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)

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.

Interview with Graeme Reynolds

Graeme Reynolds' first novel, High Moor (a werewolf novel set in the North East of England), came out in November 2011. I’ll be reviewing the book soon, but, in the meantime, I caught up with Graeme to talk writing, werewolves and publishing…

She-Wolf: Hi Graeme. Thanks for talking to us. Why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about yourself…

Graeme Reynolds: I’m originally from the North East of England, but moved to the Bristol area when I was 18, with the RAF. After a brief military career that lasted a whole year and a half, I stayed in the area. These days I break computers for money, and I moved into an isolated smallholding in Wales last year, in readiness for the inevitable zombie apocalypse. I’ve been writing for just over three years, and some people even like my work. My first novel, High Moor, came out in November.

SW: Tell us a bit about High Moor – what’s the book about?

GR: The book is split into three parts. The first part is very much a coming of age story, set in North East England in 1986 and also conforms more closely to the “classic” werewolf tale. The children in the first part have to deal with some pretty traumatic events, and that sets things up for the rest of the book.

Part 2 is very much about coming to terms with change. In this instance, it’s about how the characters deal with loss, and how their lives change as a result of the events in the first part of the novel. Specifically, how a family reacts to the fact that their ten year old son is now a werewolf. I like to think of part 2 as being the “what happened next?” part of the book.

SW: Sounds intriguing. What about the third part?

GR: The last section takes place in 2008, and the theme is how your past actions can have unforeseen consequences, sometimes years later. John, the main character returns to High Moor after a long absence, when he hears reports of what could be another werewolf in the town. He races against time to find the beast before the next full moon, when he will turn into a werewolf himself.

SW: So how did you get started in writing?

GR: Writing is something that I always wanted to do, but never really got around to. I used to write horror based role-playing games in my teens and twenties, and had a couple of false starts where I would write a chapter of a novel then consign it to the bin because I wasn’t happy with it. Then, in 2008 I discovered flash fiction and wrote about 30 or so short stories that were published in a few electronic and print venues. I started High Moor not long after I started writing shorts, but it sat gathering dust for a while. All things considered, that wasn’t a bad move in the end, because it gave me time to learn the craft, try different styles on and develop my own voice.

SW: Where do you get your inspiration from?

GR: High Moor was inspired by events in my childhood. There were reports of a big cat in the area, attacking livestock in fields. There were some sightings, and even a photograph of “The Durham Beast”, and we had the police coming into schools, warning us not to go into the woods alone. I was around the same age as the characters in the book at the time, and it left a lasting impression on me.

SW: So is High Moor a bit autobiographical then?

GR: There is an awful lot of autobiographical stuff mixed in with part 1, in terms of what the kids get up to. My mother has already chastised me for a scene involving the school VCR.

SW: So there are a few stories from your childhood then?

GR: One scene in particular – the climax of part 1, has been with me for years. I remember being at a scout camp and being told around a campfire, under a full moon, about a book that had a werewolf attacking a cub scout camp. I got so scared that I packed my stuff and walked home at 2 in the morning. It turned out later, when I read the actual book, that none of that stuff happened, and it was just kids being nasty. That mental image of that scene stayed with me though, and that was in many ways, the starting point for me when I sat down to write High Moor. It’s been a story that I’ve wanted to tell since I was ten years old.

SW: Tell me a bit about the werewolves in High Moor. Did any particular traditions inspire you?

GR: I started off with the standard, common and garden wolf man stereotype, and found in many ways, the twist to the mythology that I came up with grew organically from the story. I’ve always loved the fact that werewolves very much represented man’s struggle with the bestial part of his nature. I tried to really build on that, so while there is only one “curse” as such, depending on the mindset of the individual, they become a different type of monster.

SW: So what sort of werewolves do they become?

GR: The classic wolf man is called a moonstruck in the story. These are the people that fight against the wolf and keep it suppressed. When the moon is full, the wolf becomes too powerful and they change, but because they fight it, they end up caught between man and beast. All pain, rage and instinct.

The afflicted that accept the wolf side of them become more fully wolf, and retain their personality and intellect. The two sides work in harmony, although even in human form, they have strong wolfish instincts as they are in a symbiotic relationship with their animal side.

The last type is somewhere between the two. When a victim gives themselves over to the wolf. They retain their intelligence to an extent, and can change at will, but even in human form, they are more animal than person.

SW: There’s been a bit of a boom in werewolf fiction lately, why do you think they’re so popular?

GR: I think that werewolves have always been popular. A great deal of the recent interest comes from the paranormal romance genre, where the werewolves are considered primarily as a love interest for a human character. The same thing happened with vampires, and while it may make for a nice teenage fantasy, it gets away from what is interesting and frightening about the monster, taming it, if you like.

There are more horror themed werewolf stories coming out as well, though. Maybe with vampires and zombies saturating the market, people are turning back to the werewolf as another option. I can only hope that it continues, and we get some real quality werewolf fiction coming out. There are not that many truly great werewolf novels, when compared to other sub genres. Not that I have found anyway. It’s about time there were more.

SW: You have some female werewolves in your book – tell me a bit about writing them.

GR: I have a couple, but the main female werewolf character was very different to write than the others. She’s probably the most assured character in the book – certainly the most comfortable with herself. She has a playful, tender and quite mischievous side to her, but has her own agenda and won’t think twice about making a mess of anyone that gets in her way. By the time I finished the book, she was probably my favourite character. She’s almost certainly going to be the main protagonist in the second book.

SW: Was she any harder to write than the male werewolves?

GR: In some ways, she was the easiest to write, but also the most frustrating. She had an uncanny knack for turning my plot on its head and ruining my chapter plans, because she would go off and do something that I’d never even considered. It’s strange when things like that happen, but also great.

SW: Outside of your own (of course), who’s your favourite female werewolf?

GR: While I’ll always have a soft spot for Kelly Armstrong’s Elena, my favourite she-wolf has to be Laura Greenacre, from Thomas Emson’s brilliant Maneater and Prey novels. She’s smart, withdrawn in many respects, but is absolutely loyal and vicious when she needs to be. Both books are among my favourite pieces of werewolf fiction, and Laura’s character is a big part of that.

SW: Let's talk about publishing. Once you’d finished writing High Moor what happened next?

