School of English, University of Sheffield, UK
17-20 July 2014
Abstract Deadline: 19 December 2013
Keynote Speakers: Erica Fudge, Tom Tyler, Cary Wolfe, others TBC
Reporting in the journal PMLA on the emergence and consolidation of animal studies, Cary Wolfe drew attention to the role of the Millennial Animals conference, held in the School of English at the University of Sheffield in 2000, as a formative event in this interdisciplinary field. Seeking now to focus the diverse critical practice in animal studies, a second conference at Sheffield seeks to uncover the extent to which the discipline of English Studies now can and should be reimagined as the practice of reading animals.
This conference seeks to reflect and to extend the full range of critical methodologies, forms, canons and geographies current in English Studies; contributions are also most welcome from interested scholars in cognate disciplines. Reading Animals will be programmed to encourage comparative reflection on representations of animals and interspecies encounters in terms of both literary-historical period and overarching interpretive themes. As such, seven keynote presentations are planned; each will focus on how reading animals is crucial in the interpretation of the textual culture of a key period from the Middle Ages to the present. The conference will also feature a plenary panel of key scholars who will reflect on the importance when reading animals of thinking across periods and in thematic, conceptual and formal terms.
Papers should focus on the interpretation of textual animals at any date from the Middle Ages to the present. We seek submissions that read animals in relation to any writers/periods or in terms of the following indicative list of themes:
*Genre/Media/Form/Mode*
animals in genre (adventure; tragedy; classic realism; satire; comedy; epic; lyric; elegy; nature writing; non-fiction, criticism and polemic; detective/mystery; gothic; sf; children's literature; graphic novel)
animal genres (bestiary; fictionalised [auto-]biography; fairy tale; fable; allegory; didactic story; pet memoir)
*Arts, Aesthetics, Philosophies*
reading animals in theatre and performance, music, visual culture, film, dance, theory
*Ethics, Politics, Society*
intersections of species - race - ethnicity - disability - sex - gender - sexuality - class
*History*
animals as subjects and objects of historical interpretation; animal materialisms; post-anthropocentric literary and cultural history
*Science and Technology*
bio-engineering; technologies of animal use; narratives of meat/vivisection; ethology; biosemiotics and zoosemiotics
*Environments and Geographies*
empire and colonialism; politics and poetics of space; globalisation; zoo-heterotopias; extinctions
Abstracts for 20 minute papers (300 words) or pre-formed 3-paper panels (1000 words) are welcome by 19 December, 2013 from researchers at any stage of their career, including early career scholars and postgraduates. Please send by email to the conference convenors.
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Thursday, 31 October 2013
Monday, 12 August 2013
CFP: Little Horrors: Representations of the Monstrous Child
Book Project
Call for Chapters
Gone is the Victorian innocence of childhood. We have entered the age of the monstrous child, the little horror.
Each historical period can be seen to have prioritised a different facet of the child, the Victorian era idolised the innocence of the pre-pubescent child, the twentieth century the disaffected teenager, whilst the early twenty-first sems to be that of the monstrous child. Whilst global organisations such as UNICEF and Save the Children promote the sanctity of childhood as a fundamental human right, popular culture and empirical, sociological data would intimate something else. Here children are not configured as the wealth of the family and the community, but are seen as an economic burden, a luxury or even a parasite. Far from being the repository of all society holds dear about itself, the child becomes something at once uncontrollable and monstrous, not to be loved and cherished but feared and expelled. Whether supernatural or just plain wicked, the child becomes a liminal being caught outside of normalised categorization; not mature, not socilaised, not under the rule of law and not conforming to adult nostagia over what they should be.
Is there a relationship between the declining birth rate in the West and the increasing representation of children as an alien other? However, as witchcraft accusations against children in Africa and representations in the Asian horror film genre show, this is not just a Western phenomenon. So just what are the underlying reasons, if any? This volume aims to assemble the evidence from history, psychology, sociology, literature and media studies to map the extent and meaning of this representational development.
Topics to include:
- Witch children, witchcraft accusations against children, children using witchcraft accusations
- Magical children: children with magical or superhuman powers, the wunderkind
- Werewolves and other shapeshifters: children as animals
- Fairies and changelings: the folklore of strange children
- Undead children: vampires, zombies and others
- Ghosts and demonic children: children possessed, children as demons
- Child crime and culpability: moral evil and legal responsibility
- Monstrous children through history: physical deformity and mental health issues
- Children as embodiments of other aspects of supernatural horror
- The monstrous as a new role model for children
- Children as adults and adults as children
- Society and children and public and private spaces
- Immigration, post-colonialism and foreign adoption
- War children and child soldiers
A brief bio and abstract of circa 300 words should be sent to -
For literature and media studies: Simon Bacon
For history and social sciences: Leo Ruickbie
Deadline for abstracts: 1st September 2013
There's no project page as yet, but you'll find these same details here.
