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Detailed Page Dr. Wilken

Research Associate
Dr. Christian Wilken
Building: 23.21
Floor/room: 02.53
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I earned my BA in Japanese Studies from Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (2011–2015), which included a year abroad at the University of the Ryūkyūs in Okinawa, Japan (2013–2014). I then completed an MA in Comparative Studies at HHU (2015–2018), where I was also involved in student-led academic initiatives, such as serving as speaker for the student conference. In 2024, I received my PhD in Anglophone Studies with a dissertation on weird fiction, ontology and ecological thought.

I have taught a range of interdisciplinary courses, including academic writing, creative writing, and focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My research interests include speculative fiction, hauntology, posthumanism, and ecocriticism. In addition to academic work, I contribute journalistic pieces on the cultural history of video games.

From 2023 to 2025, I was a Research Associate at the University of Koblenz, where I am still a member of the interdisciplinary research network Traveling Bodies. I am currently affiliated with the Hauntology and Spectrality Research Network at York St. John University.

Memberships:

My research examines the intersections of literature, philosophy, and cultural history, with a particular focus on how speculative and weird fiction challenge anthropocentric worldviews and reimagine the relationship between humans and the nonhuman. Drawing from fields such as psychoanalysis, hauntology, ecocriticism, and comparative literature, my work situates literary texts within broader philosophical and ecological frameworks.

My first monograph, Reading Lovecraft in the Anthropocene: A New Dark Age (Routledge, 2025), explores how the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft resonates with contemporary ecological, metaphysical, and epistemological concerns. Using theoretical approaches such as object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and posthumanism, the book recontextualizes Lovecraft not only as a foundational figure in weird fiction but also as a writer deeply attuned to the anxieties of the Anthropocene.

Beyond Lovecraft, my research extends to authors such as Robert Aickman, Ray Bradbury, and Charles Dickens, with an emphasis on the uncanny, memory, and the spectral dimensions of narrative. My interdisciplinary background in Japanese Studies and Comparative Literature informs ongoing work on speculative and gothic aesthetics in global animation and children’s media — particularly in the films of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. Recent publications explore themes such as ecological identity in Spirited Away, affect and transience in The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, and archetypal childhood in the work of Ray Bradbury. Forthcoming work includes explorations of Dionysian absurdity in Wallace & Gromit (Animation Studies 2.0, 2025), the ontology of the in-between in Haruki Murakami (Open Philosophy, 2025), and the posthuman gothic in Japanese horror video games (American, British and Canadian Studies, 2025).

I am especially interested in how literature acts as a site of negotiation between cultural memory, ecological crisis, and philosophical speculation. My work is driven by a commitment to ecocritical and hauntological methods that foreground literature’s capacity to reflect, resist, and reimagine dominant modes of knowing and being.

 

Current and upcoming projects include:

  • An exploration of hauntology and spectrality in Shakespeare’s ghost figures and Dickensian Gothic;
  • A monograph on the significance of death and spectrality in Charles Dickens’ late career;
  • A co-edited volume on the weird fiction of Robert Aickman, focusing on spatial estrangement, ecological instability, and psychological unease.

My research seeks to foster dialogue across disciplines and to position speculative fiction as a key cultural form through which contemporary crises, from ecological precarity to ontological uncertainty, are imagined and made thinkable.

I teach BA and MA courses spanning the long eighteenth century to contemporary literature. With a generalist and interdisciplinary approach, my teaching aims to contextualize literature within broader cultural, philosophical, and historical discourse, encouraging students to reflect on the evolving role of narrative, form, and genre. My courses regularly draw on film, theory, and natural sciences to foster cross-disciplinary dialogue. 

I welcome inquiries about supervision and am available to advise BA and MA theses as well as PhD projects across topics related to literature, theory, horror, ecology, media, and speculative fiction.

Nominated for the 2025 HHU Düsseldorf Teaching Award ‘Lehrpreis’ 
(Category: Seminars) for the course ‘Frankenstein: The First 206 Years’

Nominated for the 2025 HHU Düsseldorf Teaching Award ‘Lehrpreis’ 
(Category: Emerging Scholar) for the course ‘How Dead is a Doornail? Dickens and Christmas’

Nominated for the 2024 HHU Düsseldorf Teaching Award ‘Lehrpreis’ 
(Category: Emerging Scholar) for the course ‘The Dark Side of Children’s Literature’

Nominated for the 2023 HHU Düsseldorf Teaching Award ‘Lehrpreis’
(Category: Seminars) for the course ‘Sentimentalism in Literature’

 

Seminars taught (selection):

Hauntology/Spectrality

The Fragment in Literature

Frankenstein: The First 206 Years

How Dead is a Doornail? Dickens and Christmas

Detective Fiction

Postmodernism and the End of Time

Apocalypse Now

How Modern Are We?