GR: When I started High Moor, I was intending to go down the traditional publishing route. Unfortunately, the more I saw of traditional publishing, the less I liked the idea. I’ve met people who have sold 100,000 copies of a book and made almost no money from it. I’ve also spoken to people who have been given a dreadful cover by the publisher that has hurt their sales. I wanted to retain creative control over the book. I’m proud of it and didn’t want an editor chopping out the interesting parts to make it fit a niche.

SW: You started your own small press to publish your novel. Tell me a bit about that decision.

GR: The decision to form Horrific Tales Publishing came fairly easily. I understood enough of the market to know broadly what else I needed to do once the book was finished (little things like paying a cover artist and getting a professional editor involved). As I started getting these things done, the costs started mounting up and it occurred to me that, as I’m intending to start a business (albeit with one product) I might as well run it like a business. That way I can put things down as a business expense, for example. Also, while people will read something that a small press has put out, they won’t always consider something that’s “self published”. There is still a great deal of stigma attached to the term, and people who submit their first draft to Amazon without so much as proof reading it are not helping.

It could all go horribly wrong, of course, and I may have to eat my words and go crawling to a traditional publisher if no one buys it, but for now, I’m happy with my choices.

SW: Will Horrific Tales be publishing any more titles?

GR: There is a chance that I’ll expand into publishing other people’s stuff. I have a couple of writer friends that have some great books in progress, and it may be that, because I’ve dealt with a lot of the paperwork and other business parts, that they may want me to put their stuff out through the imprint as well. It all costs money, though, and takes a lot of time, that will invariably take me away from my writing. I’ll have to see how it goes.

SW: And what about a sequel to High Moor?

GR: I’ve already started on the sequel, and there is an “in continuity” short story out in an enhanced eBook anthology called Tooth and Claw through Liquid Imagination Publishing. I’m hoping to have the sequel out by the end of 2012, and at the moment, I’ll probably publish that one through HTP as well. There are going to be at least three books in the High Moor series, maybe more. I’ll have to see where the story takes me after the first three.

SW: What sort of books do you enjoy reading? Any favourites from the last year?

GR: I’ve had a very werewolf centric year. I started off with Wolfen, by Whitley Streiber, which scared me as much a second time around as it did when I first read it as a child. Then I read the fantastic The Wolf’s Hour by Robert McCammon. It’s an amazing novel – especially the parts dealing with Michael’s life in the forest as a newly turned werewolf. It’s not really horror, but it’s one of my favourite reads of the year. This week I finished The Last Werewolf, by Glen Duncan. Parts of the book blew me away. Other parts went on a bit, I thought, and I wasn’t keen on the ending. Finally, today, I finished a book called The Squirrel who Dreamt of Madness. It’s a very odd book, but hilarious in places and quite thought provoking in others.

SW: How about films? Any favourite werewolf films?

GR: Decent werewolf films are few and far between. American Werewolf in London and The Howling remain the all time classics. I loved Dog Soldiers and liked a few of the Ginger Snaps series - especially the one set in the Middle Ages [ed. – Ginger Snaps Back, actually set in 19th-century Canada]. Other than that, I would struggle to think of any really good ones, although I did enjoy The Wolfman remake. I just wish that they’d stuck to practical effects instead of the CGI.

SW: I always ask this question…vampires or werewolves?

GR: Do you have to ask? Werewolves all the way. I mean, what is scarier – some angst-ridden walking corpse that seduces teenage girls, or a seven foot tall mass of muscle, claws and primal rage? No competition really.

SW: Thanks for chatting to us Graeme. Best of luck with the book.

High Moor is out now for Kindle (UK and US) and in paperback in the US. The UK paperback is planned for early 2012, as are other eBook formats.

The first five chapters of the book are available for free on Graeme’s website.

OUT NOW: Variant Spelling by Hannah Kate

My debut poetry collection is now available from Hic Dragones and Amazon, priced £6.99.

Here's what the publisher has to say about me:

Hannah Kate is a North Manchester-based poet, author and editor. Her work has appeared in a number of local and national magazines, as well as an anthology published by Crocus Books. She is a freelance teacher of English, Maths and Creative Writing, and reviews genre fiction and academic writing for a number of organizations. This is her first full-length collection of poetry.

And here's what the blurbs say:

“Delicate and strong, Hannah’s words beautifully communicate the impossibilities of communication. She explores the subtexts of what we do with our language in ways that will resonate with anyone who finds their own feelings and intents too big for semi colons.” Dominic Berry, Poet

“The poems in Variant Spelling evoke a North in revolt; a place of abandoned dyeworks, soot, winter, granite and grease. Through the ‘shifting vowels’ of the title poem they celebrate a world at odds with the imposed culture of the South. It is at its most rebellious in Praise God, where Hannah ‘praises the God of the North’, a place where the ‘air hangs with burning witches’.” Rosie Lugosi, Poet and Performer

I've blogged about the collection on my creative blog, and there's a sample poem up there. But here's another one - hope you enjoy!

Sir Ywain

On the wood on the bracket
of a cathedral seat,
there’s a picture of a knight
dressed for battle.

On second thoughts

he looks as if he’s already been fighting
for a long, long time.
He looks like he’s wounded his foe.

But the knight isn’t going to win this one,
because a portcullis has fallen,
missing his body
but carving his horse in half.

Poor knight.

Without a horse he won’t be able to fight.
Without a fight he won’t be able to win.
It looks like
he’s going to lose this battle.

But then again

the picture of the knight
on the wood on the bracket
of a cathedral seat
is just a picture of a man
sitting on half a horse.

Variant Spelling is available now, from Hic Dragones.

CFP: Insular Books: Vernacular Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain

Location: The British Academy
Dates: 21-23 June 2012
Organizers:
Dr Raluca Radulescu (Bangor University) and Dr Margaret Connolly (University of St Andrews)

Funded and hosted by the British Academy, this conference brings a new and multi-disciplinary focus to the late medieval miscellany, a little-investigated and poorly understood type of manuscript. The main aim of the conference is to foster academic interest in vernacular manuscript miscellanies from the period 1300-1550 written in a mixture of medieval languages (English, Anglo-Norman, Welsh, Scots). Attention will be paid to the interactions between literary and non-literary texts in miscellanies, and to evidence of exchange between different communities, including dialogue across the Welsh and Scottish borders. A main objective is to achieve agreement in the area of taxonomy; at present there is no agreed definition of the medieval miscellany which is treated variously by specialists in different disciplines and by
cataloguers. The discussion will thus address four main inter-related concerns:

• how to achieve a definition for the miscellany which distinguishes it from other mixed-content manuscripts (anthologies, collections, composite volumes);
• how to make manuscript miscellanies and their textual contents accessible to modern readers, including scholars, students, archivists, and general readers;
• how to develop a coherent scholarly methodology for dealing with volumes whose contents are intrinsically multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary;
• how to understand and represent the complex relationships between manuscript miscellanies.

