Stephen O’Donnell has recently submitted his PhD thesis, titled “The Revenant Signifier: The Zombie in Comics and Popular Culture”. This thesis explores the representation of the figure of the zombie throughout history, with the main focus on zombie comics, and The Walking Dead comic series in particular. It draws upon Stephen’s Honours and Masters work in Literary Studies, incorporating semiotics, psychoanalysis, and postmodernism as ways of understanding the zombie.

Stephen’s main research interests are: comics studies; horror and the gothic; postmodernism; psychogeography; and the works of Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, and Mike Carey. He has presented papers on the History of Horror Comics, Subjectivity and Psychoanalytic Identity, Psychogeography within Comics, and Postmodern Nostalgia in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.

He has taught on the University of Dundee’s MLitt in Comics Studies programme, and has been a regular class tutor for the MA English course, in which he tries to shoehorn in comics whenever he can.