Call for Chapters
Gone is the Victorian innocence of childhood. We have entered the age of the monstrous child, the little horror.
Each historical period can be seen to have prioritised a different facet of the child, the Victorian era idolised the innocence of the pre-pubescent child, the twentieth century the disaffected teenager, whilst the early twenty-first sems to be that of the monstrous child. Whilst global organisations such as UNICEF and Save the Children promote the sanctity of childhood as a fundamental human right, popular culture and empirical, sociological data would intimate something else. Here children are not configured as the wealth of the family and the community, but are seen as an economic burden, a luxury or even a parasite. Far from being the repository of all society holds dear about itself, the child becomes something at once uncontrollable and monstrous, not to be loved and cherished but feared and expelled. Whether supernatural or just plain wicked, the child becomes a liminal being caught outside of normalised categorization; not mature, not socilaised, not under the rule of law and not conforming to adult nostagia over what they should be.
Is there a relationship between the declining birth rate in the West and the increasing representation of children as an alien other? However, as witchcraft accusations against children in Africa and representations in the Asian horror film genre show, this is not just a Western phenomenon. So just what are the underlying reasons, if any? This volume aims to assemble the evidence from history, psychology, sociology, literature and media studies to map the extent and meaning of this representational development.
Topics to include:
- Witch children, witchcraft accusations against children, children using witchcraft accusations
- Magical children: children with magical or superhuman powers, the wunderkind
- Werewolves and other shapeshifters: children as animals
- Fairies and changelings: the folklore of strange children
- Undead children: vampires, zombies and others
- Ghosts and demonic children: children possessed, children as demons
- Child crime and culpability: moral evil and legal responsibility
- Monstrous children through history: physical deformity and mental health issues
- Children as embodiments of other aspects of supernatural horror
- The monstrous as a new role model for children
- Children as adults and adults as children
- Society and children and public and private spaces
- Immigration, post-colonialism and foreign adoption
- War children and child soldiers
A brief bio and abstract of circa 300 words should be sent to -
For literature and media studies: Simon Bacon
For history and social sciences: Leo Ruickbie
Deadline for abstracts: 1st September 2013
There's no project page as yet, but you'll find these same details here.
Wednesday, 10 April 2013
CFP: Literary Dolls: The Female Textual Body from the 19th Century to Now
8 March 2014
University of Durham
This one-day conference held on International Women’s Day 2014 assesses the ways in which women’s physical form has been depicted in artworks from the nineteenth century to the present day.
Keynote speakers at the conference will include Pulitzer Prize winning author, Jane Smiley; Professor Jo Phoenix (University of Durham); Dr Kate MacDonald (University of Ghent).
We welcome abstracts of three hundred words for twenty minute papers discussing any textual presentation of women’s bodies. This includes literary depictions, but also those in film, television, digital media, the visual arts and the applied social sciences. Topics may include, but are not limited to the following:
The romanticised female form
Femininity vs. Femaleness vs. Womanliness
The historicized figure
The broken form
Fetishized body parts
Females made inanimate, e.g. as dolls or statues
Media representations of femaleness
The social impact of textual bodily representation
The sexual figure
The body in motion
Woman as goddess or muse
The maternal female
Females ensnared in the text
Violence on the body
Queering the body
Females made inanimate, e.g. as dolls or statues
Media representations of femaleness
The social impact of textual bodily representation
The conference will run at Durham University on 8th March 2014, International Women’s Day. It is organised in association with the University of Durham’s Centre for Sex, Gender and Sexualities.
Please send abstracts to the conference convenors by 1st June 2013.
For more information, please see the conference website.
University of Durham
This one-day conference held on International Women’s Day 2014 assesses the ways in which women’s physical form has been depicted in artworks from the nineteenth century to the present day.
“Lucky I have nice hands if nothing else,” says Ella at last, very dry. He comes to her, picks up her hands, kisses them, wearily, rake-like: “Beautiful doll, beautiful.” Doris Lessing, The Golden NotebookThrough history women’s bodies have been the subject of artistic presentation, ostensibly to celebrate the beauty of the female form, but also to fetishize, to dismember and to control women both within the arts and in the wider world. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to appraise the depiction of women’s physical form in artworks, as well as how artistic presentation has informed other disciplines, from the Nineteenth Century to Now, in order to assess how far the arts have changed in line with apparent developments in the treatment of women, over the comparable historical gulf. We are also keen to consider the social impact the arts have had, and continue to have, on the treatment of women.
