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.
Showing posts with label the monstrous. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the monstrous. Show all posts
Monday, 12 August 2013
Friday, 5 July 2013
CFP: Kalamazoo 2014 Sessions
The 49th International Congress of Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, USA
May 8-11, 2014
Three sessions at next year's International Congress of Medieval Studies - please note that different sessions are organized by different people, so please use the correct contact details if submitting abstracts.
Shock! Horror! Didacticism and Diversion in Medieval Biblical Narratives
This session will address the functions and effects of the amplification of “shock” and “horror” in medieval vernacular and visual adaptations of Old and New Testament narratives. They will ask where the opening up of the Word of God for the spiritual edification of the “lewd [common] man” meets up with the exploiting of the dramatic potential in biblical stories for diversion and entertainment – or even titillation. It has been appreciated that Latin works such as Peter Comestor's Historia scholastica (c. 1173) in a sense legitimized the Bible as an “entertaining narrative” (James Morey, 1993); however, assumptions concerning and/or emphases on the moralizing quality of biblical re-imaginings have arguably prevented scholars from considering in detail where vernacular and visual works may be located along what might be termed a “didacticism-diversion spectrum.” This somewhat neglected area of research calls for a multi-disciplinary engagement and dialogue. Papers are sought from across literary studies, art and visual studies, and drama and performance studies. The sessions will appeal to scholars interested in: textual and cultural transmission of biblical stories; the burgeoning study of emotion; the interrelationships of text, image and drama; and the development of popular theology. Papers addressing poetry, prose or drama in the English vernaculars – both Old and Middle English – are especially encouraged, though other vernacular languages will also be considered, particularly if the paper has a comparative approach. Papers addressing visual studies should focus on biblical narrative artwork from England (e.g. The Illustrated Old English Hexateuch; the Holkham Bible), though insular and European continental works may also be considered if they are addressed comparatively with English works. “Shock” and “horror” may be interpreted fairly broadly, but emphasis on the deployment of violence and/or sex will especially be appreciated.
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words together with a completed Participation Form (available here) to session organizer Chris Monk by September 15, 2013. Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the abstract. Abstracts not accepted for this session will be forwarded to the Congress committee for consideration of inclusion in general sessions, as stipulated in Congress policy.
Monsters I: Monstrous Gender
Sponsored by MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application)
Recent trends in monster scholarship are developing a strong focus on the imbrications of monstrosity and gender. We are looking for papers that address the intersection of gender and monstrosity in interesting, unusual, provocative and meaningful ways. We especially encourage papers that seek to move beyond the more traditional uses of monster and gender theories in medieval studies to consider how these categories of thinking can intersect, challenge, problematize, corroborate, support, and inform one another. Interdisciplinary approaches including but not limited to the consideration of monstrous gender in literature, language, history, art history, architecture, philosophy, religion, politics, and/or cultural studies are highly welcome.
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words together with a completed Participant Information Form (available here) to session organizers Melissa Ridley Elmes or Asa Simon Mittman by September 15. Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the abstract itself. Abstracts will be posted to the MEARCSTAPA blog, and all abstracts not accepted for the session will be forwarded to Congress administrators for consideration in general sessions, as per Congress regulations.
Monsters II: Parallel Worlds: Monstrous Voyages, Monstrous Visitors
Sponsored by MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application)
Refraction, reflection, intrusion, illusion, overlay, visitation, wandering, straying: parallel worlds double and haunt medieval landscapes, providing voyage destinations and otherworldly visitors. Medieval worlds are not unitary or univocal, as refugees seek Torelore and the Pays de Cocagne; as chroniclers record or imagine far-off Carthage and Jerusalem; as the secular world finds itself invaded by hellish demons or heavenly angels; as saints and mystics simultaneously inhabit this world and the next. What can other worlds, or other temporalities, tell us about how medieval cultures understood the quotidian or secular world? How does the ingress of or egress to various worlds beyond establish or erode the definition of the here-and-now? Are all such intrusions monstrous? Does monstrosity necessitate intrusion from beyond? We invite papers from all disciplines and national traditions, on topics that might include the double presence of life and death, profane and sacred, self and other, animal and human, native and foreigner, male and female, straight and queer, past, future, and present.
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words together with a completed Participant Information Form (available here) to session organizers Stefanie Goyette or Asa Simon Mittman by September 15. Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the abstract itself. Abstracts will be posted to the MEARCSTAPA blog, and all abstracts not accepted for the session will be forwarded to Congress administrators for consideration in general sessions, as per Congress regulations.
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, USA
May 8-11, 2014
Three sessions at next year's International Congress of Medieval Studies - please note that different sessions are organized by different people, so please use the correct contact details if submitting abstracts.
Shock! Horror! Didacticism and Diversion in Medieval Biblical Narratives
This session will address the functions and effects of the amplification of “shock” and “horror” in medieval vernacular and visual adaptations of Old and New Testament narratives. They will ask where the opening up of the Word of God for the spiritual edification of the “lewd [common] man” meets up with the exploiting of the dramatic potential in biblical stories for diversion and entertainment – or even titillation. It has been appreciated that Latin works such as Peter Comestor's Historia scholastica (c. 1173) in a sense legitimized the Bible as an “entertaining narrative” (James Morey, 1993); however, assumptions concerning and/or emphases on the moralizing quality of biblical re-imaginings have arguably prevented scholars from considering in detail where vernacular and visual works may be located along what might be termed a “didacticism-diversion spectrum.” This somewhat neglected area of research calls for a multi-disciplinary engagement and dialogue. Papers are sought from across literary studies, art and visual studies, and drama and performance studies. The sessions will appeal to scholars interested in: textual and cultural transmission of biblical stories; the burgeoning study of emotion; the interrelationships of text, image and drama; and the development of popular theology. Papers addressing poetry, prose or drama in the English vernaculars – both Old and Middle English – are especially encouraged, though other vernacular languages will also be considered, particularly if the paper has a comparative approach. Papers addressing visual studies should focus on biblical narrative artwork from England (e.g. The Illustrated Old English Hexateuch; the Holkham Bible), though insular and European continental works may also be considered if they are addressed comparatively with English works. “Shock” and “horror” may be interpreted fairly broadly, but emphasis on the deployment of violence and/or sex will especially be appreciated.
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words together with a completed Participation Form (available here) to session organizer Chris Monk by September 15, 2013. Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the abstract. Abstracts not accepted for this session will be forwarded to the Congress committee for consideration of inclusion in general sessions, as stipulated in Congress policy.
Monsters I: Monstrous Gender
Sponsored by MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application)
Recent trends in monster scholarship are developing a strong focus on the imbrications of monstrosity and gender. We are looking for papers that address the intersection of gender and monstrosity in interesting, unusual, provocative and meaningful ways. We especially encourage papers that seek to move beyond the more traditional uses of monster and gender theories in medieval studies to consider how these categories of thinking can intersect, challenge, problematize, corroborate, support, and inform one another. Interdisciplinary approaches including but not limited to the consideration of monstrous gender in literature, language, history, art history, architecture, philosophy, religion, politics, and/or cultural studies are highly welcome.
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words together with a completed Participant Information Form (available here) to session organizers Melissa Ridley Elmes or Asa Simon Mittman by September 15. Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the abstract itself. Abstracts will be posted to the MEARCSTAPA blog, and all abstracts not accepted for the session will be forwarded to Congress administrators for consideration in general sessions, as per Congress regulations.
Monsters II: Parallel Worlds: Monstrous Voyages, Monstrous Visitors
Sponsored by MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application)
Refraction, reflection, intrusion, illusion, overlay, visitation, wandering, straying: parallel worlds double and haunt medieval landscapes, providing voyage destinations and otherworldly visitors. Medieval worlds are not unitary or univocal, as refugees seek Torelore and the Pays de Cocagne; as chroniclers record or imagine far-off Carthage and Jerusalem; as the secular world finds itself invaded by hellish demons or heavenly angels; as saints and mystics simultaneously inhabit this world and the next. What can other worlds, or other temporalities, tell us about how medieval cultures understood the quotidian or secular world? How does the ingress of or egress to various worlds beyond establish or erode the definition of the here-and-now? Are all such intrusions monstrous? Does monstrosity necessitate intrusion from beyond? We invite papers from all disciplines and national traditions, on topics that might include the double presence of life and death, profane and sacred, self and other, animal and human, native and foreigner, male and female, straight and queer, past, future, and present.
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words together with a completed Participant Information Form (available here) to session organizers Stefanie Goyette or Asa Simon Mittman by September 15. Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the abstract itself. Abstracts will be posted to the MEARCSTAPA blog, and all abstracts not accepted for the session will be forwarded to Congress administrators for consideration in general sessions, as per Congress regulations.
Monday, 10 December 2012
CFP: 11th Global Conference: Monsters and the Monstrous
Thursday 18th July – Saturday 20th July 2013
Mansfield College, Oxford
Call for Presentations
This inter and trans-disciplinary project examines all things monstrous; whether real or imagined, ideological or cultural, historic or futuristic. Building on the discussion points of the previous meeting, this year’s event will focus upon points of concentration within issues raised at last years events as well as examining certain aspects of the current ubiquity of particular monsters in contemporary popular culture.
Presentations, papers, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:
-Humans as monsters and monsters as humans: Popular media sensationalism and fascination around humans as mass murderers, serial killers and paedophiles (Hitler, Ted Bundy, etc.) and films such as Saw and Hostel where monsters are very much part of our everyday evironment whilst figures such as Dexter and vegetarian vampires, that only kill animals or bad people, are considered heroes.
-The Zombie Apocalypse: the ubiquity of the zombie in popular culture both of what we are now and what we will/might become. As a political, ideological figure but also its continuing humanification in literature and film (Warm Bodies, Breathers, Wasting Away, Zombie Neighbour etc.)
-Contagion, infection and disease: The continual fears around over population, invasion and infection causing, or caused by ecological, biological or technological viruses. Hybridity, mutation and cultural death-drive.
-Translation, appropriation and interpretation: The movement of monsters across time and cultures. How historical monsters have changed in later manifestations and how different cultures view, appropriate and reinterpret monsters from other nations (i.e. vampires moving from Europe to the USA, to Japan and back again).
-Children and monsters: Children as the target of monsters, children and childhood as monstrous. Monstrous babies & births, adults in children’s bodies. Child vampires, zombies, demons and ghosts.
-Possession: The popularity of films and narratives around the theme of possession and mind control and the resultant anxieties over identity and the ‘true’ self. Demon possession, as in Paranormal Activity and The Devil Inside, Compelling, glamouring and mind control, as in Vampire Diaries and True Blood.
-The resurgence of faeries and fairy tales, as seen in series such as True Blood, Once Upon a Time, Grimm and Haven, and how not all monsters are bad or can only exist in relation to a pre-existing script?
-The continuing use of Nazis and Nazism as a short-hand for cultural and ideological monstrosity, as in Frostbite, Dead Snow, Hellboy 1 & 2, Iron Sky.
All of the above can also be considered in relation to, cultural and geographical specificity, gender and sexuality, ethnicity and historical approaches.
What to Send:
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 15th March 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 31st May 2013. Abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords
E-mails should be entitled: Monsters11 Abstract Submission
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication.We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Organising Chairs:
Rob Fisher
Simon Bacon
The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.
For further details of the conference, please click here.
Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.
Mansfield College, Oxford
Call for Presentations
This inter and trans-disciplinary project examines all things monstrous; whether real or imagined, ideological or cultural, historic or futuristic. Building on the discussion points of the previous meeting, this year’s event will focus upon points of concentration within issues raised at last years events as well as examining certain aspects of the current ubiquity of particular monsters in contemporary popular culture.
Presentations, papers, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:
-Humans as monsters and monsters as humans: Popular media sensationalism and fascination around humans as mass murderers, serial killers and paedophiles (Hitler, Ted Bundy, etc.) and films such as Saw and Hostel where monsters are very much part of our everyday evironment whilst figures such as Dexter and vegetarian vampires, that only kill animals or bad people, are considered heroes.
-The Zombie Apocalypse: the ubiquity of the zombie in popular culture both of what we are now and what we will/might become. As a political, ideological figure but also its continuing humanification in literature and film (Warm Bodies, Breathers, Wasting Away, Zombie Neighbour etc.)
