CFP Frankenstein Unbound: An Interdisciplinary Conference Exploring Mary Shelley and Gothic Legacies (6/29/2018; Bournemouth 10/31-11/01/2018)

Finally, a call that is current (though only barely):


Frankenstein Unbound: An Interdisciplinary Conference Exploring Mary Shelley and Gothic Legacies
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/05/03/frankenstein-unbound-an-interdisciplinary-conference-exploring-mary-shelley-and

deadline for submissions: June 29, 2018

full name / name of organization: Arts University Bournemouth

contact email: frankensteinunboundconference@gmail.com



DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS EXTENDED: 29th June 2018

Dates: Wednesday 31 October and Thursday 1 November 2018

Venues: Conference - St Peter’s Church, Bournemouth



Keynote Speakers:

Sir Christopher Frayling, Chancellor, Arts University Bournemouth

Professor Elaine Graham, University of Chester

Professor Sir Peter Cooke, CRAB Studios (TBC)



In 1849, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley’s heart were brought to the graveyard of St. Peter’s Church in Bournemouth, where they were buried with the remains of Mary Shelley’s parents Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.

In 2018, Arts University Bournemouth and St. Peter’s Church, in association with Bournemouth University, celebrate the bicentenary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s most famous work Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) as part of the Shelley Frankenstein Festival. The academic conference, located at this unique venue, will offer new and re-situated perspectives on Mary Shelley and her writings, her family and circle, and her most famous work. We are pleased to acknowledge colleagues at Bournemouth University for their organisational support.

We invite papers and presentations themed around, but not limited to, the following:

• Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and the Romantics
• Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley
• Mary Shelley beyond Frankenstein
• The Shelley family: history and legacy
• Monstrous Romantics
• Frankenstein and the sea
• Theology and Frankenstein
• Frankenstein and philosophy
• Frankenstein at home and abroad
• Adaptations and afterlives
• Frankenstein and medical humanities
• The abject and the sublime
• Frankenstein and emotion
• Guilt and crime in Frankenstein
• Interpretations of Frankenstein in the creative industries (Film, Art, Theatre, Dance, Writing etc)
• Mary Shelley and Gothic legacies
• Gothic architecture
• The Gothic imagination

We welcome proposals for themed panel sessions (maximum three papers), individual twenty-minute presentations, or creative submissions from practitioners and scholars of all fields. We particularly encourage submissions from post-graduate students and Early Career Researchers. Please submit an abstract (300 words) and short biography (100 words) to frankensteinunboundconference@gmail.com by Friday 29th June 2018.

For more information and updates visit our website: https://frankensteinunbound.wordpress.com/.

CFP Frankenstein: Two Hundred Years of Monsters Conference (expired)

Came across this by accident today; sadly, it is also expired.

Frankenstein: Two Hundred Years of Monsters
http://hrc.cass.anu.edu.au/events/frankenstein-two-hundred-years-monsters


- Call for Papers -

Frankenstein 2018: Two Hundred Years of Monsters

12 ‐ 15 September 2018
The Australian National University and the National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra


Nearly two centuries after its anonymous publication on 1 January 1818, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus remains as topical as ever. Its core story - of a recklessly ambitious and naïve scientist whose artificial, human-like creature arouses only horror and disgust, and escapes control to seek revenge on his creator - has become, for better or worse, the techno‐scientific fable of modernity. First adapted for stage by Richard Brinsley Peake in 1823, and for film by Edison Studios in 1910, the story has inspired more theatre, film, television and other adaptations than any other modern narrative, with more than 50 screen adaptations appearing in the 2010s alone. From Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show to The Addams Family, the Frankenstein myth reaches into every recess of high and popular culture.

We invite proposals for 20-­minute papers or 3 x 20‐minute panel sessions from scholars across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences that respond in interdisciplinary ways to this most interdisciplinary of novels, including, but not limited to:

• Literary studies, especially of the long eighteenth century, Romanticism, Victorian and neo­‐Victorian literature
• Re-tellings and re-­‐imaginings of the Frankenstein story in various modes and genres, e.g. SF, steampunk, speculative fiction, slash fiction, etc.
• Film, television, theatre and performance, and visual studies
• Digital humanities, reception studies, histories of popular culture, and media ecologies
• Gender studies, queer theory, and the history of sexuality
• Disability studies and post‐humanism
• The history of medicine, especially reproductive technologies
• Science and technology studies; images and imaginaries of science and scientists
• The history and philosophy of biology, especially in relation to vitalism
• Eco‐criticism and the Anthropocene
• Affect theory and the history of emotions
• Frankenstein and race, colonialism, empire
• Global and local Frankensteins, e.g. Australian Frankensteins
• Frankenstein and material history
• Cyborgs, robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning
• Synthetic biology, genetic engineering, and artificial life

To maintain order among this menagerie of monsters, we propose the following four overarching themes, each of which will be addressed by one of our keynote speakers:

Frankenstein in 1818: historicising the monster
(Professor Sharon Ruston, Lancaster)

Frankenstein as scientific fable: from grave-­‐robbing and galvanism to synthetic biology and machine learning
(Professor Genevieve Bell, Australian National University)

Adaptation and experimentation: Frankenstein in film and other media
(Assistant Professor Shane Denson, Stanford)

Frankenstein’s queer family: gender, sexuality, reproduction and the work of care
(Professor Julie Carlson, University of California, Santa Barbara)


Please send proposals for papers or sessions - including a title, 250­‐word abstract, and brief author biography - to Dr Russell Smith at russell.smith@anu.edu.au.

