Dr Luke Thurston

BA (Oxon) MA PhD (Kent)

Dr Luke Thurston

Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature

Department of English & Creative Writing

Contact Details

Profile

Luke is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature, whose teaching covers mainly Victorian and modernist literature, as well as literary theory. He is an internationally-recognized scholar who has been writing on psychoanalysis and literature for more than two decades, and whose more recent work on the ghost story has contributed to significant new developments in literary studies. Luke worked as a postgraduate student in Paris, and has translated several important books by French psychoanalysts, including André Green and Jean Laplanche.         

Teaching

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Luke teaches Victorian, modern and contemporary literature, specializing in the period 1880-1940; and also literary theory, specializing in psychoanalysis and literary ghosts. He welcomes PhD proposals in the following areas: Modernism (especially Joyce, Beckett, Woolf, David Jones, May Sinclair); literature and ghosts; literature and war; literature and psychoanalysis.

Research

Luke's main research interests are in modernist literature, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, the ghost story, literature and war, Welsh and Irish writing in English. He has published on Dickens, M. R. James, Joyce, Henry James, May Sinclair, Wyndham Lewis, David Jones, Beckett, Pessoa, Elizabeth Bowen, Margaret Oliphant, Freud, Lacan and Laplanche. He is a member of the Editorial Committee for a new edition of the works of May Sinclair, currently in production with Edinburgh University Press. Luke is the translator of several works by Jean Laplanche, including most recently The Unfinished Copernican Revolution (2020) and is Director of the David Jones Centre  

In 2010 Luke took part in a film about Joyce, psychoanalysis and Trieste, made by an Italian television company. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl4zk3UmV54

Office Hours (Student Contact Times)

  • Tuesday 10am-12

Publications

Thurston, L 2024, Understanding Sublimation in Freudian Theory and Modernist Writing. Taylor & Francis. 10.4324/9781003393863
Thurston, L 2021, 'Two Pathways: Thinking Sublimation with David Jones', Vestigia, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 191-209. <https://inppjournal.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Luke-Thurston-article-Vestigia-V31.pdf>
Thurston, L 2020, Apostolic Actuality: David Jones and Sublimation. in A Casement, P Goss & D Nobus (eds), Thresholds and Pathways Between Jung and Lacan : On the Blazing Sublime. Taylor & Francis, London. 10.4324/9781003089667
2020, The Unfinished Copernican Revolution: Selected essays 1967-1992. translated by Luke Thurston, The Unconscious in Translation, New York.
Laplanche, J 2020, The Unfinished Copernican Revolution: Selected Works, 1967-1992. translated by Luke Thurston, The Unconscious in Translation, New York.
More publications on the Research Portal