-Contagion, infection and disease: The continual fears around over population, invasion and infection causing, or caused by ecological, biological or technological viruses. Hybridity, mutation and cultural death-drive.
-Translation, appropriation and interpretation: The movement of monsters across time and cultures. How historical monsters have changed in later manifestations and how different cultures view, appropriate and reinterpret monsters from other nations (i.e. vampires moving from Europe to the USA, to Japan and back again).
-Children and monsters: Children as the target of monsters, children and childhood as monstrous. Monstrous babies & births, adults in children’s bodies. Child vampires, zombies, demons and ghosts.
-Possession: The popularity of films and narratives around the theme of possession and mind control and the resultant anxieties over identity and the ‘true’ self. Demon possession, as in Paranormal Activity and The Devil Inside, Compelling, glamouring and mind control, as in Vampire Diaries and True Blood.
-The resurgence of faeries and fairy tales, as seen in series such as True Blood, Once Upon a Time, Grimm and Haven, and how not all monsters are bad or can only exist in relation to a pre-existing script?
-The continuing use of Nazis and Nazism as a short-hand for cultural and ideological monstrosity, as in Frostbite, Dead Snow, Hellboy 1 & 2, Iron Sky.
All of the above can also be considered in relation to, cultural and geographical specificity, gender and sexuality, ethnicity and historical approaches.
What to Send:
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 15th March 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 31st May 2013. Abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords
E-mails should be entitled: Monsters11 Abstract Submission
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication.We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Organising Chairs:
Rob Fisher
Simon Bacon
The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.
For further details of the conference, please click here.
Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.
Wednesday, 5 September 2012
CFP: 2nd Global Conference: Monstrous Geographies
Wednesday 15th May – Friday 17th May 2013
Prague, Czech Republic
Call for Presentations:
What is the relationship between the monstrous and the geographic? From ‘Aristotelian’ spaces – as containers of monsters and the monstrous – to ‘Leibnizian’ spaces, where the monstrous emerges from the topological relation between events and localities, monstrous geographies have always haunted the human cultural imagination. From the Necropolis to the Killing Fields and from the Amityville Horror to the island of Dr. Moreau, geographical locations may act as the repository or emanation of human evil, made monstrous by the rituals and behaviours enacted within them, or by their peculiarities of atmosphere or configuration. Whether actual or imagined, these places of wonder, fear and horror speak of the symbiotic relation between humanity and location that sees morality, ideology and emotions given physical form in the house, the forest, the island, the nation and even far away worlds in both space and time. They may engage notions of self and otherness, inclusion and exclusion, normal and aberrant, defence and contagion; may act as magnets for destructive and evil forces, such as the island of Manhattan; they are the source of malevolent energies and forces, such as Transylvania, Area 51 and Ringu; and they are the fulcrum for chaotic, warping energies, such as the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis and Pandemonium. Alongside this, there exist the monstrous geographies created by scientific experimentation, human waste and environmental accidents, creating sites of potential and actual disaster such as the Chernobyl nuclear plant, the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of the BP oil disaster, and the devastated coastline of Tohuku, Japan. These places raise diverse post-human quandaries regarding necessities in the present leading to real or imagined futures of humanity and habitation.
Encompassing the factual and the fictional, the literal and the literary, this project investigates the very particular relationships and interactions between humanity and place, the natural and the unnatural, the familiar and the unfamiliar, and sees a multitude of configurations of human monstrosity and evil projected, inflicted, or immanent to place. Such monstrous geographies can be seen to emerge from the disparity between past and present, memory and modernity, urban and rural and can be expressed through categories of class, gender and racial difference as well as generational, political and religious tensions.
Presentations, papers, reports, performances, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:
Monstrous Cartographies
~Terra incognita
~Real and Mythic lost lands: eg., Atlantis, D’yss, and Shangri-La
~Utopias/Dystopias, future cities in time and space
~Malevolent regions: eg., Lemuria, Bermuda Triangle, Transylvania
~Sublime landscapes
~Bodies as maps and maps as bodies, eg. Prison Break
Monstrous Islands
~As sites of experimentation. Dr. Moreau, Jurassic Park etc As a beacon for evil: eg., Manhattan in Godzilla and Cloverfield
~As site of ritual evil and incest: eg., Wicker Man, Pitkin Islands, Isle of the Dead
~Imperialist intent and construction: eg., Prospero’s Island, Hong Kong, Hashima
Monstrous Cosmographies
~Evil planets and dimensions
~Comets, meteorites and beings from unknown worlds
~Worlds as dark reflections/twins of Earth
~Planets and alien landscapes that consume and mutate earthly travelers
Monstrous Environmental Geographies
~Polluted lakes and landscapes
~Landfills, oil spills and mining sites
~Melting icecaps and landforms at risk from global warming
~Land impacted by GM crops and associated experimentation
~Sites of starvation, disaster and pestilence
~De-militarized zones and no-man’s lands
Monstrous Religious Sites & Ritualistic Monstrosity
~Armageddon, Apocalypse and final battlegrounds
~Hell, the Underworld and Valhalla
~Eden, Purgatory, Paradise, El Dorado, Shangri La
~Sites of religious ritual, sacrifice and burial
~Houses and haunts of murderers and serial killers
Monstrous Landscapes of Conflict
~The land of the enemy and the other
~Sites of attack and retaliation
~Sites of revolution and protest
~Concentration camps, prisons and other sites of incarceration
~Sites of genocide, battlefields and military graveyards
~Border crossings
~Ghettos, shanty towns and relocation sites
~Urban and rural, cities, towns and villages and regional and national prejudice
~Minefields and sites of damage, destruction and ruin
~Arsenals, bunkers and military experimentation
Uncanny Geographical Temporalities
~Old buildings in new surroundings
~Buildings with too much, and those without, memory
~Soulless Architecture
~Ideological architecture, palaces, museums etc
~Places held in time, UNESCO sites and historical and listed buildings
~Old towns and New towns, rich and poor
~Appearing and disappearing towns/regions, eg., Brigadoon, Silent Hill
Monsters on the Move
~Contagion, scouring and infectious landscapes
~Monsters and mobile technologies: phone, video, cars, planes, computers etc
~Fluid identities, fluid places
~Touring Monstrosities, dreamscapes and infernal topologies
Architectural Monstrosity
~Mazes and labyrinths (with or without the Minotaur)
~Unsettling/revolting geometries (E.A. Abbot’s Flatland, H.P. Lovecraft’s City of R’lyeh)
~Monstrous/abject building materials (bones, concrete, excrements, the corpse in the wall)
~The architecture of death (hospices, death row, funeral homes, slaughterhouses)
What to Send:
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 30th November 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 15th February 2013. 300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f0 up to 10 keywords
E-mails should be entitled: Monstrous Geographies 2 Abstract Submission
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Organising Chairs
Jessica Rapson
Rob Fisher
The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.
For further details of the conference, please click here.
Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.
Prague, Czech Republic
Call for Presentations:
What is the relationship between the monstrous and the geographic? From ‘Aristotelian’ spaces – as containers of monsters and the monstrous – to ‘Leibnizian’ spaces, where the monstrous emerges from the topological relation between events and localities, monstrous geographies have always haunted the human cultural imagination. From the Necropolis to the Killing Fields and from the Amityville Horror to the island of Dr. Moreau, geographical locations may act as the repository or emanation of human evil, made monstrous by the rituals and behaviours enacted within them, or by their peculiarities of atmosphere or configuration. Whether actual or imagined, these places of wonder, fear and horror speak of the symbiotic relation between humanity and location that sees morality, ideology and emotions given physical form in the house, the forest, the island, the nation and even far away worlds in both space and time. They may engage notions of self and otherness, inclusion and exclusion, normal and aberrant, defence and contagion; may act as magnets for destructive and evil forces, such as the island of Manhattan; they are the source of malevolent energies and forces, such as Transylvania, Area 51 and Ringu; and they are the fulcrum for chaotic, warping energies, such as the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis and Pandemonium. Alongside this, there exist the monstrous geographies created by scientific experimentation, human waste and environmental accidents, creating sites of potential and actual disaster such as the Chernobyl nuclear plant, the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of the BP oil disaster, and the devastated coastline of Tohuku, Japan. These places raise diverse post-human quandaries regarding necessities in the present leading to real or imagined futures of humanity and habitation.
Encompassing the factual and the fictional, the literal and the literary, this project investigates the very particular relationships and interactions between humanity and place, the natural and the unnatural, the familiar and the unfamiliar, and sees a multitude of configurations of human monstrosity and evil projected, inflicted, or immanent to place. Such monstrous geographies can be seen to emerge from the disparity between past and present, memory and modernity, urban and rural and can be expressed through categories of class, gender and racial difference as well as generational, political and religious tensions.
Presentations, papers, reports, performances, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:
Monstrous Cartographies
~Terra incognita
~Real and Mythic lost lands: eg., Atlantis, D’yss, and Shangri-La
~Utopias/Dystopias, future cities in time and space
~Malevolent regions: eg., Lemuria, Bermuda Triangle, Transylvania
~Sublime landscapes
~Bodies as maps and maps as bodies, eg. Prison Break
Monstrous Islands
~As sites of experimentation. Dr. Moreau, Jurassic Park etc As a beacon for evil: eg., Manhattan in Godzilla and Cloverfield
~As site of ritual evil and incest: eg., Wicker Man, Pitkin Islands, Isle of the Dead
~Imperialist intent and construction: eg., Prospero’s Island, Hong Kong, Hashima
Monstrous Cosmographies
~Evil planets and dimensions
~Comets, meteorites and beings from unknown worlds
~Worlds as dark reflections/twins of Earth
~Planets and alien landscapes that consume and mutate earthly travelers
Monstrous Environmental Geographies
~Polluted lakes and landscapes
~Landfills, oil spills and mining sites
~Melting icecaps and landforms at risk from global warming
~Land impacted by GM crops and associated experimentation
~Sites of starvation, disaster and pestilence
~De-militarized zones and no-man’s lands
Monstrous Religious Sites & Ritualistic Monstrosity
~Armageddon, Apocalypse and final battlegrounds
~Hell, the Underworld and Valhalla
~Eden, Purgatory, Paradise, El Dorado, Shangri La
~Sites of religious ritual, sacrifice and burial
~Houses and haunts of murderers and serial killers
Monstrous Landscapes of Conflict
~The land of the enemy and the other
~Sites of attack and retaliation
~Sites of revolution and protest
~Concentration camps, prisons and other sites of incarceration
~Sites of genocide, battlefields and military graveyards
~Border crossings
~Ghettos, shanty towns and relocation sites
~Urban and rural, cities, towns and villages and regional and national prejudice
~Minefields and sites of damage, destruction and ruin
~Arsenals, bunkers and military experimentation
Uncanny Geographical Temporalities
~Old buildings in new surroundings
~Buildings with too much, and those without, memory
~Soulless Architecture
~Ideological architecture, palaces, museums etc
~Places held in time, UNESCO sites and historical and listed buildings
~Old towns and New towns, rich and poor
~Appearing and disappearing towns/regions, eg., Brigadoon, Silent Hill
Monsters on the Move
~Contagion, scouring and infectious landscapes
~Monsters and mobile technologies: phone, video, cars, planes, computers etc
~Fluid identities, fluid places
~Touring Monstrosities, dreamscapes and infernal topologies
Architectural Monstrosity
~Mazes and labyrinths (with or without the Minotaur)
~Unsettling/revolting geometries (E.A. Abbot’s Flatland, H.P. Lovecraft’s City of R’lyeh)
~Monstrous/abject building materials (bones, concrete, excrements, the corpse in the wall)
~The architecture of death (hospices, death row, funeral homes, slaughterhouses)
What to Send:
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 30th November 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 15th February 2013. 300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f0 up to 10 keywords
E-mails should be entitled: Monstrous Geographies 2 Abstract Submission
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Organising Chairs
Jessica Rapson
Rob Fisher
The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.
For further details of the conference, please click here.
Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.