The list of confirmed speakers includes: Prof. Derek Pearsall, Dr Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan (Universities of Cardiff and Bangor), Prof. Wendy Scase (University of Birmingham), Dr Helen Deeming (Royal Holloway, University of London), Prof. Ad Putter (University of Bristol), Prof. Diane Watt (Surrey University), Dr Sue Niebrzydowski (Bangor University), Dr Phillipa Hardman (University of Reading), Dr Marianne Ailes (University of Bristol), Dr Tony Hunt (St Peter’s College, Oxford), Dr Dafydd Johnston (Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth), Dr Anne Parry (Aberystwyth University), Dr Sara Elin Roberts (Bangor University), Dr William Marx (University of Wales, Trinity St David’s), Dr Carrie Griffin (Queen Mary University of London), Dr Andrew Taylor (Ottawa University), Dr Carol Meale (University of Bristol), Dr Deborah Youngs (Swansea University), Dr Katherine Olson (Bangor University), as well as the two co-organizers.

The organizers are happy to receive additional proposals for 20 minute papers which focus on any of the four areas of interest outlined above. Please send an abstract (maximum 150 words) to the organizers by 15 January 2012.

Some bursaries will be made available to doctoral students and early career researchers in financial need (an application form will become available on the conference website at the British Academy).

GUEST POST: Laura Vivanco

From the Middle Ages to Harlequin/Mills & Boon Romance

The publication of For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance marks a significant stage in my transformation from a medievalist into a scholar of popular culture. My time spent with medieval literature has, however, shaped my approach to, and my expectations of, literature. As a result, I was unconvinced by many of the criticisms I encountered of Harlequin/Mills & Boon romances. In the face of Ann Barr Snitow’s confident statement that descriptions of clothing are “the number one filler in Harlequins” (249), for example, and Janice Radway’s opinion that

The clothes described [...] almost never figure significantly in the developing action. Instead, the plot is momentarily, often awkwardly, delayed as the narrator accidentally notices seemingly superfluous details for the reader. The details, however, are not really superfluous at all. They are part of an essential shorthand that establishes that, like ordinary readers, fictional heroines are “naturally” preoccupied with fashion. (193)

I was unavoidably reminded of the importance of colour symbolism in many medieval works. As Harriet Goldberg has observed,

In sentimental romances and other courtly works, architectural marvels, banners, shields, gowns, tunics and hose are colourful embellishments. Their colour was often the bearer of extra meaning. [...] Although some authors explained their chromatic imagery, others did not, relying on a chromatic awareness shared with their readership. (221)

It therefore occurred to me that perhaps the critics’ low opinion of modern romances was based on a lack of understanding of the conventions which modern romance authors “shared with their readership.” And so, instead of accepting that “Any history of the romance will in one sense be a record of decadence. The works now popularly called ‘romances’ are usually sub-literature” (Beer 1), I began to look at them more closely. As I did so, I discovered topoi such as the locus amoenus and the hunt of love, familiar to me from reading medieval texts. There were also explicit and implicit references to chivalric romances which support Peter Swirski’s argument that

popular literature created for the mass enjoyment of mass readership may be as true a medium of literary artistry and aesthetic continuity as the canon, circulating and recycling plots, narratives, and characters that have proven their enduring worth. [...] Its predilection for well tried formulas and its penchant for recycling may, at the end of the day, be a good way to preserve the great motifs of literature for new generations of readers. (64)

I’d like to think that one can take both a scholar and romances out of the Middle Ages, but you can’t entirely remove traces of medievalism from either of them.

------

Beer, Gillian. The Romance. The Critical Idiom, 10. 1970. London: Methuen, 1977.

Goldberg, Harriet. “A Reappraisal of Colour Symbolism in the Courtly Prose Fiction of Late-Medieval Castile.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 69.3 (1992): 221-37.

Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. 1984. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991.

Snitow, Ann Barr. “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different.” Radical History Review 20 (1979): 141–61. Rpt. in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality. Ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson. New York: Monthly Review P, 1983. 245–63.

Swirski, Peter. From Lowbrow to Nobrow. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005.

CFP: 1st Global Conference: The Graphic Novel

Friday 7th September 2012 – Sunday 9th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

“Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea… and ideas are bulletproof.” - Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

Call for Papers:

This inter- and multi-disciplinary conference aims to examine, explore and critically engage with issues in and around the production, creation and reading of all forms of comics and graphic novels. Taken as a form of pictographic narrative it has been with us since the first cave paintings and even in the 21st century remains a hugely popular, vibrant and culturally relevant means of communication whether expressed as sequential art, graphic literature, bandes dessinees, tebeos, fumetti, manga, manhwa, komiks, strips, historietas, quadrinhos, beeldverhalen, or just plain old comics. (as noted by Paul Gravett)

Whilst the form itself became established in the 19th Century it is perhaps not until the 20th century that comic book heroes like Superman (who has been around since 1938) became, not just beloved characters, but national icons. With the globalisation of publishing brands such as Marvel and DC it is no accident that there has been an increase in graphic novel adaptations and their associated merchandising. Movies such as X-men, Iron man, Watchmen and the recent Thor have grossed millions of dollars across the world and many television series have been continued off-screen in the graphic form, Buffy, Firefly and Farscape to name a few.

Of course America and Europe is not the only base of this art form and the Far East and Japan have their own traditions as well as a huge influence on graphic representations across the globe. In particular Japanese manga has influenced comics in Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, China, France and the United States, and have created an amazing array of reflexive appropriations and re-appropriations, in not just in comics but in anime as well.