Keynote speakers at the conference will include Pulitzer Prize winning author, Jane Smiley; Professor Jo Phoenix (University of Durham); Dr Kate MacDonald (University of Ghent).
We welcome abstracts of three hundred words for twenty minute papers discussing any textual presentation of women’s bodies. This includes literary depictions, but also those in film, television, digital media, the visual arts and the applied social sciences. Topics may include, but are not limited to the following:
The romanticised female form
Femininity vs. Femaleness vs. Womanliness
The historicized figure
The broken form
Fetishized body parts
Females made inanimate, e.g. as dolls or statues
Media representations of femaleness
The social impact of textual bodily representation
The sexual figure
The body in motion
Woman as goddess or muse
The maternal female
Females ensnared in the text
Violence on the body
Queering the body
Females made inanimate, e.g. as dolls or statues
Media representations of femaleness
The social impact of textual bodily representation
The conference will run at Durham University on 8th March 2014, International Women’s Day. It is organised in association with the University of Durham’s Centre for Sex, Gender and Sexualities.
Please send abstracts to the conference convenors by 1st June 2013.
For more information, please see the conference website.
Friday, 27 April 2012
OUT NOW: Journal of Monsters and the Monstrous, Vol. 1, No. 2 (September 2011)
Contents:
Freeing Woman from Truth and the Unknown: Using Kahlo and Irigaray to Liberate Woman from Haggard's She - Cameron Ellis
The Monstrification of the Monster: How Ceauşescu Became the Red Vampire - Peter Mario Kreuter
Wednesday, 16 June 2010
She-Wolf Conference September 2010
A two-day interdisciplinary conference to be held at the University of Manchester, 9th-10th September 2010.
The figure of the werewolf has haunted art, literature and culture for millenia. While not as common as their male counterparts, female werewolves appear in a variety of texts, of different genres and different cultures. From transcripts of witchcraft trials to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the female werewolf, and her shapeshifting sisters, continues to challenge, excite and entertain.
This conference will explore the manifestations and cultural meanings of female werewolves and other female shapeshifters, and the perennial fascination of these creatures.
Conference Programme
Thursday 9th September
10.00-11.00 Registration
11.00-11.30 Opening Remarks
11.30-1.00 Session 1: Monstrous Sexuality (Chair: Carys Crossen)
Tim Snelson (University of East Anglia): 'Women Can Be Wolves Too': The Cry of the Werewolf (1944), the Female Monster and the Contested Bodies of Wartime Women
Kerstin Frank (University of Heidelberg): Angela Carter's Wolf-Girls: Power Struggles, Transformation and Gender in her Rewritings of 'Little Red Riding Hood'
Eva Bru-Dominguez (University of Birmingham): Reclaiming Desire: the She-Wolf in Merce Rodoreda's Death in Spring
1.00-2.00 Lunch
2.00-3.00 Museum Workshop: Monstrous Material Culture (led by Sam Alberti and Bryan Sitch)
3.00-3.30 Coffee
3.30-5.00 Session 2: Shapeshifting Sisters (Chair: Hannah Priest)
Linda McGuire (Independent Researcher): Magical Transformations: Owl Women and Sorcery in Latin Literature
Geoff Holder (Independent Researcher): Were-Cats, Were-Deer and Were-Whales: Female Shapeshifting in Scottish Witchcraft Narratives
Laura Wilson (University of Manchester): Dans Ma Peau: Shape-shifting and Subjectivity
5.00 Close
Friday 10th September
9.30-11.00 Session 3: Of Otherness and Conformity (Chair: Linda McGuire)
Brian Feltham (University of Reading): Imagined Identities - The Woman in the Wolf Suit
Shannon Scott (University of St. Thomas): Lycanthropic Representations of Native Americans in Henry Beaugrand's 'The Werewolves'
Carys Crossen (University of Manchester): 'The Complex and Antagonistic Forces that Constitute One Soul': Religious Conviction versus Feminist Principles in Clemence Housman's The Werewolf
11.00-11.30 Coffee
11.30-12.30 Keynote Address: Peter Hutchings (Northumbria University): The She-Wolves of Horror Cinema: Marginality, Transformation and Rage
12.30-1.30 Lunch
1.30-3.00 Session 4: Fantasy and the She-Wolf (Chair: Brian Feltham)
Nickianne Moody (Liverpool John Moores University): Supernatural Hierarchies: The Place of Werewolves in the Paranormal Romance and Contemporary Urban Fantasy
Hannah Priest (University of Manchester): I Was a Teenage She-Wolf: Boobs, Blood and Chocolate
Jacquelyn Bent and Helen Gavin (University of Huddersfield): An Uberwald Werewolf Howled in Patrician Square
3.00-3.30 Coffee
3.30-5.00 Session 5: Creating the She-Wolf (Chair: Nickianne Moody)
Jazmina Cininas (RMIT University): The Girlie Werewolf Hall of Fame: Historial and Contemporary Representations of the Female Lycanthrope
Chantal Bourgault du Coudray (University of Western Australia): 'You Should Write a Werewolf Screenplay': Meeting the Challenge
Allison Moon (Independent Researcher): Courting the Lunatic Fringe: Shapeshifting at the Vanguard of Queer Activism and Post-Gender Feminism
5.00 Close
For details of how to register for this conference, please go to our registration page
Coming soon: Details of our fabulous fringe events, including a 'Writing the Female Monster' discussion panel and a film screening.
