A haunted virtual literary tour for the month of Halloween!

You’re lost in the halls of a forgotten castle. Your steps leave prints in the dust, marking your progress as faithfully as fallen snow. As you climb from the dungeons to the highest tower, you hear muffled footsteps at your heels, but whenever you turn back, there are only mirrors and shadows behind you.

You’re investigating a house that is anything but empty. It’s almost too full - of strangers, intimates, and worst of all, yourself. The longer you stay, the more at home you feel, though sometimes you worry that you know this house too well. Or perhaps, the house knows you too well. You don’t think you’ll ever leave.

You came to the forest to see the oaks, but as you walk deeper, you see briar thickets so dense they block the light and your path. You look for a way around them, only to realize they encircle something, holding the secret close to their heart. When you try to push through them, you realize they’re sharp as knives.

You wander through the labyrinth of city streets. The tall windows of the library glint at you from above, and conversation and laughter spill from the open doors of coffee shops and pubs. But the light falls differently today, and the laughter has a sharp edge of panic. Every face you pass is a stranger who could be anyone… anything.

Your home amongst the stars just might be cursed. You pull down the industrial shutters to block out the heat of foreign suns and ward yourself against your pale neighbors who thirst for blood and marrow. When you leave your lab at the end of the day to visit the ossuary, you realize what you interred is walking...

We begin October 7th, 2022!

What is this exactly?

What makes a story Gothic?

A big part of the Gothic is where the story happens. The Gothic is strongly rooted in place, the rooms and forests and streets where the plot unfolds. You just know when you’re in a Gothic space. You feel it in the burgundy velvet curtains, the creaking stairs, the tangle of abandoned books and cables.

What makes a place Gothic? A delicate cocktail of folklore and fear. What if the folkloric past came back to haunt the present?

This can happen almost anywhere, from crumbling castles to the halls of a spaceship.

In Gothic Realms, we’ll explore all kinds of Gothic spaces - castles, haunted houses, forests, cities, and even outer space. Think of it as a haunted virtual literary tour for the month of Halloween. And on this exploration, we’ll uncover why these places - and these stories - matter and why they continue to entice us, hundreds of years after the first Gothic stories were written.

Also, we are complete nerds about the Gothic. We love it more than we can say (our bookcases speak for themselves), and we both specialized in the Gothic while earning our PhDs.

We’ll be real with you: it’s fall, it’s been a long couple of years, and we want to teach this thing that makes us ridiculously happy!

Choose your option...
(and then click on it to learn more and enroll!)

What Are The Seminars?

The seminars are a completely optional addition to the course! You can 100% take the course without it (just click that option above!) - all the materials will still stand alone and make sense.

BUT we also wanted to create an option for those who want to go a bit deeper, something that would function like a university seminar. In this option, we'll have five additional meetings in which we discuss five additional long-form texts that simply don't fit into the lecture format (or the expected reading workload.) The seminars give us additional course time to talk about these extra texts.

More importantly, the seminars give YOU a chance to talk, beyond the chat during the live lectures or the Facebook group. This is your chance to ask us questions directly, share your thoughts and observations out loud with your classmates, and to experience the collaboration and community that we loved in our own university seminars. 

If you’ve ever wanted to go more in-depth at Carterhaugh - if you wanted even more scholarship and discussion and a chance to participate on a deeper level - this is for you. Select the seminar option above!

Open your mind to tales and your heart to magic.

The doors are open...

but only until October 6th at Midnight ET!