Of equal importance in this growth and relevance of the graphic novel are the smaller and independent publishers that have produced influential works such as Maus by Art Spiegleman, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Palestine by Joe Sacco, Epileptic by David B and even Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware that explore, often on a personal level, contemporary concerns such as gender, diaspora, post-colonialism, sexuality, globalisation and approaches to health, terror and identity. Further to this the techniques and styles of the graphic novel have taken further form online creating entirely web-comics and hypertexts, as in John Cei Douglas’ Lost and Found and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, as well as forming part of larger trans-media narratives and submersive worlds, as in the True Blood franchise that invites fans to enter and participate in constructing a narrative in many varied formats and locations.

This projects invites papers that consider the place of the comic or graphic novel in both history and location and the ways that it appropriates and is appropriated by other media in the enactment of individual, social and cultural identity.

Papers, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to (but not limited to) the following themes:

* Just what makes a Graphic Novel so Graphic and so Novel?:
~Sources, early representations and historical contexts of the form.
~Landmarks in development, format and narratology.
~Cartoons, comics, graphic novels and artists books.
~Words, images, texture and colour and what makes a GN
~Format, layout, speech bubbles and “where the *@#% do we go from here?”

* The Inner and Outer Worlds of the Graphic Novel:
~Outer and Inner spaces; Thoughts, cities, and galaxies and other representations of graphic place and space.
~ Differing temporalities, Chronotopes and “time flies”: Intertextuality, editing and the nature of Graphic and/or Deleuzian time.
~ Graphic Superstars and Words versus Pictures: Alan Moore v Dave Gibbons (Watchmen) Neil Gaiman v Jack Kirby (Sandman).
~Performance and performativity of, in and around graphic representations.
~Transcriptions and translations: literature into pictures, films into novels and high/low graphic arts.

* Identity, Meanings and Otherness:
~GN as autobiography, witnessing, diary and narrative
~Representations of disability, illness, coping and normality
~Cultural appropriations, east to west and globalisation
~National identity, cultural icons and stereo-typical villains
~Immigration, postcolonial and stories of exile
~Representing gender, sexualities and non-normative identities.
~Politics, prejudices and polemics: banned, censored and comix that are “just plain wrong”
~Other cultures, other voices, other words

* To Infinity and Beyond: The Graphic Novel in the 21st Century:
~Fanzines and Slash-mags: individual identity through appropriation.
~Creator and Created: Interactions and interpolations between authors and audience.
~Hypertext, Multiple formats and inter-active narratives.
~Cross media appropriation, GN into film, gaming and merchandising and vice versa
~Graphic Myths and visions of the future: Sandman, Hellboy, Ghost in the Shell.

Papers can be accepted which deal solely with Graphic Novels. This project will run concurrently with our project on Fear, Horror and Terror – we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Fear, Horror and Terror and Graphic Novels for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of the Graphic Novel or in relation to crossover panel(s).

Papers will be accepted which deal with related areas and themes. 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. 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: GN1 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

Nadine Farghaly
Paris-Lodron University, Salzburg,
Austria

Rob Fisher
Network Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net,
Freeland, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

The conference is part of the Education Hub series of research projects, which in turn belong to the At the Interface programmes of Inter-Disciplinary.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore discussions which are innovative and challenging. 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 or volumes.

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.

Conference Round-Up 2011

Since 2011 is coming to a close, and everyone is writing their reviews of the year, I thought I’d offer a round-up of the academic conferences I’ve attended this year. It’s been a good year for conferences, and I’ve been to some fantastic events. This post is a taste of my year in conferences.

January

6-9 Jan: Gender and Medieval Studies: Gender, Time and Memory
University of Swansea
My first conference of the year was the annual Gender and Medieval Studies conference, held this year at the University of Swansea. The keynote speakers at the 2011 conference were Diane Wolfthal (Rice University), who spoke on serial marriage in the Middle Ages, and Elizabeth Robertson (University of Glasgow), who spoke on gender and the translation of empire. My own paper was entitled: Reading Marie de France’s Muldumarec: Blood, Masculinity and Devotion. The 2012 Gender and Medieval Studies Conference will be hosted at the University of Manchester on 11-13 January 2012. I’m on the organizing committee for the 2012 event, along with my former PhD supervisor (Anke Bernau) and one of her current PhD students (Daisy Black).

February

March

7-8 Mar: Before Man and God: Sin, Confession, Forgiveness and Redemption in the Anglo-Saxon World (MANCASS Postgraduate Conference)
John Rylands Library, Deansgate, Manchester
In 2011, the annual MANCASS postgraduate conference explored sin, penance and forgiveness in the Anglo-Saxon world, and was organized by PhD student, Chris Monk (University of Manchester). I didn’t speak at the conference, but I chaired a session on the second day, with papers on the Old English Martyrology and male sexuality in the Anglo-Saxon penitentials. As always, the postgrad conference coincided with the annual Toller Lecture, which was given this year by Professor Barbara Yorke (University of Winchester), who spoke on ‘King Alfred and the traditions of Anglo-Saxon kingship’. The 2012 MANCASS postgraduate conference will focus on domestic life and lifestyle in the Anglo-Saxon period.

After the conference closed on 8 March, a number of us headed over to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation for the launch of In Strange Countries: Middle English Literature and its Afterlife (ed. by David Matthews), a collection of essays in memory of J.J. Anderson.

11-12 Mar: ‘The Ideal Woman’: Interrogating Femininity Across Disciplines and Time
Queen’s University, Belfast
This interdisciplinary conference, exploring representations and constructions of femininity across different time periods, was organized by QUB postgraduate students to celebrate International Women’s Day. My paper was entitled: Gothic Lolitas: Infantilization and Idealization in Contemporary Teen Fiction.

17-19 Mar: Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness
Prague
This was the 12th annual Perspectives on Evil conference, organized by Inter-Disciplinary.Net. My paper was Her Husband’s Goods: Women, Shopping and Evil in the Later Middle Ages, and was part of a panel on women, evil and shopping I organized with independent reasearcher, Linda Maguire. I originally met Linda a few years ago at an ID.net conference on monsters, and we came up with the idea for the shopping panel at a 2010 conference on Magic and the Supernatural in Salzburg. Having spent a lot of time emailing each other about evil and shopping, it was really great to eventually bring everything together and present our papers. Unfortunately, the third member of our panel wasn’t able to make the conference, but Linda and I really enjoyed the way the session turned out. The 2012 Perspectives on Evil conference will be held on 15-17 March 2012, in Prague.

