Eleanor Johnson

“Heeeere’s Johnny!”

The most famous scene of The Shining is on screen in a lecture hall during “History of Horror,” and Jack Torrance’s crazed announcement to his terrified wife, Wendy, is under discussion. As Eleanor Johnson, associate professor of English and comparative literature, explains, the disturbing events at the Overlook Hotel offer scares, and also context, to explore the complex issue of domestic violence.

“The soul of horror is the disruption of domestic life,” Johnson tells the class. In The Shining, she says, the Torrance family is endangered not only by the hotel’s ghosts, but by the corporeal threats of imperiled masculinity, isolation, gaslighting and the age-old patriarchal doctrine of “correction.”

It’s a fascinating conversation, and a popular one: Johnson says “History of Horror” was one of the biggest humanities classes at the College when it was first taught in Spring 2022. The course, which she co-teaches with Jeremy Dauber, the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture, takes the genre seriously, asserting that despite its pulpy reputation, horror is capable of offering profound cultural, political and historical critique. The syllabus covers a surprising range — 700 years of chillers, from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to Get Out.

“We’ve stumbled onto something that’s both intellectually interesting and totally the zeitgeist,” Johnson says. “Horror is just exploding right now.”

Creepy stuff is not Johnson’s only area of expertise. She also specializes in late medieval prose, poetry and drama; law and literature of the Middle Ages; and vernacular theology, which is the study of Christian texts written in dialects other than Latin. “It’s a sort of contemplative writing,” Johnson explains. “These works were supposed to make you feel like you were understanding God.”

She first wrote about medieval horror in 2015, then made a related discovery a few years later while writing her third book, Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England (2023). “There’s a subgenre in medieval literature that’s basically eco-horror — nature going rogue,” she says. “There’s more writing like that in the Middle Ages than any scholarship acknowledges.”

Johnson never expected to become an expert in either horror or literature. In fact, she was studying physics at Yale when a required English course with renowned Chaucer scholar Lee Patterson altered her path. After getting a low grade on a paper, she went to Patterson for advice and came away inspired. “I loved that he took this really old poetry really seriously,” Johnson says. “I got into medieval poetry because that’s what he did.” She became an English major in her senior year, then earned a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2009. She started at Columbia the same year.

It’s been an exciting time for Johnson lately: This past spring she received the 2024 Lionel Trilling Book Award for Waste and the Wasters, and a mass-market release is in the works for her next book, an examination of 1970s-era horror films and their relationship to feminist law (she also blogs regularly on the overlap between horror and feminism on the Substack “Eleanor’s Horrors”). In January, she became the director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL).

“I was not planning on taking over an institute this year,” Johnson says with a laugh. But the stars aligned when a colleague connected Johnson with former IRCPL director Matthew Engelke (chair of the Department of Religion), who had organized a speaker series on monsters and monstrosity. “Matthew and I had a long conversation about theological history and how horror interfaces with American public life,” she says. “And it just quickly snowballed from there.”

Johnson is currently facilitating an IRCPL series about climate and religion; this fall, the institute will feature a program about the history of violence against women. She is passionate about undergraduate engagement, so she also pioneered a series of lunch talks that she hopes will make IRCPL more familiar and accessible to students. “It’s not going to be a lecture,” Johnson says. “It’ll be more like: ‘If you’re interested in, say, zombies, let’s nerd out for two hours.’”

Johnson takes joy in teaching a wide array of classes, and is grateful for both the support of her colleagues in the English department and the willingness of her students to take these pedagogical journeys with her. “One of the best things about being at Columbia is that the undergraduates are just, like, phosphorescently brilliant,” Johnson says. “They really care about things a lot, and they’re so willing to get on board with you. So if you want to beta test some insane idea — like 700 years of horror! — they show up, and are very engaged.

“I’ve learned a lot from working with them,” she says. “And it’s shaped and fostered everything that I do.”