)