April

May

13-15 May: Evil, Women and the Feminine
Warsaw
My second ID.net conference of the year was the third annual Evil, Women and the Feminine conference. My paper was entitled: Watch Out Boy, She’ll Chew You Up: Werewolf Mouths and the Vagina Dentata. It was great to catch up with people I’ve met at previous ID.net events, especially Sorcha Ní Fhlainn and Ann Marie Cook (who is currently organizing a conference on the TV show Skins and popular culture). I also got to catch up with Simon Bacon, who I met at the De Montfort Vegetarians, VILFs and Fang-Bangers conference in 2010. EWF was also where I met Gráinne O’Brien for the first time, who is organizing the Magic is Might 2012 conference at the University of Limerick (23-24 July 2012), and Eileen Pollard, who went on to work with me on organizing the Hic Dragones Afterlife of Alice conference. The fourth Evil, Women and the Feminine conference will run 6-8 May 2012, and will be held in Prague.

I’m currently in the process of editing a dialogic collection of essays that have developed out of this conference, to be published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2012.

16-18 May: The Gothic: Exploring Critical Issues
Warsaw
I stayed on in Warsaw for a second ID.net conference, this time on the Gothic. My paper for this conference was: Glitter Gothic: Uses of the Past in Contemporary YA Fantasy Fiction.

Following this conference, I was asked to be guest blogger on the University of Stirling’s Gothic Imagination website.

28 May: Thought this date was worth mentioning. In June, I mark GCSE papers for one of the exam boards (something has to pay for all my conference travel, after all). Before beginning the marking, I attended the standardization meeting in Birmingham, and this year decided to combine this with meeting up with someone I’d been chatting to on Twitter, whose sister attended the She-Wolf conference in 2010. We went for dinner, fell in love, and have been together ever since.

June

4-5 Jun: Trailtrekker
Skipton
Not an academic event, but an Oxfam one. I’ve been volunteering for Oxfam since I was 16, and usually run one of the checkpoints at Trailtrekker, a sponsored 100km hike for teams of four that takes place around Skipton in Yorkshire. My role involves supervising volunteers, checking teams in as the arrive at our checkpoint and generally standing in a field for 27 hours making sure things run smoothly. I’ve stewarded at music festivals for Oxfam since 1997, but got involved with Trailtrekker when it started in 2009, as I fancied trying something a bit different.

6-7 Jun: Education and Ignorance: The Use of Knowledge in the Medieval World
John Rylands Library, Deansgate, Manchester
This was the third annual University of Manchester Postgraduate Medieval Studies conference. I chaired the first session, which was oddly ‘Katherine’ themed, with papers from Katherine Frances (on Saint Margaret of Antioch), Katherine Harvey (on episcopal elections) and Emily Dalton (on Capgrave’s ‘Life of Saint Katherine’). This was followed by the keynote paper by Carolyn Muessig (University of Bristol), who spoke on scholasticism and women’s religious education. This conference was organized by three postgraduate students from the University of Manchester: Robert Mitchell, Stephen Gordon and Daisy Black.

26-28 Jun: Can’t Buy Me Love? Sex, Money, Power and Romance
Fales Library and Special Collection of New York University
This month, I made my first ever trip to the US to attend the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance conference in New York. My paper for this conference was entitled: ‘Hit Cost a Thousand Pound and Mar’: Love, Sex and Wealth in the Fourteenth-Century Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle. This was also the only conference of the year where I received some funding, getting a small travel grant from the Romance Writers of America. The conference keynote was given by Laura Kipnis. I also enjoyed papers by Ann Herendeen (author of Pride/Prejudice), who spoke on ‘The Upper-Class Bisexual Man as Romantic Hero’, and a panel by Katherine E. Lynch, Ruth Sternglantz and Len Barot (of Boldstokes Books), who spoke on contemporary lesbian romance and the queer female hero. Len Barot writes paranormal romance under the name L.L. Raand, and her alpha (Sylvan Mir) recently won ‘Best New She-Wolf’ on this site. It was also nice to catch up with Jonathan Allan, who I first met in 2010 at the ID.net Monsters and the Monstrous conference.

29 Jun: After the conference finished, I had a spare half-day to myself (not really a lot of time, since it was my first trip to New York!), so I decided to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for few hours before I headed off to the airport.

30 Jun: I landed in Manchester at 9am, and headed straight off to the station to catch a train to London. A couple of us had tickets for the British Museum’s Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe exhibition. This was a really stunning display of reliquaries and devotional objects, with some breath-taking pieces. Also, I can now say that I went to both the New York Met and the British Museum within the same 24-hour period... I’m quite proud of that.

July

5-6 Jul: Wounds in the Middle Ages
John Rylands Library, Deansgate, Manchester
This was an invite-only workshop on wounds and wounding in the Middle Ages, organized by Cordelia Warr and Anne Kirkham from Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. I spoke on Christ, Wounds and Romance. This was, without doubt, one of my favourite academic events of the year. The range of papers was fantastic, and speakers covered early and late medieval culture, European and Arabic medicine, literary and historical sources, religious and secular material. Every paper was fascinating, but I particularly enjoyed Anthony Bale’s presentation on the circumcision of Christ.

27-31 July: Camp Bestival
Dorset
And now I took a little break from conferences to do some more volunteering for Oxfam, this time as a festival steward. My first festival of 2011 was Camp Bestival. As a side note, one of the people I was working with performs as Dolly Delicious with the Ooh La Las, who I’m hoping to book for one of the 2012 Hic Dragones events.

August

2-7 Aug: Big Chill
Eastnor Castle
After Camp Bestival, and a night’s stopover in Stroud, I headed up to Big Chill for a bit more stewarding.

24-29 Aug: Leeds Festival
Leeds
My third and final festival with Oxfam for 2011.

September

October

6 Oct: A Journey Through Wonderland: Alice in Multimedia
Portico Library, Manchester
No conferences in October, but I did attend the preview evening of the Portico’s Journey Through Wonderland exhibition, which featured various illustrations and interpretations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels. The exhibition was launched by Vanessa St Clair, the great-granddaughter of Alice Liddell, and was curated by librarian Emma Marigliano, who worked with me to co-promote this event with the Hic Dragones Afterlife of Alice conference (which ran the day after the exhibition closed). As well as the exhibition, the Portico also hosted a series of talks on Alice in Wonderland and its legacy, including a brilliant talk on 12 October from John Reppion and Leah Moore on their Complete Alice in Wonderland.

