Nick Freeman read English at Leeds University before postgraduate work at the University of Bristol. He has worked in adult, further, and prison education as well as the university sector. Before joining Loughborough in 2006 he taught at Bristol, UWE, and the Open University.
Nick was one of the original members of British Association for Victorian Studies on its relaunch in 2000, and one of the founders of the British Association for Decadence Studies (BADS). He reviews for a number of publishers and periodicals and is a consultant for Seren’s new Welsh Gothic series (We Are Seren. Welcome. - Seren). He was a co-organiser of the first academic conference on George Egerton, held at Loughborough in 2017 and is a member of several editorial and advisory boards including Gothic Studies and Volupté, the journal of the BADS. He has wide experience of external examining at BA and MA levels and has examined doctoral theses throughout the UK, as well as in Canada and Brazil.
Nick co-founded the Cultural Currents Research Group, which researches the culture of the period roughly spanning 1870-1930. Much of his own work explores this historical space.
Nick is internationally known for his research is in two main areas.
He has published and presented widely on the literature and culture of the fin de siècle, particularly the London of the 1890s, Oscar Wilde, and the poet, critic, and travel writer, Arthur Symons. He is the author of the influential interdisciplinary study, Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art, 1870-1914 (2007) and an innovative ‘microhistory’, 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (2013). His edition of Symons’ Spiritual Adventures (2017) is the first scholarly edition of the author’s fiction and also collects a number of his important essays on literature, music, and urban space.
Nick also works on Gothic and Weird fiction and film from the Victorian era to the present and has an especial interest in the ghost story. Alongside academic articles on figures such as E.F. Benson, Edith Nesbit, and Robert Aickman, he has edited selections of the supernatural fiction of A.M. Burrage and Elizabeth Walter. He recently completed editing an anthology of Welsh Gothic fiction, Giving the Darkness Life, scheduled for publication in autumn 2026. The two strands of his research overlap in work on Victorian and Edwardian supernatural fiction, where he has published on Somerset Maugham, Arthur Machen, Vernon Lee, and Rudyard Kipling, amongst others.
A member of the Oscar Wilde Society and the Friends of Arthur Machen, Nick is currently at work on two book-length projects. One is a biography of Symons, Arthur Symons: A Life of Sensations, while the other reconstructs the first English production of Wilde’s Salome in May 1905.
Nick has taught across the BA and MA programmes at Loughborough, contributing to modules in Victorian and Modernist literature, Decadence, Creative Writing, and Weird fiction, and supervising dissertations on a wide range of topics including film, music, and visual art. He is a creative and innovative teacher who has pioneered the use of assessment packages which allow students to combine critical and creative work whatever their programme of study. A Loughborough Student Union Lecturer of the Year, he has won a variety of other student and staff awards.
Nick has a PGCE (HE) and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Current PhD Supervision:
As of September 2026, Nick is supervising the following researchers:
- Rosemary Archer is exploring the sweatshops and soup kitchens of the 1880s in a thesis on the Socialist novelist, Margaret Harkness.
- Nathaniel Corns is charting the weirdness of Daphne du Maurier.
- Abigail Mills is diving into a century of the Watery Weird.
- Minuli Herath is researching Buddhism in Victorian Britain.
- Izzie Radley is haunting urban spaces in her creative project about ghost signs.
- Jill Walters is uncovering the complex literary networking of the Victorian poet and critic, Lionel Johnson.
Recent Completions:
- Milly Harrison, ‘Deviant Cartographies: Queer Errancy and Masculine Deviancy in British Weird Fiction, 1890-1914’ (2026).
- Aaron Eames, ‘Writing Wilde: Oscar Wilde, Sexuality, and Biographical Literature, 1900-54’ (2022).
- Karen Ette, ‘Don’t Be Late in the Morning’ [creative writing PhD on the Leicestershire Regiment in the Great War] (2019).
Books
- 1895: Drama, Disaster, and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
- Conceiving the City: London, Literature and Art, 1870-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2007).
Editions
- Giving the Darkness Life: Welsh Gothic Stories (Seren, 2026).
- Elizabeth Walter, Let a Sleeping Witch Lie: Welsh Gothic Stories (Seren, 2024).
- A.M. Burrage, The Little Blue Flames and Other Uncanny Tales (British Library, 2022).
- Arthur Symons, Spiritual Adventures (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2017)
Recent Articles and Chapters:
- ‘Entrancing but Dangerous: Blackwood and the Erotic,’ Gothic Studies 27.3 (2025), 306-19.
- ‘In the Nightmare Country’: John Metcalfe’s ‘The Bad Lands,’ Gothic Studies 25.1 (2023), 61-75.
- ‘Essays: Defending and Describing Decadence’, The Oxford Handbook of Decadence, ed. Jane Desmarais & David Weir (Oxford University Press, 2022), 335-50.