Call for Submissions: Monsters and the Monstrous Journal
Volume 3, Number 1, Themed Issue on Monstrous Spaces/Spaces of Monstrosity
This issue is concentrating on spaces that are considered monstrous or are themselves capable of producing monstrosity. these spaces can be actual or authored, real or imaginary. Spaces of violence and murder, social taboo, ideological excess and human depravity from the past, present or future. Equally spaces natural or supernatural, earth found or star bound that produce, spawn or inevitably return to monstrosity in all its many human, cultural and temporal forms.
The Editors welcome contributions to the journal in the form of articles, reviews, reports, art and/or visual pieces and other forms of submission on the following or related themes:
● Monstrous Landscapes of Conflict: Genocide, battle zones, imprisonment, execution, torture
● Monstrous Environments: Biological experimentation, nuclear fallout, GM crops
● Monstrous Temporalities: Other dimensions, spirit worlds, mythical places
● Monstrous Cosmographies: Outer Space, Alien worlds, Terra Incognita, space craft, parallel universes
● Monstrous Religious Spaces: Hell, Hades, Purgatory, Heaven, Nirvana, Valhalla, Samsara, Paradise
● Monstrous Ideological Spaces: Society, Politics, Difference, Gender, Colonial, Post Colonial, Disabilities
Submissions for this Issue are required by Friday 8th March 2013 at the latest.
Contributions to the journal should be original and not under consideration for other publications at the same time as they are under consideration for this publication. Submissions are to be made electronically wherever possible using either Microsoft® Word or .rtf format.
For Further Information, please visit the journal's website.
Contributions are also invited for future issues of the journal which will include: “Monstrous Beauty/The Beauty of Monstrosity.”
We also invite submission to our special features on Non-English Language Book Reviews. Please mark entries for these topics with their respective headings.
All accepted articles, artworks and prose pieces will receive a free electronic version of the journal.
Length Requirements:
Articles – 5,000 – 7,000 words.
Reflections, reports and responses – 1,000 – 3,000 words.
Book reviews – 500 – 4,000 words.
Other forms of contributions such as artworks, photographs, poetry, prose and short stories are welcome.
In the case of visual work and images we ask that all copyrights to publication are either obtained or owned by the author/artist.
Send submissions via e-mail using the following Subject Line:
'Journal: Contribution Type (article/review/…): Author Surname'
Submissions E-Mail Address
Submissions will be acknowledged within 48 hours of receipt.
This issue is concentrating on spaces that are considered monstrous or are themselves capable of producing monstrosity. these spaces can be actual or authored, real or imaginary. Spaces of violence and murder, social taboo, ideological excess and human depravity from the past, present or future. Equally spaces natural or supernatural, earth found or star bound that produce, spawn or inevitably return to monstrosity in all its many human, cultural and temporal forms.
The Editors welcome contributions to the journal in the form of articles, reviews, reports, art and/or visual pieces and other forms of submission on the following or related themes:
● Monstrous Landscapes of Conflict: Genocide, battle zones, imprisonment, execution, torture
● Monstrous Environments: Biological experimentation, nuclear fallout, GM crops
● Monstrous Temporalities: Other dimensions, spirit worlds, mythical places
● Monstrous Cosmographies: Outer Space, Alien worlds, Terra Incognita, space craft, parallel universes
● Monstrous Religious Spaces: Hell, Hades, Purgatory, Heaven, Nirvana, Valhalla, Samsara, Paradise
● Monstrous Ideological Spaces: Society, Politics, Difference, Gender, Colonial, Post Colonial, Disabilities
Submissions for this Issue are required by Friday 8th March 2013 at the latest.
Contributions to the journal should be original and not under consideration for other publications at the same time as they are under consideration for this publication. Submissions are to be made electronically wherever possible using either Microsoft® Word or .rtf format.
For Further Information, please visit the journal's website.
Contributions are also invited for future issues of the journal which will include: “Monstrous Beauty/The Beauty of Monstrosity.”
We also invite submission to our special features on Non-English Language Book Reviews. Please mark entries for these topics with their respective headings.
All accepted articles, artworks and prose pieces will receive a free electronic version of the journal.
Length Requirements:
Articles – 5,000 – 7,000 words.
Reflections, reports and responses – 1,000 – 3,000 words.
Book reviews – 500 – 4,000 words.
Other forms of contributions such as artworks, photographs, poetry, prose and short stories are welcome.
In the case of visual work and images we ask that all copyrights to publication are either obtained or owned by the author/artist.
Send submissions via e-mail using the following Subject Line:
'Journal: Contribution Type (article/review/…): Author Surname'
Submissions E-Mail Address
Submissions will be acknowledged within 48 hours of receipt.
Monday, 14 May 2012
Journal Announcement and Call for Submissions: Monsters and the Monstrous
Volume 2, Number 2
Special Issue on Monstrous Pedagogy: Teaching and Reading the Twilight Saga
As we approach the release of the final cinematic installment of the Twilight Saga we want to focus on monsters and pedagogy and in particular the relation between “Twilight and the Classroom”. How do we teach Twilight? Why do we teach Twilight? Should we teach Twilight?
The Editors welcome contributions to the journal in the form of articles, reviews, reports, art and/or visual pieces and other forms of submission on the following or related themes:
● Twilight and Gender and Sexuality Studies
● Twilight and Literary Studies
● Twilight and Cultural Studies
● Twilight and Film Studies
● Twilight and Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity
● Twilight and Disability Studies
● Twilight and Religious Studies
● Twilight and Psychology
● Twilight and Sociology
Submissions for this Issue are required by Friday 3rd August 2012 at the latest.
Contributions to the journal should be original and not under consideration for other publications at the same time as they are under consideration for this publication. Submissions are to be made electronically wherever possible using either Microsoft® Word or .rtf format.
Length Requirements:
Articles - 5,000 – 7,000 words
Reflections, reports and responses - 1,000 – 3,000 words
Book reviews - 500 – 4,000 words
Artworks and photographs (Copyright permissions required)
Poems, prose and short stories
Other forms of contributions are also welcome
Submission Information:
Send submissions via e-mail using the following Subject Line: ‘Journal: Contribution Type (article/review/...): Author Surname’ and marked "Monstrous Pedagogy."
Submissions E-Mail Address
Submissions will be acknowledged within 48 hours of receipt.
Contributions are also invited for future issues of the journal which will include: "Monstrous Spaces/ Spaces of Monstrosity" and "Monstrous Beauty."
We also invite submission to our special features on Non-English Language Book Reviews, and Monstrous Pedagogy. Please mark entries for these topics with their respective headings.
We look forward to folks getting involved in and with the journal.
Special Issue on Monstrous Pedagogy: Teaching and Reading the Twilight Saga
As we approach the release of the final cinematic installment of the Twilight Saga we want to focus on monsters and pedagogy and in particular the relation between “Twilight and the Classroom”. How do we teach Twilight? Why do we teach Twilight? Should we teach Twilight?
The Editors welcome contributions to the journal in the form of articles, reviews, reports, art and/or visual pieces and other forms of submission on the following or related themes:
● Twilight and Gender and Sexuality Studies
● Twilight and Literary Studies
● Twilight and Cultural Studies
● Twilight and Film Studies
● Twilight and Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity
● Twilight and Disability Studies
● Twilight and Religious Studies
● Twilight and Psychology
● Twilight and Sociology
Submissions for this Issue are required by Friday 3rd August 2012 at the latest.
Contributions to the journal should be original and not under consideration for other publications at the same time as they are under consideration for this publication. Submissions are to be made electronically wherever possible using either Microsoft® Word or .rtf format.
Length Requirements:
Articles - 5,000 – 7,000 words
Reflections, reports and responses - 1,000 – 3,000 words
Book reviews - 500 – 4,000 words
Artworks and photographs (Copyright permissions required)
Poems, prose and short stories
Other forms of contributions are also welcome
Submission Information:
Send submissions via e-mail using the following Subject Line: ‘Journal: Contribution Type (article/review/...): Author Surname’ and marked "Monstrous Pedagogy."
Submissions E-Mail Address
Submissions will be acknowledged within 48 hours of receipt.
Contributions are also invited for future issues of the journal which will include: "Monstrous Spaces/ Spaces of Monstrosity" and "Monstrous Beauty."
We also invite submission to our special features on Non-English Language Book Reviews, and Monstrous Pedagogy. Please mark entries for these topics with their respective headings.
We look forward to folks getting involved in and with the journal.
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
Saturday, 25 February 2012
CFP: Journal Announcement: Monsters and the Monstrous
Volume 2, Number 1, Special Issue on Monstrous Memory
The Editors welcome contributions to the journal in the form of articles, reviews, reports, art and/or visual pieces and other forms of submission on the following or related themes:
Monstrous Memory
Sethe: "It's so hard for me to believe in . Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. . . But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place - the picture of it - stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world".
Denver: "If it's still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies."
Sethe: "Nothing ever does." (Morrison, Beloved)
Monsters of memory, monstrous memories, monsters as memories.
Keywords: memory, remembrance, history, trauma, the past, undead, re-memory, undying, haunting, unheimlich, spectres, monsters, ghosts.
Call for Articles:
This special issue of Monsters and the Monstrous is looking for articles and reviews that are based around the idea of Monstrosity and Memory.
Memories of the past, whether individual, societal or national constantly invade our everyday lives. Sometimes as the remembrance of monstrous past events that can, and should, never die or be forgotten but also as disruptive and destructive presences that upset, intrude and invade our equilibrium and sense of self.
EXAMPLES:
Monstrous events and people that live on today:
-the holocaust and national geneocides, hiroshima etc.
-natural disasters, tsunamis, eartquakes and volcanic eruptions.
-monstrous figures from the past such as Rasputin, Jack the Ripper, Stalin.
-the national and cultural disparities in the conceptions of all of the above.
Monstrous entities from the past in fiction and film:
- Manifestations of the national past and political extremism, The Grudge, Godzilla, Dead Snow, Frostbite
- Representation of monsters that lived before humans, Cthulhu (Lovecraft), Jurassic Park, Starship Troopers, Priest.
Ghosts and Spirits that Haunt the Present:
-Popular series such as Medium, The Ghost Whisperer, Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
-Discontented figures that want justice or revenge, Woman in Black, Death Watch, Ringu, Nightmare on Elm Street
- traumatic events that cannot be escaped, Silent Hill, Triangle, Inception
Whether Proustian flashbacks or actual embodiments , metaphorical, psychological, or phantasical the monsters of the past will not relinquish their hold on our times, lives and imaginations.
Submissions for this Issue are required by 31st March 2012 at the latest.
Contributions to the journal should be original and not under consideration for other publications at the same time as they are under consideration for this publication. Submissions are to be made electronically wherever possible using either Microsoft® Word or .rtf format.
Length Requirements:
Articles - 5,000 – 7,000 words.
Reflections, reports and responses - 1,000 – 3,000 words.
Book reviews - 500 – 4,000 words.
Other forms of contributions are welcome.
Submission Information:
Send submissions via e-mail using the following Subject Line:
‘Journal: Contribution Type (article/review/...): Author Surname’ and marked "Monstrous Memory".
Submissions E-Mail Address
Submissions will be acknowledged within 48 hours of receipt.
Contributions are also invited for future issues of the journal which will include: "Twilight and Teaching the Monstrous", "Monstrous Spaces".
We also invite submission to our special features on Non-English Language Book Reviews, and Monstrous Pedagogy. Please mark entries for these topics with their title.
For more information about the journal, please click here.
The Editors welcome contributions to the journal in the form of articles, reviews, reports, art and/or visual pieces and other forms of submission on the following or related themes:
Monstrous Memory
Sethe: "It's so hard for me to believe in . Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. . . But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place - the picture of it - stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world".
Denver: "If it's still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies."
Sethe: "Nothing ever does." (Morrison, Beloved)
Monsters of memory, monstrous memories, monsters as memories.
Keywords: memory, remembrance, history, trauma, the past, undead, re-memory, undying, haunting, unheimlich, spectres, monsters, ghosts.
Call for Articles:
This special issue of Monsters and the Monstrous is looking for articles and reviews that are based around the idea of Monstrosity and Memory.
Memories of the past, whether individual, societal or national constantly invade our everyday lives. Sometimes as the remembrance of monstrous past events that can, and should, never die or be forgotten but also as disruptive and destructive presences that upset, intrude and invade our equilibrium and sense of self.
EXAMPLES:
Monstrous events and people that live on today:
-the holocaust and national geneocides, hiroshima etc.