26-31 Oct: Bram Stoker Film Festival
Whitby
Not really a conference, but I went spent four lovely days in Whitby, and attended the Bram Stoker Film Festival. You can read my review here.

November

2-4 Nov: Vampires: Myths of the Past and the Future
IGRS, University of London
This conference, organized by Simon Bacon, explored the various manifestations of vampire myths in literature, film, history and folklore. My paper was entitled: Vampires in Those Days: Interrogating Master Narratives. This conference was quite intense, with long days filled with lots of excellent papers. It was also notable for offering the most amazing list of keynote speakers: Milly Williamson, Catherine Spooner, Ken Gelder and Stacey Abbott. I was particularly pleased to be able to meet Catherine Spooner, as her work (especially Contemporary Gothic and Fashioning Gothic Bodies) has been really influential on my own. Catherine is currently involved in organizing the Capturing Witches: Histories, Stories, Images (400 Years After the Lancashire Witches) conference, to be held at the University of Lancaster on 17-19 August 2012. As well as the four keynote papers, this conference incorporated the annual Coffin Trust Lecture (an unintentional pun), which this year was given by Sir Christopher Frayling, who spoke on ‘The Nightmare of Bram Stoker’. As well as listening to some great papers, it was nice to meet Jim Doan and Barbara Brodman (who are currently working on a two-volume collection of essays entitled The Universal Vampire) and Clemens Ruthner (who is organizing a ‘Vampires and/as Science’ conference, to be held 5-6 July 2012 at Trinity College, Dublin). And I got chance to catch up with Gráinne and Sorcha.

18-20 Nov: The Monster Inside Us, The Monsters Around Us: Monstrosity and Humanity Conference
De Montfort University
This was a three-day interdisciplinary conference, exploring monsters and monstrosity across different time periods and cultures. My paper was titled: Battle Not With Monsters: Slayers from Beowulf to Buffy, the beginning stages of a new project that I’m hoping to write up as journal article at some point in 2012. The conference was organized by Deborah Mutch (De Montfort University), and had keynote papers from David Punter (University of Bristol) and Andy Mousley (De Montfort University). Andy has recently set up an interactive website called SageBites, which offers reflections on quotations for life.

December

1 Dec: Further Adventures in Wonderland: The Afterlife of Alice
Hic Dragones, Manchester
My final conference of the year was the one I was most nervous about, as it was the first event organized by my publishing and events company, Hic Dragones. The conference was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, and explored the various representations and interpretations of Alice in Wonderland that have come after Lewis Carroll’s novel. My paper was entitled: Steampunk, Cyberpunk, Whimsy: Generic Definition and Jeff Noon’s The Automated Alice. Our keynote paper was given by Will Brooker (Kingston University), author of Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture, and other papers covered books, films, computer games, Disneyland rides and pop music. We were also happy to have Mark Richards (of the Lewis Carroll Society) and Emma Marigliano (of the Portico Library) in attendance, as both were very supportive of the conference. I was also assisted in the organization of the event by Eileen Pollard, a PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University.

I am planning a collection of essays based on this conference, which will expand on the topics discussed during the day.

CFP: 1st Global Conference: Skins: Exploring Critical Issues

Tuesday 25th September 2012 – Thursday 27th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Papers

Now in its sixth series on E4 in the UK and first series on MTV in the US, the brainchild of father-son writing team Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain has gained popularity and critical acclaim for the honesty, authenticity and humour of its no-holds-barred depiction of the teenage experience. In a reflexive turn, Skins has become a cultural phenomenon whose influence is registered through its status as essential teen viewing, the Skins party craze and the tendency among fans to perceive their own identities and experiences in relation to characters and situations from the show. The richness of Skins as a televisual text supports wide-ranging explorations of the show’s aesthetic, thematic, ideological, social and technological implications.
We therefore invite papers and preconstituted panels that address any aspect of Skins, such as:

■Representations of teenage life and teen culture
■Identities: gender, class, race, sexualities (hetero-, homo-, bi-, fluid, queer, etc.)
■Death and the concept of mortality
■Mental illness/psychology/psychoanalysis
■Fandom
■Transnational reception
■Analysis of fanvids, fanfics, fanart
■Assessments of the meaning/cultural significance of specific storylines (c.f. the Naomily phenomenon)
■Plotline controversies and moral panics
■Adapting Skins for the American market
■Narrative and storytelling
■Creator/showrunner as author
■Genre analysis
■Modes of comedy
■Defining the ‘Skins aesthetic’
■Uses of inter-textuality/pop culture allusions
■Fashion
■Music
■Space and place: Bristol on screen
■Skins novels
■Acting and performance
■Cameos and guest stars
■Fame and celebrity
■Production process studies
■Technologies of production, distribution and reception in the post-broadcast era
■Skins and Channel 4/E4/MTV
■Comparative analyses of Skins and other television shows

For 2012, the Skins and Contemporary Culture project will meet alongside our project on Gender and Love It is our intention to create cross-over sessions between the two groups – and we welcome proposals which deal with the relationship between gender and love and Skins and contemporary culture. Papers will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper of no more than 3000 words should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. 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, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: SKINS 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). 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

Ann-Marie Cook
Visiting Fellow, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation,
Queensland University of Technology,
Australia

Dr Rob Fisher
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Priory House, Wroslyn Road,
Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR

The conference is part of the Critical Issues series of research projects. 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 more information, please click here.

CFP: 2nd Global Conference: Beauty: Exploring Critical Issues

Friday 21st September – Sunday 23rd September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Papers:

“The first real problem I faced in my life was that of beauty,” wrote the poet-playwright- novelist Yukio Mishima, in Temple of the Golden Pavilion as he pondered beauty’s relevance, meanings, and the spell it cast over him. Beauty is complicated by the word beauty itself. Limited or overloaded, beauty has been celebrated as essential or denounced as irrelevant. The existence of beauty has been challenged, called a search for El Dorado. Some find no beauty in life, a recurring motif in subcultures, music lyrics, and the notes left by suicides. Others dismiss that perspective, arguing that common sense, experience, and multidisciplinary research reveal the reality and centrality of beauty in our lives. But what exactly is beauty? Speculations about the nature of beauty are various and contradictory. Some philosophers have argued that it will remain a mystery. Other theorists have held less modest beliefs, arguing that beauty expresses a basic spiritual reality, has universal physical properties, or is an experience and construction of mind and culture. The beauty ‘project’ will explore, assess, and map a number of key core themes.

