Roger Luckhurst, born in the United Kingdom in 1957, is a professor of modern and contemporary literature at Birkbeck, University of London, and currently holds the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair in Nineteenth-Century Studies. He is a noted author of Gothic literature, science fiction and books on the cultural history of horror. His most acclaimed works include Gothic: An Illustrated History, The Trauma Question, The Mummy’s Curse and Zombies: A Cultural History. He has edited classic Gothic novels for the Oxford World’s Classics series and written volumes on The Shining and Alien for the BFI Film Classics series. Luckhurst’s latest work, Graveyards: A History of Living with the Dead, is an essay on funeral rituals and their evolution over time.