Death in Victorian Literature

Mars is Heaven: An Enquiry into Science-Fiction

The Dark Side of Children’s Literature

Weird Fiction

The Defective Real: Realism in Victorian Novels

Gothic Fiction

Sentimentalism in Literature

Spirits That I’ve Cited: Horror Fiction from Victorianism to the Present Day

Arcadia and Apocalypse in Children’s Literature

MONOGRAPH

Reading Lovecraft in the Anthropocene: A New Dark Age. Routledge, 2025.
http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003545446

 

JOURNAL ARTICLES

‘”More than Death” Traversing the Ravine with Archetypal Children in Ray Bradbury’s Illinois Stories’ The New Ray Bradbury Review, (8), edited by Phil Nichols, 2024. 81–97. DOI: 10.18060/28542

‘The Fleeting Nature of Joy in Isao Takahata’s Princess Kaguya’ Animation Studies 2.0, edited by Carmen Hannibal and Anastasiia Gushchina, 2024. https://blog.animationstudies.org/?p=6908

‘The River on that Day – Water and Identity in the Films of Hayao Miyazaki’ Journal of Children in Popular Culture, Volume 14, Issue 1, Fall 2024. https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/6a58c084-8445-4b4d-b5fb-2bc65b9a6026/downloads/d17df7b8-6c5a-4ea1-b3b5-f1e7726cfd3d/6%20Wilken%20The%20River%20on%20that%20Day.pdf?ver=1735408176064

‘To the Moon, on a Whim: Dionysian Desire and the Dreamlike in Nick Park’s A Grand Day Out (1989)’ Animation Studies 2.0, edited by Carmen Hannibal and Anastasiia Gushchina, June 2025. (in print)

‘”A World That Had No Form” – Haruki Murakami and the Ontology of the In-Between’ Open Philosophy, “Realism, Psychoanalysis, and Critique in a Metamodern Key” special issue, edited by Friederike Danebrock, Martin Bartelmus, Christian Wilken, De Gruyter, open access, Fall 2025. (forthcoming)

‘American Nightmares: Japanese Horror Games Around the Millennial Turn’

American, British and Canadian Studies, “American Narratives and Video Games” special issue, edited by Francesca Razzi and Valentina Romanzi, The Journal of Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, open access, December 2025. (forthcoming)

 

JOURNAL ISSUES EDITED

‘Realism, Psychoanalysis, and Critique in a Metamodern Key,’ Special Issue, edited by Friederike Danebrock, Martin Bartelmus, Christian Wilken, Open Philosophy, De Gruyter, open access, Fall 2025. (forthcoming)

 

PEER-REVIEWED BOOK CHAPTERS

‘Illustrated Men and Mischievous Skeletons: The Object-Realm in Ray Bradbury’s Fiction’, in Ray Bradbury: A Companion, edited by Kevin Wetmore, Peter Lang Publishing, 2025. (forthcoming)

‘Hubris as a Vocation. Frankenstein and the Century of Biology’, in “Umbrüche in Europa”, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift. Beihefte, edited by Michaela Bill-Mrziglod and Sarah Schäfer-Althaus, Universitätsverlag Winter. (forthcoming)

‘London’s Plutonic Shore: The Thames as a Victorian Styx in Our Mutual Friend’, in Blue Victorian, edited by Shaonli Bhowmik, Ritam Dutta and John C. Ryan, Bloomsbury. (forthcoming)

‘”In Lieu of the Authentic Document:” The Reader’s Role in Dracula’s Epistemic Fragmentation’, in Dracula: A Companion, edited by Matthew Crofts and Madeline Potter, Peter Lang Publishing, 2026. (forthcoming)

‘A World Without Children’s Voices: Cultural Apocalypse in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men’, in Critical Explorations in Science-Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Ceng Tan and Mikail Boz, McFarland. (forthcoming)

‘These Trees Know Not Our God: Puritan Fear, Liminal Spaces, and the Dark Ecologies of Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015)’, in Reinventing The Witch: Witchcraft and Sorcery in 21st Century Fiction and Film, edited by Nazan Yıldız Çiçekçi and Cenk Tan, McFarland. (forthcoming)

‘The View from the Vanishing Point: Time, Memory, and the Eerie in Elidor’, in Alan Garner and the Work of Time, edited by Robert Edgar, Wayne Johnson and John Marland, Manchester University Press. (forthcoming)

‘The Phenomenology of Holes in Silent Hill 2’, in Handbook of Body Horror, edited by Subashish Bhattacharjee and Anik Sarkar. (forthcoming)

 

CONFERENCE ACTIVITY

‘Robert Aickman and the True Weird: Spectrality, Time, and the Unnatural’, Haunted Modernities, Present Pasts and Spectral Futures, Falmouth, UK, July 2025.

‘Reading Lovecraft in the Anthropocene’, Fantastic Climates, Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung, Kassel, Germany, Conference, Sep 2024.

‘Is Goth Dead? Towards an Anthropocene Goth’, Bela Lugosi’s Dead at 45 – A Celebration of Goth Culture, Virtual Conference, Aug 2024.

 ‘The Five-Headed Monster: Houdini, Lovecraft, and the Enigma of Antediluvian Egypt’, The Egypt Obsession: Past, Present & Future, The International Society for the Study of Egyptomania,Virtual Conference, Oct 2023.

 

JOURNALISM AND PODCASTS

‘Perpetual Unease: Lovecraft at the Edge of the Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Sundays Ep. 2, Victorian Vanguard, podcast, Youtube, April 2025.

‚Der Weg des Kriegers‘, Gee, issue 74, magazine, edited by Jörg Luibl, March 2025.

‚Über Bushido, Samurai & Japan‘, Spielvertiefung, podcast, hosted by Jörg Luibl, March 2025.

‚Im Gespräch: Christian Wilken‘, Spielvertiefung, podcast, hosted by Jörg Luibl, January 2025.

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