Dr Helena Bacon
Co-Course Leader for Digital Film Production and Screenwriting
- Phone
- +44 (0)1473 338689
- h.bacon@uos.ac.uk
- School/Directorate
- School of Business, Arts, Social Sciences and Technology
- Helena Bacon ORCID
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Helena is an experienced academic with a background in literature, film and creative writing. She has taught on both undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the University of East Anglia, Anglia Ruskin University, the University of Nottingham, the University of Essex and the University of Suffolk.
Helena was awarded a BA in Literature and Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University before completing an MA in Modern Culture at University College London and a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her specialisms include gothic and horror fiction and film, contemporary fiction and television, modern retellings of myth, nuclear cultures and energy humanities.
She has published work in FANTASTIKA, Otherness: Essays and Studies, Green Letters, Gramarye, Gothic Studies and Horror Studies and has multiple book chapters forthcoming (focussed on the gothic/horror) that cover the work of Mexican horror animator Sofia Carillo, David Lowery's The Green Knight, Richard Warlow's Ripper Street, and the crossroads myth in contemporary music videos. She is currently writing her first monograph, Nuclear Gothic: Textual and Cultural Fusions, to be published by Anthem Press, and is on the editorial board of Horror Studies (Intellect).
Helena has presented at national and international academic conferences including those hosted by the International Gothic Association and the British Society for Literature and Science. In summer 2021 she co-ran an online international conference at the University of East Anglia focused on re-imagining the Western and Post-War America. Two edited collections (European Journal of American Culture and Comparative American Studies) on the Western genre were published in 2023 as a result of this event.
Helena is a member of the International Gothic Association, has also appeared on both the Hallowed Histories and The Constant Reader podcasts, given talks at local Suffolk cinemas and has done extensive Outreach work across East Anglia, working with multiple local schools to introduce pupils to various humanities subjects and the university experience itself.
Helena teaches across all levels of the Digital Film Production and Screenwriting degrees and leads on the following subject areas and projects:
Film Studies: Analysis and Representation
Film Theory and Approaches
Dissertation and Research
Helena’s research focusses on gothic and horror film and fiction and their socio-political work and contexts; she also works on the Western film genre, representation in contemporary television and on representation in film, television, and literature more broadly. Most recently, she is exploring how energy is depicted and interpreted in a variety of cultural texts (with a special interest in the work of Stephen King).
Current projects include a monograph which explores how nuclear techno-sciences and nuclear cultures have been presented in film, television and literature and examines more broadly the intersection between these technologies and texts and the gothic mode.
Helena is interested in supervising PhD projects connected to gothic/horror, Westerns, energy humanities, eco- and speculative texts across both film and literary studies.
Published:
We can no longer live as rats. We know too much: Radical Rodents and Suffering Hounds in The Secret of NIMH and The Plague Dogs, Radical Children’s Film and Television, University of Edinburgh Press (2025)
Lonely Are the Brave, co-written with Mark Jancovich - European Journal of American Culture, Vol. 42, Issue 2-3 (2023)
Outlaw Trails: New Routes Through the Postwar Western, co-written with Mark Jancovich - Comparative American Studies, Vol. 20, Issue 2 (2023)
Sometimes; Other Times: Unstitching Gothic Ambiguity in Sofia Carrillo’s Prita Noire/Black Doll, co-written with by Dr Luis Alvarez (UDLAP) – Fantastika, Vol. 6, Issue 1 (2022)
Ambivalent Energies: Stephen King’s Depiction of Electricity in The Green Mile, Revival and The Shining – Horror Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2021)
The Lies of the Land: The Alluvial Formalities of Gothic East Anglia, co-written with Dr Adam Whybray – Gothic Studies Special Edition: Tales of Terror: Gothic and the Short Form, Vol. 23, Issue 1 (2021)
Once a Wood, Always a Wood: Woodland, Witchery and Rewilding in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes – Green Letters, Vol. 25, Issue 2 (2021)
The Big Tower of Darkness: Haunting Energy in Catherine Linstrum’s Nuclear, Gramarye, Issue 19 (2021)
Cinematic Phenomenology: Theoretical Analysis of the Camera as a Narrator in Interstellar, co-written with Dr Luis Alvarez and Alfonso Jaimes (UDLAP), IJAHSSS, Vol. 5, Issue 12 (2020)
They’re Just People, That’s All: American Carnival, the Freakish Body and the Ecological Self in Daniel Knauf’s Carnivàle, Otherness: Essays and Studies, Issue 6.2 (2018)
Biology and the Baroque in Matthew Barney’s The Order, HARTS & Minds: The Journal of Humanities and Arts – Science, Society and Civilisation, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2016)
Forthcoming:
Nuclear Gothic: Textual and Cultural Fusions, Anthem Press (monograph, 2026)
Sewing Patterns; Sowing Patterns: Restitching Gothic Ambiguity in the Work of Sofia Carrillo in Global Horror Animation (edited collection), University of Wales Press (2026)
Whilst We’re Off Looking for Red, In Comes Green: The Threat and Thrill of Verdigris in David Lowery’s The Green Knight in Green Women: A Cultural Study Collection, Peter Lang, (2026)
What’s Haunting Whitechapel? Gothic Undercurrents in Richard Wardlow’s Ripper Street (2012-2016) in Twenty-First Century Neo-Victorian Gothic: Deviance and Transgression on Page and Screen, Peter Lang (2026)
Me and the Devil: Music Videos and the Crossroads Myth in Gothic Crossroads: Exploring and Celebrating the Multi and Interdisciplinary Crossings of Folklore and Gothic Studies, University of Wales Press, (2027)