-natural disasters, tsunamis, eartquakes and volcanic eruptions.
-monstrous figures from the past such as Rasputin, Jack the Ripper, Stalin.
-the national and cultural disparities in the conceptions of all of the above.
Monstrous entities from the past in fiction and film:
- Manifestations of the national past and political extremism, The Grudge, Godzilla, Dead Snow, Frostbite
- Representation of monsters that lived before humans, Cthulhu (Lovecraft), Jurassic Park, Starship Troopers, Priest.
Ghosts and Spirits that Haunt the Present:
-Popular series such as Medium, The Ghost Whisperer, Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
-Discontented figures that want justice or revenge, Woman in Black, Death Watch, Ringu, Nightmare on Elm Street
- traumatic events that cannot be escaped, Silent Hill, Triangle, Inception
Whether Proustian flashbacks or actual embodiments , metaphorical, psychological, or phantasical the monsters of the past will not relinquish their hold on our times, lives and imaginations.
Submissions for this Issue are required by 31st March 2012 at the latest.
Contributions to the journal should be original and not under consideration for other publications at the same time as they are under consideration for this publication. Submissions are to be made electronically wherever possible using either Microsoft® Word or .rtf format.
Length Requirements:
Articles - 5,000 – 7,000 words.
Reflections, reports and responses - 1,000 – 3,000 words.
Book reviews - 500 – 4,000 words.
Other forms of contributions are welcome.
Submission Information:
Send submissions via e-mail using the following Subject Line:
‘Journal: Contribution Type (article/review/...): Author Surname’ and marked "Monstrous Memory".
Submissions E-Mail Address
Contributions are also invited for future issues of the journal which will include: "Twilight and Teaching the Monstrous", "Monstrous Spaces".
We also invite submission to our special features on Non-English Language Book Reviews, and Monstrous Pedagogy. Please mark entries for these topics with their title.
Wednesday, 22 February 2012
GUEST POST: Bryan Sitch (The Manchester Museum)
Monsters, the Museum and Sacrificial Theory
When Hannah contacted me about contributing a paper to a conference she is organising on the subject of Monsters, I immediately thought of the presentation I gave - or rather a colleague gave on my behalf - at a conference a year or so ago. In the paper I made a brief survey of objects in the Manchester Museum archaeology collection depicting monsters, including Odysseus in the Cyclops’ cave on an ancient Greek vase and figurines of the chimera or chimaera, the sirens and the sphinx.
At that time I was very interested in sacrificial theory, but I was only able to touch upon the topic in passing because most of the paper was devoted to monstrous objects in the Museum collection. One of the questions I posed was if, as has been argued by Adrienne Mayor in her fascinating book The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times (2001), some of the monsters in ancient Greek myths were inspired by discoveries of fossilised bones from long-extinct Mediterranean megafauna, then how do we explain weird composites or hybrids like the chimaera or the sphinx in which the bodies of completely different creatures are mixed together? The former animal had the body of a lioness with a snake for a tail and a goat’s head sticking out of its back. It's like one of those books for children in which you turn a page and the head of one person is superimposed upon the body of someone else who is in turn superimposed over the lower body of another person. Reading Rene Girard's books about sacrificial theory seemed to offer a solution. Girard is a French academic who has worked for many years in the USA
His argument goes something like this: in the distant past members of a community that facing a flood or a famine or pestilence might experience into a state of collective anxiety such that the members of that community become progressively more agitated to the point where a total break-down of order and respect for social distinction is threatened. Girard compares the situation to a pan of milk about to boil over. What prevents the pan boiling over and a collective descent into anarchy – what Girard calls the ‘sacrifical crisis’- is the selection of a victim or scapegoat who acts as a lightning rod, exorcising the communal frenzy and bringing about a return to normality. Typically the victim is accused of having committed horrendous crimes and suffers a violent death in which all the members of the community take part. The victim is selected on the basis of disabilities or blemishes (and sometimes being unblemished is the excuse). Think of the myth of Oedipus with his club foot for example. Once order has been restored the community rationalises its violent treatment of the victim, who undergoes a change of status. Girard calls this the ‘mythic crystallisation’. Instead of being held responsible for the break-down of social order the victim is seen as having brought about its resolution and becomes a sanctified figure.
There are a number of things here that are relevant. Firstly, people who suffer from a disability or a blemish can be perceived as monstrous as well as being accused of monstrous crimes by other members of the community. Think of Oedipus who murdered his father and married his mother. Secondly Girard characterises the descent into chaos as a lack of respect for order and degree and social hierarchies. The people involved become so agitated that they can no longer make sense of what they are seeing. In the collective madness their perceptions are confused, resulting in the mixing of different categories, such as animal and human, and the creation of monstrous compilations and hybrids.
Monstrosity, therefore, is an important part of Rene Girard’s work on scape-goating. This offers potentially a way of understanding monsters, of which hybrids like the chimaera and the sphinx in Greek mythology are such memorable examples.
Bryan Sitch
Deputy Head of Collections and Curator of Archaeology
The Manchester Museum
Images:
1. Bronze Figurine of a Sphinx
2. Terracota Depicting Medusa
Bryan Sitch will be speaking on 'Monsters, the Museum and Sacrificial Theory' at the Hic Dragones Monsters: Subject, Object, Abject Conference, to be held at the Manchester Museum on 12-13 April 2012. For more information about the conference, please visit the Hic Dragones website.
When Hannah contacted me about contributing a paper to a conference she is organising on the subject of Monsters, I immediately thought of the presentation I gave - or rather a colleague gave on my behalf - at a conference a year or so ago. In the paper I made a brief survey of objects in the Manchester Museum archaeology collection depicting monsters, including Odysseus in the Cyclops’ cave on an ancient Greek vase and figurines of the chimera or chimaera, the sirens and the sphinx.
At that time I was very interested in sacrificial theory, but I was only able to touch upon the topic in passing because most of the paper was devoted to monstrous objects in the Museum collection. One of the questions I posed was if, as has been argued by Adrienne Mayor in her fascinating book The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times (2001), some of the monsters in ancient Greek myths were inspired by discoveries of fossilised bones from long-extinct Mediterranean megafauna, then how do we explain weird composites or hybrids like the chimaera or the sphinx in which the bodies of completely different creatures are mixed together? The former animal had the body of a lioness with a snake for a tail and a goat’s head sticking out of its back. It's like one of those books for children in which you turn a page and the head of one person is superimposed upon the body of someone else who is in turn superimposed over the lower body of another person. Reading Rene Girard's books about sacrificial theory seemed to offer a solution. Girard is a French academic who has worked for many years in the USA
His argument goes something like this: in the distant past members of a community that facing a flood or a famine or pestilence might experience into a state of collective anxiety such that the members of that community become progressively more agitated to the point where a total break-down of order and respect for social distinction is threatened. Girard compares the situation to a pan of milk about to boil over. What prevents the pan boiling over and a collective descent into anarchy – what Girard calls the ‘sacrifical crisis’- is the selection of a victim or scapegoat who acts as a lightning rod, exorcising the communal frenzy and bringing about a return to normality. Typically the victim is accused of having committed horrendous crimes and suffers a violent death in which all the members of the community take part. The victim is selected on the basis of disabilities or blemishes (and sometimes being unblemished is the excuse). Think of the myth of Oedipus with his club foot for example. Once order has been restored the community rationalises its violent treatment of the victim, who undergoes a change of status. Girard calls this the ‘mythic crystallisation’. Instead of being held responsible for the break-down of social order the victim is seen as having brought about its resolution and becomes a sanctified figure.
There are a number of things here that are relevant. Firstly, people who suffer from a disability or a blemish can be perceived as monstrous as well as being accused of monstrous crimes by other members of the community. Think of Oedipus who murdered his father and married his mother. Secondly Girard characterises the descent into chaos as a lack of respect for order and degree and social hierarchies. The people involved become so agitated that they can no longer make sense of what they are seeing. In the collective madness their perceptions are confused, resulting in the mixing of different categories, such as animal and human, and the creation of monstrous compilations and hybrids.
Monstrosity, therefore, is an important part of Rene Girard’s work on scape-goating. This offers potentially a way of understanding monsters, of which hybrids like the chimaera and the sphinx in Greek mythology are such memorable examples.
Bryan Sitch
Deputy Head of Collections and Curator of Archaeology
The Manchester Museum
Images:
1. Bronze Figurine of a Sphinx
2. Terracota Depicting Medusa
Bryan Sitch will be speaking on 'Monsters, the Museum and Sacrificial Theory' at the Hic Dragones Monsters: Subject, Object, Abject Conference, to be held at the Manchester Museum on 12-13 April 2012. For more information about the conference, please visit the Hic Dragones website.
