Rachel Stewart is a PhD Student studying nineteenth-century British literature, with expertise in historical popular culture/fiction and the Gothic, with a special fondness for vampires. Her research is interested in how popular Victorian fiction can be seen as phenomenological projects: exercises in experience through that which cannot be experienced such as haunted houses, vampires or ghosts. 

Her most recent research has involved vampires that transcend the horror genre, offering a theoretical understanding of the creature to see trauma as a vampire in detective fiction, and explorations into how Florence Marryat's conception of the psychic vampire enters into conversation with Charles Darwin and Victorian theories of sympathy.