These will include:

1. Understanding Beauty
- Defining beauty
- Theorising beauty
- Power of beauty
- History of beauty
- Politics of beauty
- Culture of beauty
- Religion of beauty

2. Experiences of and Representations of Beauty
- Pursuit of beauty
- Expressions of beauty
- Appearance of beauty
- Making beauty
- Documenting beauty
- Emotion and beauty
- Beauty and seduction
- Representing beauty in art, literature and popular culture

3. Beauty and Nature
-Beauty and the natural world
-Beauty and the Sublime
-Beauty and desire
-Science and mathematics of beauty
-Medical aspects of beauty

4. Beauty, Culture, and Identity
- Beauty subcultures
- Beauty and social stratification: gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, age, etc.
- Beauty collectors
- Beauty specialists
- Beauty disciples
- Enhancing the body beautiful: cosmetics, tattoos, piercings, surgical interventions, and other forms of body modification

5. The Business of Beauty
-Beauty and consumer culture
-Beauty and cultural capital
-Beauty professions and trades
-Beauty cities
-Beauty marketing and forecasting
-Professional beauties (models, actors, celebrities, beauty pageants etc.)
-Fashion and beauty
-Glamour and beauty

6. Diminishing the Beautiful
-Beauty and transgression
-Beauty and ugliness
-Beauty and aging
-Defiling the beautiful
-Destroying the beautiful
-Beauty and death
-Beauty and decay

Papers will be accepted which deal with related areas and themes.

The 2012 meeting of Beauty will run alongside a second of our projects on Strangers, Aliens and Foreigners and we anticipate holding sessions in common between the two projects. We welcome any papers or panels considering the problems or addressing issues that cross both projects

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 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 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, f) up to 10 keywords

E-mails should be entitled: Beauty 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). 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

Dr Jacque Lynn Foltyn
Project Leader
Professor of Sociology, Dept of Social Sciences, College of Letters and Sciences, National University, CA, USA

Dr Rob Fisher
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Priory House, Wroslyn Road,
Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR

The conference is part of the Critical Issues series of research projects. 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 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.

The Steam King

Recently, I've been working as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant on a project involving searching databases of nineteenth-century newspapers. Though it has nothing to do with the project, I've become quite enamored with the following poem by Edward P. Mead, which was originally published in The Northern Star and reprinted in Engels' Conditions of the Working Class in England. I was also pleased to see it discussed in a recent conference paper, at the De Montfort The Monster Inside Us, The Monsters Around Us conference.

If you're interested in the industrial revolution, and the ways in which some people of the time viewed it, or if you're a steampunk writer or fan, I think you'll enjoy...

The Steam King by Edward P. Mead
Originally published in The Northern Star, and Leeds General Advertiser (vol. 6, February 1843); reproduced in Engels, Conditions of the Working Class in England (1845)

There is a King, and a ruthless King;
Not a King of the poet’s dream;
But a tyrant fell, white slaves know well,
And that ruthless King is Steam.

He hath an arm, an iron arm,
And tho’ he hath but one,
In that mighty arm there is a charm,
That millions hath undone.

Like the ancient Moloch grim, his sire
In Himmon’s vale that stood,
His bowels are of living fire,
And children are his food.

His priesthood are a hungry band,
Blood-thirsty, proud, and bold;
’Tis they direct his giant hand,
In turning blood to gold.

For filthy gain in their servile chain
All nature’s rights they bind;
They mock at lovely woman’s pain,
And to manly tears are blind.

The sighs and groans of Labour’s sons
Are music in their ear,
And the skeleton shades, of lads and maids,
In the Steam King’s hell appear.

Those hells upon earth, since the Steam King’s birth,
Have scatter’d around despair;
For the human mind for Heav’n design’d,
With the body, is murdered there.

Then down with the King, the Moloch King,
Ye working millions all;
O chain his hand, or our native land
Is destin’d by him to fall.

And his Satraps abhor’d, each proud Mill Lord,
Now gorg’d with gold and blood,
Must be put down by the nation’s frown,
As well as their monster God.

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.

CFP: 1st Global Conference: Reframing Punishment

Monday 3rd September – Wednesday 5th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Papers:

The concept of punishment has a long history and diverse cultural, social and criminological meanings. Research and debate is often focused on the offender, the offence, the state and legal codification. In contrast, this project seeks to re-frame these debates in order to combine the insights they produce with broader cultural meanings, social representations and ritualistic or other activities. Therefore, the aim of the project is to develop different ways of understanding the penetration and complexity of shared understandings of punishment from a variety of perspectives, approaches and practitioner experiences. Reframing the debate might be done through papers aimed the personal or social levels. We encourage unique approaches to punishment in terms of boundary control, whether it is control of evil, the politically subversive, the economically disruptive, or punishment in pursuit of system stability or marginalisation of liminality. Papers might also cover punishment issues relating to defining the contours of disgust, desire, dread, or the abject. They may even consider the operation and consequences of both wrongdoing and various forms of societal/social punishment. Accordingly the project welcomes papers, work-in-progress and pre-formed panels from diverse areas of study such as the humanities, social sciences, business, science, law schools and the arts, as well as practitioners.

Papers, presentations, reports and workshops are invited on issues broadly related to any of the following themes:

* Cultural (including cross-/inter-cultural) notions of what constitutes punishment

* Religious/spiritual punishment, asceticism, whether self-inflicted or externally imposed

* Pain, fear and corporal punishment

* Punishment, public services and performance measurement

* Punishment and child development/child rearing

* Punishment rituals

* Punishing the body for pleasure (modification, BDSM, smoking, etc)

* Punishing the body in the name of beauty and fashion

* Representations of punishment in contemporary times and across historical periods

* Theories of punishment and deviants: What is punishment’s purpose? Ideal methods? Is punishment limited to humans? What about animals or nature, and in some societies, why is imprisonment such a key form of punishment?