Tuesday, 21 February 2012
Monsters: Subject, Object, Abject
Kanaris Lecture Theatre and Conference Room
Manchester Museum, Oxford Road,
Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom
Thursday 12th April – Friday 13th April 2012
Conference Programme
Thursday 12th April
9.00-9.30am: Registration
9.30-11.00am: Opening Remarks (Dr. Hannah Priest, University of Manchester) and Session 1: Monsters in Popular Culture (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Matthew Freeman (University of Nottingham): Who’s Monster?: Monsters, Subjectivity, and the Figure of the Child in Doctor Who
(ii) James Campbell (University of Stirling): ‘Welcome to the Madhouse’: The Conflation of Monstrosity, Madness and Mental Illness in DC Comics’ Batman Franchise
(iii) Christina Wilkins (University of Southampton): Transatlantic Differences and the Importance of Religion in Post-9/11 Monsters
11.00-11.30am: Coffee
11.30-1.00pm: Parallel Sessions
Session 2a: Literary Monsters (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Lisa Tagliaferri (The Graduate Center, CUNY): S’el fu sì bel com’elli è ora brutto: Dante’s Vision of Lucifer
(ii) Imke Heuer (University of Southampton): ‘A brood of monsters like myself’: Joshua Pickersgill’s The Three Brothers, Byron’s The Deformed Transformed and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(iii) Giulia I. Sandelewski (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham): Vengeful or Revenger? Renaissance Drama as a Lens for Vallgren’s Hercules Barefoot
Session 2b: Making Monsters (Conference Room)
Chair: TBC
(i) Lisa Temple-Cox (Independant Researcher): Making Myself a Monster: Self-Portraiture as Teratological Specimen
(ii) Rosie Garland (Independent Researcher): ‘The Girl You Never Loved But Always Looked For’: Occupational Therapy and the Development of the Performance Persona Rosie Lugosi the Vampire Queen
(iii) Susanne Hamscha (FU Berlin): “Gaga, Ooh La La”: Lady Gaga and the Pleasures of Being a Freak
1.00-2.00pm: Lunch
2.00-3.30pm: Parallel Sessions
Session 3a: Embodying Monstrosity (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Tracy Fahey (Limerick School of Art and Design, LIT): Invisible Monsters: Gothic and the Diabetic Body
(ii) Michel Delville (University of Liège) and Andrew Norris (Institut Supérieur des Traducteurs et Interprètes): Monstrosity, Hunger and Resistance
(iii) Lorie Hamalian (California State University): Swans and Prawns: Monster Metamorphoses and Hybrid Identities in Aronofsky’s Black Swan and Blomkamp’s District 9
Session 3b: Monsters of Literature (Conference Room)
Chair: TBC
(i) Jessica George (Cardiff University): Celtic Subject and Racial Other in Arthur Machen’s ‘The White People’
(ii) Kay Lint (University of Hertfordshire): ‘Mangy fur and red, smouldering eyes’, The Monstrous Dog in Graham Masterton’s Charnel House
(iii) Rick Hudson (Bath Spa University): ‘Their Hand Is At Your Throat, But Ye See Them Not’: Monstrous Absence in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft
3.30-4.00pm: Coffee
4.00-5.00pm: Parallel Sessions
Session 4a: Folk Monsters (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Carla Bascombe (University of the West Indies): Monsters of the Caribbean: A Portrait of the Traditional Torturer in the Untraditional Tale
(ii) Alexandra McGlynn (Independent Researcher): Kappa: Buttocks-Ball Eating Monsters of Shintõ Suijin
Session 4b: Monsters of Cinema (Conference Room)
Chair: TBC
(i) Michael C. Bongiorno (CUNY, College of Staten Island): Another One for the Fire: Spectatorship, Apparatus and Recognition in Night of the Living Dead (1968)
(ii) Joshua Peery (Independent Researcher): Fear the Ma(SHE)ne: Monstrous Female Machines in Sci-Fi Cinema
5.00pm: Close
7.30pm: Conference Dinner at Felicini
*****
Friday 13th April
9.30-11.00am: Parallel Sessions
Session 5a: Old Monsters, New Faces (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Rachel Mizsei Ward (University of East Anglia): Munchkin Cthulhu, My Little Cthulhu and Chibithulu: The Transformation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu from Horrific Body to Cute Body
(ii) Carys Crossen (University of Manchester): ‘The loup-garou has a duty: justice’: The Law, Justice and Vigilantism in Contemporary Lycanthropic Fiction
(iii) Kim Wilkins (University of Queensland): Writing the Medieval Monstrous
Session 5b: Spaces of Monstrosity
Chair: TBC
(i) Ersi Ioannidou (University of Brighton): Dismembered Domesticity: the House as Monster
(ii) David Allen (Midland Actors Theatre): Expedition Everest
(iii) Garfield Benjamin (University of Wolverhampton): Virtual Monsters: Becoming Death and the Quantum Immortal
11.00-11.30am: Coffee
11.30-1.00pm: Parallel Sessions
Session 6a: Of Monstrosity and Humanity (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Maria Chatzidimou (Aristotle University of Thessaloni): I am not an elephant! I am not a man! I am a colonized abject! : Re-viewing David Lynch’s The Elephant Man
(ii) Ian Pettigrew (University of Miami): The Monster’s Choice to Be Human: Guillermo del Toro’s Incarnations of a Hitchcockian Theme
Session 6b: More Literary Monstrosity (Conference Room)
Chair: TBC
(i) Martyn Colebrook (University of Hull): ‘The Last Banned Book in Britain’: David Britton, Michael Butterworth, Lord Horror and Monstrosity
(ii) Eva Bru (Independent Researcher) The Spectacle of the Monstrous: Enforcing Normalcy in Mercè Rodoreda’s Death in Spring
(iii) Kristy Butler (Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick): Breaking the Frame: Alternative Histories, Monstrous Ideologies and the Political Gothic
1.00-2.00pm: Lunch
2.00-3.00pm: Monsters, the Museum and Sacrificial Theory: Workshop with Bryan Sitch (Manchester Museum) (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
3.00-3.30pm: Coffee
3.30-4.30pm: Session 7: The Monstrous Human (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Abby Bentham (University of Salford): The Monster in Me: On Cultural Fascination with the Fictional Psychopath
(ii) David McWilliam (Lancaster University): Demystifying the Folk Devil: The Humanization of Aileen Wuornos in Patty Jenkins’s Monster (2003)
Manchester Museum, Oxford Road,
Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom
Thursday 12th April – Friday 13th April 2012
Conference Programme
Thursday 12th April
9.00-9.30am: Registration
9.30-11.00am: Opening Remarks (Dr. Hannah Priest, University of Manchester) and Session 1: Monsters in Popular Culture (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Matthew Freeman (University of Nottingham): Who’s Monster?: Monsters, Subjectivity, and the Figure of the Child in Doctor Who
(ii) James Campbell (University of Stirling): ‘Welcome to the Madhouse’: The Conflation of Monstrosity, Madness and Mental Illness in DC Comics’ Batman Franchise
(iii) Christina Wilkins (University of Southampton): Transatlantic Differences and the Importance of Religion in Post-9/11 Monsters
11.00-11.30am: Coffee
11.30-1.00pm: Parallel Sessions
Session 2a: Literary Monsters (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Lisa Tagliaferri (The Graduate Center, CUNY): S’el fu sì bel com’elli è ora brutto: Dante’s Vision of Lucifer
(ii) Imke Heuer (University of Southampton): ‘A brood of monsters like myself’: Joshua Pickersgill’s The Three Brothers, Byron’s The Deformed Transformed and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(iii) Giulia I. Sandelewski (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham): Vengeful or Revenger? Renaissance Drama as a Lens for Vallgren’s Hercules Barefoot
Session 2b: Making Monsters (Conference Room)
Chair: TBC
(i) Lisa Temple-Cox (Independant Researcher): Making Myself a Monster: Self-Portraiture as Teratological Specimen
(ii) Rosie Garland (Independent Researcher): ‘The Girl You Never Loved But Always Looked For’: Occupational Therapy and the Development of the Performance Persona Rosie Lugosi the Vampire Queen
(iii) Susanne Hamscha (FU Berlin): “Gaga, Ooh La La”: Lady Gaga and the Pleasures of Being a Freak
1.00-2.00pm: Lunch
2.00-3.30pm: Parallel Sessions
Session 3a: Embodying Monstrosity (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Tracy Fahey (Limerick School of Art and Design, LIT): Invisible Monsters: Gothic and the Diabetic Body
(ii) Michel Delville (University of Liège) and Andrew Norris (Institut Supérieur des Traducteurs et Interprètes): Monstrosity, Hunger and Resistance
(iii) Lorie Hamalian (California State University): Swans and Prawns: Monster Metamorphoses and Hybrid Identities in Aronofsky’s Black Swan and Blomkamp’s District 9
Session 3b: Monsters of Literature (Conference Room)
Chair: TBC
(i) Jessica George (Cardiff University): Celtic Subject and Racial Other in Arthur Machen’s ‘The White People’
(ii) Kay Lint (University of Hertfordshire): ‘Mangy fur and red, smouldering eyes’, The Monstrous Dog in Graham Masterton’s Charnel House
(iii) Rick Hudson (Bath Spa University): ‘Their Hand Is At Your Throat, But Ye See Them Not’: Monstrous Absence in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft
3.30-4.00pm: Coffee
4.00-5.00pm: Parallel Sessions
Session 4a: Folk Monsters (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Carla Bascombe (University of the West Indies): Monsters of the Caribbean: A Portrait of the Traditional Torturer in the Untraditional Tale
(ii) Alexandra McGlynn (Independent Researcher): Kappa: Buttocks-Ball Eating Monsters of Shintõ Suijin
Session 4b: Monsters of Cinema (Conference Room)
Chair: TBC
(i) Michael C. Bongiorno (CUNY, College of Staten Island): Another One for the Fire: Spectatorship, Apparatus and Recognition in Night of the Living Dead (1968)
(ii) Joshua Peery (Independent Researcher): Fear the Ma(SHE)ne: Monstrous Female Machines in Sci-Fi Cinema
5.00pm: Close
7.30pm: Conference Dinner at Felicini
*****
Friday 13th April
9.30-11.00am: Parallel Sessions
Session 5a: Old Monsters, New Faces (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Rachel Mizsei Ward (University of East Anglia): Munchkin Cthulhu, My Little Cthulhu and Chibithulu: The Transformation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu from Horrific Body to Cute Body
(ii) Carys Crossen (University of Manchester): ‘The loup-garou has a duty: justice’: The Law, Justice and Vigilantism in Contemporary Lycanthropic Fiction
(iii) Kim Wilkins (University of Queensland): Writing the Medieval Monstrous
Session 5b: Spaces of Monstrosity
Chair: TBC
(i) Ersi Ioannidou (University of Brighton): Dismembered Domesticity: the House as Monster
(ii) David Allen (Midland Actors Theatre): Expedition Everest
(iii) Garfield Benjamin (University of Wolverhampton): Virtual Monsters: Becoming Death and the Quantum Immortal
11.00-11.30am: Coffee
11.30-1.00pm: Parallel Sessions
Session 6a: Of Monstrosity and Humanity (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Maria Chatzidimou (Aristotle University of Thessaloni): I am not an elephant! I am not a man! I am a colonized abject! : Re-viewing David Lynch’s The Elephant Man
(ii) Ian Pettigrew (University of Miami): The Monster’s Choice to Be Human: Guillermo del Toro’s Incarnations of a Hitchcockian Theme
Session 6b: More Literary Monstrosity (Conference Room)
Chair: TBC
(i) Martyn Colebrook (University of Hull): ‘The Last Banned Book in Britain’: David Britton, Michael Butterworth, Lord Horror and Monstrosity
(ii) Eva Bru (Independent Researcher) The Spectacle of the Monstrous: Enforcing Normalcy in Mercè Rodoreda’s Death in Spring
(iii) Kristy Butler (Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick): Breaking the Frame: Alternative Histories, Monstrous Ideologies and the Political Gothic
1.00-2.00pm: Lunch
2.00-3.00pm: Monsters, the Museum and Sacrificial Theory: Workshop with Bryan Sitch (Manchester Museum) (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
3.00-3.30pm: Coffee
3.30-4.30pm: Session 7: The Monstrous Human (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Abby Bentham (University of Salford): The Monster in Me: On Cultural Fascination with the Fictional Psychopath
(ii) David McWilliam (Lancaster University): Demystifying the Folk Devil: The Humanization of Aileen Wuornos in Patty Jenkins’s Monster (2003)
4.30-5.00pm: Closing Remarks
5.00pm: Conference Close
This conference is being run by Hic Dragones, and information on registration can be found on the Hic Dragones website. The registration fee is £75 (including refreshments) or £97 (including a 3-course conference dinner on Thursday 12th), and the deadline for registration in 30th March 2012. Following the conference, there will be a series of public events with a horror/monstrous theme. For more information about the public events, please click here.
Sunday, 4 December 2011
CFP: 10th Global Conference: Monsters and the Monstrous
Monday 10th September – Thursday 13th September 2012
Mansfield College, Oxford
Call for Papers:
For this 10th Anniversary of the Monsters and the Monstrous Project we are looking forward to the future, and so are starting from Franco Moretti’s comment that “the monster expresses the anxiety that the future will be monstrous.” Our focus then will be on Monsters of the Future, no matter from which time or place that future is viewed. So whether the present is Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, Modernist or Post Modernist it is the ways that, as further noted by Moretti, a “new order of beings” makes manifest the terror of an unknown and uncontrollable tomorrow and the forms these creatures take.
As such the monster becomes not the return of the repressed but an immanent Imaginary that constantly harasses and harangues the borders of the Real. Just as Grendel, Caliban, Frankenstein’s Monster, Dr. Moreau’s creatures and the clones from Blade Runner can be seen to manifest a hybrid future that blurs the borders between human/non-human, the humane and the in-humane, the converse is equally true where the tomorrow they envision is as much degenerative as it is evolutionary. Here, as in Wells’ the Time Machine, or Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness, the future is in fact a portal to the past and that the true anxiety we feel is not for inevitable change but for a monstrous stasis that, like the vampire, will lock us forever in a never-ending present (not unlike Wittgenstein’s immortality of the never-ending moment). This then is a call for monstrous visions of the future, whether it is a new and alien land or one that is only too familiar; for the Post-Human, the Non-Human and the Anti-Human, the Robot, the Golem and the Cyborg, the Pure-bred, the Hybrid and the Mudblood, the Unborn, the Unliving and the Undead.
Papers, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:
Monstrous Places/Spaces of the Future:
~The city, the town, the home of the future
~Environmental disasters, global warming, nuclear meltdowns, plagues and terra incognito
~Dystopias/utopias
~New Worlds, forgotten worlds, undiscovered worlds: Atlantis, Shangri-la, Eldorado
Human Monsters:
~Medical experimentation, cloning, reproduction
~Cyborgs, robots and inanimate bodies made real
~Hybrids, both real and supernatural, post-human and beyond human
~Evolution and degeneration
~Actual bodies and supernatural bodies.
~Monsterisation of the human body: fragmentation, surgical modification and bodies without organs
Monstrous Aliens & Alien Invaders:
~Invasions of unknown beings, conquistadors, Martians, heavenly or alien life forms
~Humans as invaders, Starship Troopers, Iain M. Banks’ The Culture
~Parasites, diseases, flora and influences
Monstrous Generations:
~The glorification of Youth, Logan’s Run and In Time
~Monstrous adolescents
~Demonic children and alien babies
~Middle-aged zombies and serial killers, possessed grandparents
~Romantacising the Monster: Paranormal Romance, dark lovers and heroes, Twilight, Vampire Diaries and Dexter.