The figure of the werewolf has haunted art, literature and culture for millenia. While not as common as their male counterparts, female werewolves appear in a variety of texts, of different genres and different cultures. From transcripts of witchcraft trials to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the female werewolf, and her shapeshifting sisters, continues to challenge, excite and entertain.
This conference will explore the manifestations and cultural meanings of female werewolves and other female shapeshifters, and the perennial fascination of these creatures.
Conference Programme
Thursday 9th September
10.00-11.00 Registration
11.00-11.30 Opening Remarks
11.30-1.00 Session 1: Monstrous Sexuality (Chair: Carys Crossen)
Tim Snelson (University of East Anglia): 'Women Can Be Wolves Too': The Cry of the Werewolf (1944), the Female Monster and the Contested Bodies of Wartime Women
Kerstin Frank (University of Heidelberg): Angela Carter's Wolf-Girls: Power Struggles, Transformation and Gender in her Rewritings of 'Little Red Riding Hood'
Eva Bru-Dominguez (University of Birmingham): Reclaiming Desire: the She-Wolf in Merce Rodoreda's Death in Spring
1.00-2.00 Lunch
2.00-3.00 Museum Workshop: Monstrous Material Culture (led by Sam Alberti and Bryan Sitch)
3.00-3.30 Coffee
3.30-5.00 Session 2: Shapeshifting Sisters (Chair: Hannah Priest)
Linda McGuire (Independent Researcher): Magical Transformations: Owl Women and Sorcery in Latin Literature
Geoff Holder (Independent Researcher): Were-Cats, Were-Deer and Were-Whales: Female Shapeshifting in Scottish Witchcraft Narratives
Laura Wilson (University of Manchester): Dans Ma Peau: Shape-shifting and Subjectivity
5.00 Close
Friday 10th September
9.30-11.00 Session 3: Of Otherness and Conformity (Chair: Linda McGuire)
Brian Feltham (University of Reading): Imagined Identities - The Woman in the Wolf Suit
Shannon Scott (University of St. Thomas): Lycanthropic Representations of Native Americans in Henry Beaugrand's 'The Werewolves'
Carys Crossen (University of Manchester): 'The Complex and Antagonistic Forces that Constitute One Soul': Religious Conviction versus Feminist Principles in Clemence Housman's The Werewolf
11.00-11.30 Coffee
11.30-12.30 Keynote Address: Peter Hutchings (Northumbria University): The She-Wolves of Horror Cinema: Marginality, Transformation and Rage
12.30-1.30 Lunch
1.30-3.00 Session 4: Fantasy and the She-Wolf (Chair: Brian Feltham)
Nickianne Moody (Liverpool John Moores University): Supernatural Hierarchies: The Place of Werewolves in the Paranormal Romance and Contemporary Urban Fantasy
Hannah Priest (University of Manchester): I Was a Teenage She-Wolf: Boobs, Blood and Chocolate
Jacquelyn Bent and Helen Gavin (University of Huddersfield): An Uberwald Werewolf Howled in Patrician Square
3.00-3.30 Coffee
3.30-5.00 Session 5: Creating the She-Wolf (Chair: Nickianne Moody)
Jazmina Cininas (RMIT University): The Girlie Werewolf Hall of Fame: Historial and Contemporary Representations of the Female Lycanthrope
Chantal Bourgault du Coudray (University of Western Australia): 'You Should Write a Werewolf Screenplay': Meeting the Challenge
Allison Moon (Independent Researcher): Courting the Lunatic Fringe: Shapeshifting at the Vanguard of Queer Activism and Post-Gender Feminism
5.00 Close
For details of how to register for this conference, please go to our registration page
Coming soon: Details of our fabulous fringe events, including a 'Writing the Female Monster' discussion panel and a film screening.
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