* Proportionality, materiality and other concepts used to administer punishment(s)

* Shame, forgiveness, vengeance, retribution and punishment

* The limits of punishment: whether controlled by the state, institutions or groups, including sports groups, cults, gangs, the military, etc.

* Shifting social attitudes toward punishment

* Self-harm, abuse and control

* Space and its role in enhancing or ameliorating punishment

* The relationship(s) between discipline and punishment

Papers on any other topic related to the theme will also be considered.

This project will run concurrently with our project on Space and Place– we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Reframing Punishment and Space and Place for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of Reframing Punishment or in relation to crossover panel(s).

This project will run concurrently with our project on Space and Place– we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Reframing Punishment and Space and Place for a cross-over panel. The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. 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 simultaneously to all 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, f) up to 10 key words

E-mails should be entitled: PUNISH 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). 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.

Joint Organising Chairs:

Shona Hill & Shilinka Smith
Conference Leaders
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
New Zealand

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire,
United Kingdom

The conference is part of the Probing the Boundaries programme of research projects. It aims 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 will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers maybe invited for development for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s).

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.

CFP: 6th Global Conference: Fear, Horror and Terror

Friday 7th September 2012 – Sunday 9th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Papers:

This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference seeks to examine and explore issues which lie at the interface of fear, horror and terror. In particular the project is interested in investigating the various contexts of fear, horror and terror, and assessing issues surrounding the artistic, cinematic, literary, moral, social, (geo) political, philosophical, psychological and religious significance of them, both individually and together.

In addition to academic analysis, we welcome the submission from practitioners, such as people in religious orders, therapists, or victims of events which have been provoked by experiences of fear, horror and terror – for example, social workers, those involved with the legal system, medical practitioners, or fiction authors whose work aims to evoke these reactions.

Papers, reports, work-in-progress and workshops are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:

1. The Contexts of Fear, Horror and Terror
- case studies
- professions dealing with the Fear, Horror and Terror (Therapists, Clergy, etc.)
- creating and experiencing fear, horror and terror
- the properties of fear, horror and terror
- contexts of fear, horror and terror
- the language, meaning and significance of fear, horror and terror

2. At the Interface of Fear, Horror and Terror
- the role of fear, horror and terror
- emotional releases (pleasant or negative) achieved by Fear, Horror and Terror
- techniques of fear, horror and terror
- marketing fear, horror and terror
- recreational fear, horror and terror
- aesthetic fear, horror and terror
- the body, temperature, touch, taste or sound and fear, horror and terror
- silence as a strategic subversion of the operation of fear, horror and terror
- fear, horror and terror and the visible/invisible

3. Representations of Fear, Horror and Terror and:
- the imagination or the sublime
- pleasure, hope, despair, anxiety, disgust, dread, loathing
- art, cinema, theatre, media and the creative arts
- survival horror video games
- literature (including children’s stories)
- the other
- technology
- the future

Papers will be accepted which deal with related areas and themes. 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. 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: FHT 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

Shona Hill & Shilinka Smith
Conference Leaders
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
New Zealand

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

The conference is part of the ‘At the Interface’ series of research projects. 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 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.

CFP: 3rd Global Conference: Space and Place

Monday 3rd September – Thursday 6th September 2012

Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Call for Papers:

Questions of space and place affect the very way in which we experience and recreate the world. Wars are fought over both real and imagined spaces; boundaries are erected against the “Other” constructed a lived landscape of division and disenfranchisement; and ideology constructs a national identity based upon the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion. The construction of space and place is also a fundamental aspect of the creative arts either through the art of econstruction of a known space or in establishing a relationship between the audience and the performance. Politics, power and knowledge are also fundamental components of space as is the relationship between visibility and invisibility. This new inter- and multi-disciplinary conference project seeks to explore these and other topics and open up a dialogue about the politics and practices of space and place. We seek submissions from a range of disciplines including archaeology, architecture, urban geography, the visual and creative arts, philosophy and politics and also actively encourage practioners and non-academics with an interest in the topic to participate.

We welcome traditional papers, preformed panels of papers, workshop proposals and other forms of performance – recognising that different disciplines express themselves in different mediums.

Submissions are sought on any aspect of space and place, including the following:

1. Theorising Space and Place
~Philosophies and space and place
~Surveillance, sight and the panoptic structures and spaces of contemporary life
~Rhizomatics and/or postmodernist constructions of space as a “meshwork of paths” (Ingold: 2008)
~The relationship between spatiality and temporality/space as a temporal-spatial event (Massey: 2005)
~The language and semiotics of space and place

2. Situated Identities
~Gendered spaces including the tension between domestic and public spheres
~Work spaces and hierarchies of power
~Geographies and archaeologies of space including Orientalism and Occidentalism
~Ethnic spaces/ethnicity and space
~Disabled spaces/places
~Queer places and spaces

3. Contested spaces
~The politics and ideology of constructions and discourses of space and place including the construction of gated communities as a response to real/imagined terrorism.
~The relationship between power, knowledge and the construction of place and space
~Territorial wars, both real and imagined.
~The relationship between the global and the local
~Barriers, obstructions and disenfranchisement in the construction of lived spaces
~Space and place from colonisation to globalisation
~Real and imagined maps/cartographies of place
~Transnational and translocal places

4. Representations of place and space
~Embodied/disembodied spaces
~Lived spaces and the architecture of identity
~Haunted spaces/places and non-spaces
~Set design and the construction of space in film, television and theatre
~Authenticity and the reproduction/representation of place in the creative arts
~Technology and developments in the representation of space including new media technologies and 3D technologies of viewing
~Future cities/futurology and space
~Representations of the urban and the city in the media and creative arts
~Space in computer games

Papers on any other topic related to the theme will also be considered.

This project will run concurrently with our project on Reframing Punishment – we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Reframing Punishment and Space and Place for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of Space or Place 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. 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: SP 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). 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 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:

Matt Melia
Conference Leader
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Kingston University, United Kingdom

Rob Fisher
Network Founder and Network Leader,
Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom.

The conference is part of the ‘Ethos’ series of research projects, which in turn belong to the Critical Issues programmes of ID.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and challenging. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference will be published in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into 20-25 page chapters for publication in a themed dialogic ISBN hard copy volume.

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.