Monstrous Politics:
~Protest, revolt and revolution
~Zombie Capitalism and undead labour
~Class, status and the aristocracy
~Post colonialism, diasporas and migration
~Ageism, sexism, health-ism and separatism e.g, District 9, Metropolis, Matrix, Daybreakers
Papers can be accepted which deal solely with specific monsters. This project will run concurrently with our project on The Erotic – we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Monsters and The Erotic for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of the monstrous or in relation to crossover panel(s).
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. Abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords
E-mails should be entitled: Monsters Abstract Submission
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Organising Chairs
Sorcha Ni Fhlainn
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
School of English, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
Rob Fisher
Network Founder & Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire
United Kingdom
Simon Bacon
Poznan,
Poland
The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume. Some papers may also be invited for inclusion in the Journal of Monsters and the Monstrous.
For further details of the project, please click here.
For further details of the conference, please click here.
Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.
Mansfield College, Oxford
Call for Papers:
For this 10th Anniversary of the Monsters and the Monstrous Project we are looking forward to the future, and so are starting from Franco Moretti’s comment that “the monster expresses the anxiety that the future will be monstrous.” Our focus then will be on Monsters of the Future, no matter from which time or place that future is viewed. So whether the present is Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, Modernist or Post Modernist it is the ways that, as further noted by Moretti, a “new order of beings” makes manifest the terror of an unknown and uncontrollable tomorrow and the forms these creatures take.
As such the monster becomes not the return of the repressed but an immanent Imaginary that constantly harasses and harangues the borders of the Real. Just as Grendel, Caliban, Frankenstein’s Monster, Dr. Moreau’s creatures and the clones from Blade Runner can be seen to manifest a hybrid future that blurs the borders between human/non-human, the humane and the in-humane, the converse is equally true where the tomorrow they envision is as much degenerative as it is evolutionary. Here, as in Wells’ the Time Machine, or Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness, the future is in fact a portal to the past and that the true anxiety we feel is not for inevitable change but for a monstrous stasis that, like the vampire, will lock us forever in a never-ending present (not unlike Wittgenstein’s immortality of the never-ending moment). This then is a call for monstrous visions of the future, whether it is a new and alien land or one that is only too familiar; for the Post-Human, the Non-Human and the Anti-Human, the Robot, the Golem and the Cyborg, the Pure-bred, the Hybrid and the Mudblood, the Unborn, the Unliving and the Undead.
Papers, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:
Monstrous Places/Spaces of the Future:
~The city, the town, the home of the future
~Environmental disasters, global warming, nuclear meltdowns, plagues and terra incognito
~Dystopias/utopias
~New Worlds, forgotten worlds, undiscovered worlds: Atlantis, Shangri-la, Eldorado
Human Monsters:
~Medical experimentation, cloning, reproduction
~Cyborgs, robots and inanimate bodies made real
~Hybrids, both real and supernatural, post-human and beyond human
~Evolution and degeneration
~Actual bodies and supernatural bodies.
~Monsterisation of the human body: fragmentation, surgical modification and bodies without organs
Monstrous Aliens & Alien Invaders:
~Invasions of unknown beings, conquistadors, Martians, heavenly or alien life forms
~Humans as invaders, Starship Troopers, Iain M. Banks’ The Culture
~Parasites, diseases, flora and influences
Monstrous Generations:
~The glorification of Youth, Logan’s Run and In Time
~Monstrous adolescents
~Demonic children and alien babies
~Middle-aged zombies and serial killers, possessed grandparents
~Romantacising the Monster: Paranormal Romance, dark lovers and heroes, Twilight, Vampire Diaries and Dexter.
Monstrous Politics:
~Protest, revolt and revolution
~Zombie Capitalism and undead labour
~Class, status and the aristocracy
~Post colonialism, diasporas and migration
~Ageism, sexism, health-ism and separatism e.g, District 9, Metropolis, Matrix, Daybreakers
Papers can be accepted which deal solely with specific monsters. This project will run concurrently with our project on The Erotic – we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Monsters and The Erotic for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of the monstrous or in relation to crossover panel(s).
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. Abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords
E-mails should be entitled: Monsters Abstract Submission
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Organising Chairs
Sorcha Ni Fhlainn
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
School of English, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
Rob Fisher
Network Founder & Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire
United Kingdom
Simon Bacon
Poznan,
Poland
The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume. Some papers may also be invited for inclusion in the Journal of Monsters and the Monstrous.
For further details of the project, please click here.
For further details of the conference, please click here.
Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.
Tuesday, 29 November 2011
CFP: Preternature 2.2
Monstrophy: The Academic Study of Monsters
''Monstrophy'' is a term referring to the academic study of monsters as representational and conceptual categories, which has gained recent currency in several related fields of study (literary and cultural history, sociological theories of identity and difference, et al.), as well as in a number of recent books and articles about monsters as subjects of theoretical interpretation. Etymologically derived from Latin ''mōnstrum'' (meaning prodigy, ominous sign, monstrous creature or person, abomination) and Greek ''sophia'' (σοφία, wisdom), hybrid compounding of monstrophy is not uncommon in disciplinary names, e.g. [[sociology]], another Greek and Latin compound.) Monstrophy literally means "wisdom about monsters," and in academic usage refers to the broader study of monsters in society and history.
Monsters have been widely catalogued in their historical and ethnographic contexts, and have been commonly included in cultural products such as epic, folktale, fiction, and film, but have only begun to be studied seriously as semiological markers indicating the seams of internal cultural tension. Interpreters commonly note the "monstrous" as occupying space at the borders of a society's conceptual categories, such as those relating to sexual and behavioral transgression, or to inherent prejudice and internal conflict (for instance, in race, gender, politics, and religion). Monsters are rarely fully distinct from the "human," but are often comprised of hybrid features
of the human and non-human. This issue of Preternature invites contributions that explore how the category of "monster" is used to define and articulate what a certain group of people articulates to itself to be properly human.
Contributions are welcome from any discipline, time period, or geographic provenance, so long as the discussion highlights the cultural, literary, religious, or historical significance of the topic.
Contributions should be roughly 8,000 - 12,000 words (with the possibility of longer submissions in exceptional cases), including all documentation and critical apparatus. If accepted for publication, manuscripts will be required to adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition (style 1, employing footnotes).
Preternature also welcomes original editions or translations of texts related to the topic that have not otherwise been made available in recent editions or in English. Submissions are made online here.
Final Papers are due February 15, 2012
Queries about submissions, queries concerning books to be reviewed, or requests to review individual titles may be made to the Editor.
Inquiries about book reviews should be sent to the Book Review Editor.
For more on the journal, please consult the website.
''Monstrophy'' is a term referring to the academic study of monsters as representational and conceptual categories, which has gained recent currency in several related fields of study (literary and cultural history, sociological theories of identity and difference, et al.), as well as in a number of recent books and articles about monsters as subjects of theoretical interpretation. Etymologically derived from Latin ''mōnstrum'' (meaning prodigy, ominous sign, monstrous creature or person, abomination) and Greek ''sophia'' (σοφία, wisdom), hybrid compounding of monstrophy is not uncommon in disciplinary names, e.g. [[sociology]], another Greek and Latin compound.) Monstrophy literally means "wisdom about monsters," and in academic usage refers to the broader study of monsters in society and history.
Monsters have been widely catalogued in their historical and ethnographic contexts, and have been commonly included in cultural products such as epic, folktale, fiction, and film, but have only begun to be studied seriously as semiological markers indicating the seams of internal cultural tension. Interpreters commonly note the "monstrous" as occupying space at the borders of a society's conceptual categories, such as those relating to sexual and behavioral transgression, or to inherent prejudice and internal conflict (for instance, in race, gender, politics, and religion). Monsters are rarely fully distinct from the "human," but are often comprised of hybrid features
of the human and non-human. This issue of Preternature invites contributions that explore how the category of "monster" is used to define and articulate what a certain group of people articulates to itself to be properly human.
Contributions are welcome from any discipline, time period, or geographic provenance, so long as the discussion highlights the cultural, literary, religious, or historical significance of the topic.
Contributions should be roughly 8,000 - 12,000 words (with the possibility of longer submissions in exceptional cases), including all documentation and critical apparatus. If accepted for publication, manuscripts will be required to adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition (style 1, employing footnotes).
Preternature also welcomes original editions or translations of texts related to the topic that have not otherwise been made available in recent editions or in English. Submissions are made online here.
Final Papers are due February 15, 2012
Queries about submissions, queries concerning books to be reviewed, or requests to review individual titles may be made to the Editor.
Inquiries about book reviews should be sent to the Book Review Editor.
For more on the journal, please consult the website.
Tuesday, 22 November 2011
CFP: 1st Global Conference: Monstrous Geographies: Places and Spaces of Monstrosity
Thursday 19th July – Saturday 21st July 2012
Mansfield College, Oxford
CALL FOR PAPERS:
What is the relationship between the monstrous and the geographic – those places monsters inhabit but also places that are configured as being monstrous in and of themselves? Places that engage notions of self and otherness, inclusion and exclusion, normal and aberrant, defense and contagion? From the Necropolis to the Killing Fields and from the Amityville Horror to the island of Dr. Moreau, geographical locations have acted as the repository or emanation of human evil, made monstrous by the rituals and behaviors enacted within them, or by their peculiarities of atmosphere or configuration. Whether actual or imagined, these places of wonder, fear and horror speak of the symbiotic relation between humanity and location that sees morality,
ideology and emotions given physical form in the house, the forest, the island, the nation and even far away worlds in both space and time. These places act as magnets for destructive and evil forces, such as the island of Manhattan; they are the source of malevolent energies and forces, such as Transylvania, Area 51 and Ringu; and they are the fulcrum for chaotic, warping energies, such as the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis and Pandemonium. Alongside this, there exist the monstrous geographies created by scientific experimentation, human waste and environmental accidents, creating sites of potential and actual disaster such as the Chernobyl nuclear plant, the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of the BP oil disaster, and the devastated coastline of Tohuku, Japan. These places raise diverse post-human quandaries regarding necessities in the present leading to real or imagined futures of humanity and habitation.
Encompassing the factual and the fictional, the literal and the literary, this project investigates the very particular relationships and interactions between humanity and place, the natural and the unnatural, the familiar and the unfamiliar, and sees a multitude of configurations of human monstrosity and evil projected, inflicted, or immanent to place. Such monstrous geographies can be seen to emerge from the disparity between past and present, memory and modernity, urban and rural and can be expressed through categories of class, gender and racial difference as well as generational, political and religious tensions.
Papers, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:
Monstrous Cartographies:
~Terra incognita
~Real and Mythic lost lands: eg., Atlantis, D’yss, and Shangri-La
~Utopias/Dystopias, future cities in time and space
~Malevolent regions: eg., Lemuria, Bermuda Triangle, Transylvania
~Sublime landscapes
~Bodies as maps and maps as bodies, eg. Prison Break
Monstrous Islands:
~As sites of experimentation. Dr. Moreau, Jurassic Park etcAs a
beacon for evil: eg., Manhattan in Godzilla and Cloverfield
~As site of ritual evil and incest: eg., Wicker Man, Pitkin Islands,
Isle of the Dead
~Imperialist intent and construction: eg., Prospero’s Island, Hong
Kong, Hashima
Monstrous Cosmographies:
~Evil planets and dimensions
~Comets, meteorites and beings from unknown worlds
~Worlds as dark reflections/twins of Earth
~Planets and alien landscapes that consume and mutate earthly
travelers
Monstrous Environmental Geographies:
~Polluted lakes and landscapes
~Landfills, oil spills and mining sites
~Melting icecaps and landforms at risk from global warming
~Land impacted by GM crops and associated experimentation
~Sites of starvation, disaster and pestilence
~De-militarized zones and no-man’s lands
Monstrous Religious Sites & Ritualistic Monstrosity:
~Armageddon, Apocalypse and final battlegrounds
~Hell, the Underworld and Valhalla
~Eden, Paradise, El Dorado, Shangri La
~Sites of religious ritual, sacrifice and burial
~Houses and haunts of murderers and serial killers
Monstrous Political Environments
~The land of the enemy and the other
~Sites of attack and retaliation.
~Sites of revolution and protest
~Landscapes of incarceration
~Border crossings
~Magical realist landscapes of escape
~Ghettos, shanty towns and relocation sites
~Urban and rural, cities, towns and villages and regional and
national prejudice
Monstrous Landscapes of Conflict:
~Battlefields and military graveyards
~Concentration camps and sites of genocide
~Minefields and sites of damage, destruction and ruin
~Arsenals, bunkers and military experimentation
Uncanny Geographical Temporalities:
~Old buildings in new surroundings
~Buildings with too much, and those without, memory
~Soulless Architecture
~Ideological architecture, palaces, museums etc
~Places held in time, UNESCO sites and historical and listed
buildings
~Old towns and New towns, rich and poor
~Appearing and disappearing towns/regions, eg., Brigadoon, Silent
Hill.
Monsters on the Move:
~Contagion, scouring and infectious landscapes
~Monsters and mobile technologies: phone, video, cars, planes,
computers etc
~Fluid identities, fluid places
~Touring Monstrosities, dreamscapes and infernal topologies
This project will run concurrently with our project on Apocalypse – we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Monstrous Geographies and Apocalypse for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of monstrous geographies or in relation to crossover panel(s).
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 27th February 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 25th May 2012.
300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords
E-mails should be entitled: Monstrous Geographies Abstract Submission
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in
cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Organising Chairs
Jessica Rapson
Goldsmiths University,
London,
United Kingdom
Rob Fisher
Network Founder & Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire
United Kingdom
The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume. Some papers may also be invited for inclusion in the Journal of Monsters and the Monstrous.
For further details of the project, please click here.
For further details of the conference, please click here.
Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.
Mansfield College, Oxford
CALL FOR PAPERS:
What is the relationship between the monstrous and the geographic – those places monsters inhabit but also places that are configured as being monstrous in and of themselves? Places that engage notions of self and otherness, inclusion and exclusion, normal and aberrant, defense and contagion? From the Necropolis to the Killing Fields and from the Amityville Horror to the island of Dr. Moreau, geographical locations have acted as the repository or emanation of human evil, made monstrous by the rituals and behaviors enacted within them, or by their peculiarities of atmosphere or configuration. Whether actual or imagined, these places of wonder, fear and horror speak of the symbiotic relation between humanity and location that sees morality,
ideology and emotions given physical form in the house, the forest, the island, the nation and even far away worlds in both space and time. These places act as magnets for destructive and evil forces, such as the island of Manhattan; they are the source of malevolent energies and forces, such as Transylvania, Area 51 and Ringu; and they are the fulcrum for chaotic, warping energies, such as the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis and Pandemonium. Alongside this, there exist the monstrous geographies created by scientific experimentation, human waste and environmental accidents, creating sites of potential and actual disaster such as the Chernobyl nuclear plant, the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of the BP oil disaster, and the devastated coastline of Tohuku, Japan. These places raise diverse post-human quandaries regarding necessities in the present leading to real or imagined futures of humanity and habitation.
Encompassing the factual and the fictional, the literal and the literary, this project investigates the very particular relationships and interactions between humanity and place, the natural and the unnatural, the familiar and the unfamiliar, and sees a multitude of configurations of human monstrosity and evil projected, inflicted, or immanent to place. Such monstrous geographies can be seen to emerge from the disparity between past and present, memory and modernity, urban and rural and can be expressed through categories of class, gender and racial difference as well as generational, political and religious tensions.
Papers, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:
Monstrous Cartographies:
~Terra incognita
~Real and Mythic lost lands: eg., Atlantis, D’yss, and Shangri-La
~Utopias/Dystopias, future cities in time and space
~Malevolent regions: eg., Lemuria, Bermuda Triangle, Transylvania
~Sublime landscapes
~Bodies as maps and maps as bodies, eg. Prison Break
Monstrous Islands:
~As sites of experimentation. Dr. Moreau, Jurassic Park etcAs a
beacon for evil: eg., Manhattan in Godzilla and Cloverfield
~As site of ritual evil and incest: eg., Wicker Man, Pitkin Islands,
Isle of the Dead
~Imperialist intent and construction: eg., Prospero’s Island, Hong
Kong, Hashima
Monstrous Cosmographies:
~Evil planets and dimensions
~Comets, meteorites and beings from unknown worlds
~Worlds as dark reflections/twins of Earth
~Planets and alien landscapes that consume and mutate earthly
travelers
Monstrous Environmental Geographies:
~Polluted lakes and landscapes
~Landfills, oil spills and mining sites
~Melting icecaps and landforms at risk from global warming
~Land impacted by GM crops and associated experimentation
~Sites of starvation, disaster and pestilence
~De-militarized zones and no-man’s lands
Monstrous Religious Sites & Ritualistic Monstrosity:
~Armageddon, Apocalypse and final battlegrounds
~Hell, the Underworld and Valhalla
~Eden, Paradise, El Dorado, Shangri La
~Sites of religious ritual, sacrifice and burial
~Houses and haunts of murderers and serial killers
Monstrous Political Environments
~The land of the enemy and the other
~Sites of attack and retaliation.
~Sites of revolution and protest
~Landscapes of incarceration
~Border crossings
~Magical realist landscapes of escape
~Ghettos, shanty towns and relocation sites
~Urban and rural, cities, towns and villages and regional and
national prejudice
Monstrous Landscapes of Conflict:
~Battlefields and military graveyards
~Concentration camps and sites of genocide
~Minefields and sites of damage, destruction and ruin
~Arsenals, bunkers and military experimentation
Uncanny Geographical Temporalities:
~Old buildings in new surroundings
~Buildings with too much, and those without, memory
~Soulless Architecture
~Ideological architecture, palaces, museums etc
~Places held in time, UNESCO sites and historical and listed
buildings
~Old towns and New towns, rich and poor
~Appearing and disappearing towns/regions, eg., Brigadoon, Silent
Hill.
Monsters on the Move:
~Contagion, scouring and infectious landscapes
~Monsters and mobile technologies: phone, video, cars, planes,
computers etc
~Fluid identities, fluid places
~Touring Monstrosities, dreamscapes and infernal topologies
This project will run concurrently with our project on Apocalypse – we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Monstrous Geographies and Apocalypse for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of monstrous geographies or in relation to crossover panel(s).
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 27th February 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 25th May 2012.
300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords
E-mails should be entitled: Monstrous Geographies Abstract Submission
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in
cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Organising Chairs
Jessica Rapson
Goldsmiths University,
London,
United Kingdom
Rob Fisher
Network Founder & Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire
United Kingdom
The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume. Some papers may also be invited for inclusion in the Journal of Monsters and the Monstrous.
For further details of the project, please click here.
For further details of the conference, please click here.
Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.
Thursday, 8 September 2011
CFP: Sensualising Deformity: Communication and Construction of Monstrous Embodiment
The University of Edinburgh
June 15-16, 2012
Confirmed Plenary Speakers:
Prof. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
George Washington University
Dr. Peter Hutchings
Northumbria University
“Although he was already repellent enough, there arose from the fungous skin-growth with which he was almost covered a very sickening stench which was hard to tolerate... with the use of the [daily] bath the unpleasant odour... ceased to be noticeable”
~ Sir Frederick Treves
The prominent surgeon Frederic Treves’s description of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, exposes a body which is simultaneously an assault on the senses and one which has traditionally been de-sensualised. Deformity is sanitised and fitted into a structure of normality. The academy tends to obscure the complexity of the sensuous/sensual/sensed body of the deformed subject, and of the questions, anxieties, and denials which surround deformity when it is located within a continuum of sense.
From freak exhibitions and fairs, medical examinations and discoveries to various portrayals in arts and literature, images of deformity (or monstrosity, used separately or interchangeably depending on context) have captivated us for centuries. The result is a significant body of critical and artistic works where these bodies are dissected, politicized, exhibited, objectified or even beatified. Nonetheless, there remains a gap, an unexplored, unspoken or neglected aspect of this complex field of study which needs further consideration. This two-day interdisciplinary conference aims to bring the senses and the sensuous back to the monstrous or deformed body from the early modern period through to the mid-twentieth century, and seeks to explore its implications in diverse academic fields.
We hope to bring together scholars and students from a wide range of disciplines to engage in a constructive dialogue, network, and exchange ideas and experiences, connecting a community of researchers who share a fascination with deformity, monstrosity, and freakery.
Possible topics may include (but are not limited to):
● Spectacle/fetishisation of monstrosity and deformity; monstrous sexuality/eroticisation
● The monster as a catalyst of progression/ historical perspectives
● Monstrous symbolism, prodigality, or beatification
● The racialised body; exoticising difference
● Monstrosity in medical literature; disability narratives
● Monstrous becoming; the ‘sensed’ body
● Deformed aesthetics; monstrosity in the visual arts
● (De) gendering the deformed body; humanisation vs objectification
We welcome proposals for 20-minute presentations from established scholars, postdoctoral researchers and postgraduate students from various teratological backgrounds, e.g. in literature, history, media and art studies, philosophy, religious studies, history of science,medical humanities, and critical and cultural theory. Proposals should be no more than 300 words, in .doc format, and should include a brief 50-word biography.
Please submit your abstracts no later than 31 January 2012 to the conference organisers:
Dr. Karin Sellberg (The University of Edinburgh)
Ally Crockford (The University of Edinburgh)
Maja Milatovic (The University of Edinburgh)
June 15-16, 2012
Confirmed Plenary Speakers:
Prof. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
George Washington University
Dr. Peter Hutchings
Northumbria University
“Although he was already repellent enough, there arose from the fungous skin-growth with which he was almost covered a very sickening stench which was hard to tolerate... with the use of the [daily] bath the unpleasant odour... ceased to be noticeable”
~ Sir Frederick Treves
The prominent surgeon Frederic Treves’s description of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, exposes a body which is simultaneously an assault on the senses and one which has traditionally been de-sensualised. Deformity is sanitised and fitted into a structure of normality. The academy tends to obscure the complexity of the sensuous/sensual/sensed body of the deformed subject, and of the questions, anxieties, and denials which surround deformity when it is located within a continuum of sense.
From freak exhibitions and fairs, medical examinations and discoveries to various portrayals in arts and literature, images of deformity (or monstrosity, used separately or interchangeably depending on context) have captivated us for centuries. The result is a significant body of critical and artistic works where these bodies are dissected, politicized, exhibited, objectified or even beatified. Nonetheless, there remains a gap, an unexplored, unspoken or neglected aspect of this complex field of study which needs further consideration. This two-day interdisciplinary conference aims to bring the senses and the sensuous back to the monstrous or deformed body from the early modern period through to the mid-twentieth century, and seeks to explore its implications in diverse academic fields.
We hope to bring together scholars and students from a wide range of disciplines to engage in a constructive dialogue, network, and exchange ideas and experiences, connecting a community of researchers who share a fascination with deformity, monstrosity, and freakery.
Possible topics may include (but are not limited to):
● Spectacle/fetishisation of monstrosity and deformity; monstrous sexuality/eroticisation
● The monster as a catalyst of progression/ historical perspectives
● Monstrous symbolism, prodigality, or beatification
● The racialised body; exoticising difference
● Monstrosity in medical literature; disability narratives
● Monstrous becoming; the ‘sensed’ body
● Deformed aesthetics; monstrosity in the visual arts
● (De) gendering the deformed body; humanisation vs objectification
We welcome proposals for 20-minute presentations from established scholars, postdoctoral researchers and postgraduate students from various teratological backgrounds, e.g. in literature, history, media and art studies, philosophy, religious studies, history of science,medical humanities, and critical and cultural theory. Proposals should be no more than 300 words, in .doc format, and should include a brief 50-word biography.
Please submit your abstracts no later than 31 January 2012 to the conference organisers:
Dr. Karin Sellberg (The University of Edinburgh)
Ally Crockford (The University of Edinburgh)
Maja Milatovic (The University of Edinburgh)
Monday, 28 February 2011
Journal Announcement and Call for Submissions
A message from the lovely people at ID.net. The first issue is out, and I've got a review in it!
Monsters and the Monstrous
Volume 1, Number 1
March 2011
We are pleased to announce the launch of the first journal in our Global Interdisciplinary Research Series - Monsters and the Monstrous
Click here to visit the website.
The first edition will be available from 1st March 2011; subscriptions are now open.
The Editors welcome contributions to the journal in the form of articles, reviews, reports, art and/or visual pieces and other forms of submission.
Contributions to the journal should be original and not under consideration for other publications at the same time as they are under consideration for this publication. Submissions are to made electronically wherever possible using either Microsoft Word or .rtf format.
Length requirements:
Articles - 5000 - 7000 words
Reflections, reports, responses - 1000 - 3000 words
Book reviews - 500 - 4000 words
Other forms of contributions are welcome.
Submission information:
Send submissions via email, using the following Subject Line:
'Journal: Contribution Type (article/review/...): Author Surname'
Submissions Email Address
Submissions will be acknowledged within 48 hours of receipt.
Monsters and the Monstrous
Volume 1, Number 1
March 2011
We are pleased to announce the launch of the first journal in our Global Interdisciplinary Research Series - Monsters and the Monstrous
Click here to visit the website.
The first edition will be available from 1st March 2011; subscriptions are now open.
The Editors welcome contributions to the journal in the form of articles, reviews, reports, art and/or visual pieces and other forms of submission.
Contributions to the journal should be original and not under consideration for other publications at the same time as they are under consideration for this publication. Submissions are to made electronically wherever possible using either Microsoft Word or .rtf format.
Length requirements:
Articles - 5000 - 7000 words
Reflections, reports, responses - 1000 - 3000 words
Book reviews - 500 - 4000 words
Other forms of contributions are welcome.
Submission information:
Send submissions via email, using the following Subject Line:
'Journal: Contribution Type (article/review/...): Author Surname'
Submissions Email Address
Submissions will be acknowledged within 48 hours of receipt.
Sunday, 27 February 2011
Save the Date: Hic Dragones Manchester Monster Convention
Thursday 12th - Sunday 15th April 2012
Venues tbc
Thursday 12th - Friday 13th April
Monsters: Subject, Object, Abject
A two-day, interdisciplinary conference exploring monsters and monstrosity. CFP coming soon.
Friday 13th April
The Monster Mash
A deliciously decadent and moreishly monstrous costume ball. Entertainment line-up and details to follow.
Saturday 14th - Sunday 15th April
MancMonCon
A two-day convention with talks, debates and exhibitions. Programme to follow.
Ticket info
Registration details will be posted soon. Registration will be available for one or more events, and full weekend passes will be available.
Entry to The Monster Mash will be included in some registration options, but individual tickets to this event will also be available.
For more information about any of these events, please check the Hic Dragones website or email the convenors.
Venues tbc
Thursday 12th - Friday 13th April
Monsters: Subject, Object, Abject
A two-day, interdisciplinary conference exploring monsters and monstrosity. CFP coming soon.
Friday 13th April
The Monster Mash
A deliciously decadent and moreishly monstrous costume ball. Entertainment line-up and details to follow.
Saturday 14th - Sunday 15th April
MancMonCon
A two-day convention with talks, debates and exhibitions. Programme to follow.
Ticket info
Registration details will be posted soon. Registration will be available for one or more events, and full weekend passes will be available.
Entry to The Monster Mash will be included in some registration options, but individual tickets to this event will also be available.
For more information about any of these events, please check the Hic Dragones website or email the convenors.
Monday, 7 February 2011
CFP: 9th Global Conference: Monsters and the Monstrous
Saturday 10th - Tuesday 13th September 2011
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom
Call for Papers
This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary project seeks to investigate and explore the enduring influence and imagery of monsters and the monstrous on human culture throughout history. In particular, the project will have a dual focus with the intention of examining specific 'monsters' as well as assessing the role, function and consequences of persons, actions or events identified as 'monstrous'. The history and contemporary cultural influences of monsters and monstrous metaphors will also be examined.
Papers, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom
Call for Papers
This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary project seeks to investigate and explore the enduring influence and imagery of monsters and the monstrous on human culture throughout history. In particular, the project will have a dual focus with the intention of examining specific 'monsters' as well as assessing the role, function and consequences of persons, actions or events identified as 'monstrous'. The history and contemporary cultural influences of monsters and monstrous metaphors will also be examined.
Papers, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:
- The 'monster' through history
- Civilization, monsters and the monstrous
- Children, childhood, stories and monsters
- Comedy: funny monsters and/or making fun of monsters (e.g. Monsters vs. Aliens, the Addams Family)
- Monstrous Avatars or objects
- Monsters and subjectivity
- Monsters and Sexuality
- Making monsters; monstrous births; childhood
- Mutants and mutations and freaks
- Technologies of the monstrous (including Role Playing Games)
- Horror, fear and scare
- Do monsters kill because they are monstrous or are they monstrous because they kill?
- How critical to the definition of 'monster' is death or the threat of death?
- Human 'monsters' and 'monstrous' acts? e.g. perverts, paedophiles and serial killers
- Revolution and monsters
- Enemies (political/social/military) and monsters
- Iconography of the monstrous
- The popularity of the modern monsters; the Mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, Vampires, Cannibals
- The monster in literature
- The monster in media (television, cinema, radio, internet)
- Religious depictions of the monstrous
- Metaphors and the monstrous
- The problematic attraction and admiration of monsters
- Monstrous (In)Humanity/(In)Human Monstrosity
- Monstrous Politics
- Critical Theories on the Monstrous
Papers can be accepted which deal solely with specific monsters. This project will run concurrently with our project on Space and Place - we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Monsters and Space and Place for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of the monstrous or in relation to crossover panel(s).
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 25th March 2011. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 8th July 2011.
300 word abstracts should be submitted to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract
E-mails should be entitled: Monsters Abstract Submission
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look an alternative electronic route or resend.
Organising Chairs
Sorcha Ni Fhlainn
Hub Leader, Evil Hub, Inter-Disciplinary.Net
School of English, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
Rob Fisher
Network Founder & Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire
United Kingdom
Stephen Morris
Hub Leader
Independent Scholar
New York, USA
The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBoook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume. Some papers may also be invited for inclusion in the Journal of Monsters and the Monstrous.
For further details of the project, please click here.
For further details of the conference, please click here.
Sunday, 3 October 2010
3rd Global Conference: Evil, Women and the Feminine
Friday 13th May - Sunday 15th May 2011
Warsaw, Poland
Call for Papers
This inter-disciplinary conference seeks to examine issues surrounding the conjunction between evil and the feminine. In many cultures women have been long suspected as the source of sundry human miseries, however basic to society they may be. At the same time as ideals of purity and dedication to family have been exhalted and feminine beauty lauded, women have been viewed as embodying sinister forces of evil. Mistrusted as seductive and beguiling, women are also often thought of as vengeful, manipulative and even malevolent. In grappling with our understanding of what it is to be 'evil', the project aims to shine a spotlight on this dark area of the human condition and explore the possible sources of the fear and resentment of women.
Papers, reports, work-in-progress and workshops are invited on issues related to the to the following themes:
Warsaw, Poland
Call for Papers
This inter-disciplinary conference seeks to examine issues surrounding the conjunction between evil and the feminine. In many cultures women have been long suspected as the source of sundry human miseries, however basic to society they may be. At the same time as ideals of purity and dedication to family have been exhalted and feminine beauty lauded, women have been viewed as embodying sinister forces of evil. Mistrusted as seductive and beguiling, women are also often thought of as vengeful, manipulative and even malevolent. In grappling with our understanding of what it is to be 'evil', the project aims to shine a spotlight on this dark area of the human condition and explore the possible sources of the fear and resentment of women.
Papers, reports, work-in-progress and workshops are invited on issues related to the to the following themes:
- Evil Women and Feminine Evil
- Representing and Misrepresenting the Female
- Motherhood; Monstrous Motherhood
- Monstrous Births and Infanticide
- Matriarchy/Matricide
- Devious Sexuality and Feminine Perversions
- Women and the Abject
- Menstruation, Castration
- Fears and Myths: Feminine Blood
- Anthropological Perspectives
- Historical Perspectives
- The Evil Women in Literature
- Psychoanalytic perspectives: "Vagina Dentata" etc
- Sexualizing the Female or Evil Objectification
- Jezebel, Delilah, Lilith, Harpies and the Femme Fatale
- The Bitch
- Women and Power
- Beauty as threatening or evil
- Portrayals of Evil Women
- Fantasy
- Mythology
- Vampires, Witches and Sirens
- Case Studies
The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 26th November 2010. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 1st April 2011.
300 word abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract.
Emails should be entitled: EWF3 Abstract Submission.
Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.
Organising Chairs:
Sorcha Ni Fhlainn
Hub Leader, Project Co-Leader, School of English, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
Stephen Morris
Hub Leader, Independent Scholar, New York, USA
Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
The conference is part of the At the Interface programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discusssions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s).
For further details about the project, please click here.
For further details about the conference, please click here.
Saturday, 21 August 2010
She-Wolf Conference Criticized by Werewolf
During my regular cyber-surveys of all things werewolf, I've come across a few mentions of the conference on blogs, livejournal and other sites. We certainly seem to have caught people's attention. However, tonight I discovered that not all the attention is positive. I found A Werewolf Blog in Brooklyn, a blog written by a 'modern day werewolf from Brooklyn'. The female werewolf who authors the site has taken some offence at the ways in which we are marketing the She-Wolf Conference. In particular, she's not happy about the link I have made between the 'female monster' and the 'female werewolf'.
Of course, it has never been my intention to cause offence. But I would like to offer a brief defence. Theoretical considerations of the 'monster' are becoming more common in academic discourse; literary studies, film studies, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, history, legal studies, theology... and many other disciplines are becoming more and more engaged with exploring the concept of the 'monster' and the impact this has on our understanding of the 'human'. Though in everyday parlance the word can simply refer to something repellant, unpleasant or dangerous, academics seek to go beyond this and question the far-reaching implications of 'monster-production', 'monstrosity' and the 'monstrous'.
I would suggest that this is even more problematic when examining the female 'monster'. Women - werewolf or otherwise - are monsterized and dehumanized in many discourses. So what happens when we create or are confronted by the monstrous monster? The other of the other? The inhuman non-human? Does this double otherness, as many critics have suggested, give the female monster more power? Or does it render her utterly abject?
These are the questions I wanted to raise and discuss by organizing She-Wolf. And, if you have a look at our programme, you'll see that our speakers will be grappling with these questions from different perspectives and from different theoretical positions. I believe that our discussions will cover many of the representations of the female werewolf in art, literature and culture - but will also explore what it means when we distinguish between the human and the monster.
I hope this clears up some of the thinking behind the conference. Despite the animosity the author clearly feels towards the conference, I would recommend giving A Werewolf Blog in Brooklyn or the downloadable zines a go. It's an interesting read, particularly if you're familiar with a lot of the recent pop culture representations of female werewolves.
Feel free to comment!
Of course, it has never been my intention to cause offence. But I would like to offer a brief defence. Theoretical considerations of the 'monster' are becoming more common in academic discourse; literary studies, film studies, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, history, legal studies, theology... and many other disciplines are becoming more and more engaged with exploring the concept of the 'monster' and the impact this has on our understanding of the 'human'. Though in everyday parlance the word can simply refer to something repellant, unpleasant or dangerous, academics seek to go beyond this and question the far-reaching implications of 'monster-production', 'monstrosity' and the 'monstrous'.
I would suggest that this is even more problematic when examining the female 'monster'. Women - werewolf or otherwise - are monsterized and dehumanized in many discourses. So what happens when we create or are confronted by the monstrous monster? The other of the other? The inhuman non-human? Does this double otherness, as many critics have suggested, give the female monster more power? Or does it render her utterly abject?
These are the questions I wanted to raise and discuss by organizing She-Wolf. And, if you have a look at our programme, you'll see that our speakers will be grappling with these questions from different perspectives and from different theoretical positions. I believe that our discussions will cover many of the representations of the female werewolf in art, literature and culture - but will also explore what it means when we distinguish between the human and the monster.
I hope this clears up some of the thinking behind the conference. Despite the animosity the author clearly feels towards the conference, I would recommend giving A Werewolf Blog in Brooklyn or the downloadable zines a go. It's an interesting read, particularly if you're familiar with a lot of the recent pop culture representations of female werewolves.
Feel free to comment!
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