The deadline for proposals is 6 April 2018. Proposals will be reviewed by a committee comprising scholars from the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, and applicants will be informed of the outcome within two weeks of the submission deadline. Please note that we will endeavour to notify overseas applicants earlier if they submit proposals before the submission deadline.

For further information and updates, as well as information about the Humanities Research Centre’s annual theme for 2018, Imagining Science and Technology 200 Years after Frankenstein, see here.

Please direct any inquiries to Penny Brew at hrc@anu.edu.au.

CFP Of 'Gods and Monsters': Shelley's Frankenstein Two Hundred Years On (expired)

Not sure how I missed posting this sooner:

Of 'Gods and Monsters': Shelley's Frankenstein Two Hundred Years On
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2017/10/24/of-gods-and-monsters-shelleys-frankenstein-two-hundred-years-on

deadline for submissions: January 15, 2018

full name / name of organization: Roger Stanley/Southeast Regional Conference on Christianity and Literature

contact email: rstanley@uu.edu



Of ‘Gods and Monsters’: Shelley’s Frankenstein Two Hundred Years On

Southeast Conference on Christianity and Literature

19-21 April 2018

Union University

Jackson, Tennessee


Keynote Speaker:

Dr. Christina Bieber Lake, Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English, Wheaton College

Prophets of the Posthuman: American Literature, Biotechnology and the Ethics ofPersonhood

(Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2013)

Dr. Bieber Lake is also the author of the book The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor and many articles which have appeared in Books & Culture and elsewhere.


The primary theme of the convention will be a celebration of the bicentennial of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Union University itself envisions a campus-wide, interdisciplinary commemoration for the calendar year, though the focus for this conference will be, as always, on the intersection of theology and fiction.

Within the Frankenstein motif, possible topics and areas of interest include:

--Mary Shelley’s legacy in contemporary science fiction

---Creation: Human, subhuman and posthuman

--Narrative frames and the voice of the marginalized

--Science, technology, and the limitations of knowledge

--Maternity and paternity

--Idealized vs. “monstrous” femininity

--“Singularity” in terms of AI vs. human intelligence

--Revisions of Frankenstein in movies/pop culture


As always, SECCL is open to other proposals concerning the relationship of Christianity and literature. Abstracts from graduate students are also welcome. Undergraduates should send complete papers.

Send abstracts (400-500) words via email attachment to Prof. Roger Stanley, at rstanley@uu.edu . The submission deadline is January 15, 2018.

CFP Diagnosing History: Medicine in Television Costume Dramas (9/15/2018)

Here's an interesting idea:

Diagnosing History: Medicine in Television Costume Dramas
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/20/diagnosing-history-medicine-in-television-costume-dramas

deadline for submissions: September 15, 2018

full name / name of organization: Dr. Julie Anne Taddeo

contact email: taddeo@umd.edu


There has been a long relationship between television and medicine: some of the small screen’s most popular shows, on both sides of the Atlantic, have been medical in focus, from hospital-set dramas like ER to reality TV shows and docudramas like One Born Every Minute. This fascination with doctors, hospitals and bodies is also shared by period drama television, but scholarship has paid little attention to this intersection/relationship. Recent period dramas including The Knick, Mercy Street, and Charite, for example, use the hospital setting familiar from older shows like Bramwell, to address larger themes about the professionalization of medicine, medical innovations and failures, and the gender politics that surround the profession. Dramas like Call the Midwife document the progress of the NHS and female reproductive health while also engaging in contemporary debates about contraception, abortion, and disability. In addition, medical-driven narratives abound in almost every period drama on our screens today: war-induced mental and physical trauma in Peaky Blinders; Spanish ‘flu in The Village; gay conversion plotlines in A Place to Call Home; bodily and facial disfigurement in Home Fires; medical experimentation and monstrosity in Penny Dreadful and Frankenstein Chronicles; nursing as a vehicle of female emancipation in The Crimson Field and Morocco: Love in Times of War; and all of the above and many more in Downton Abbey, whose most famous plotlines are medical in nature.

This edited collection seeks to address this important area of period drama studies, and we are looking for proposals for essays on any of the above issues, or which may be interdisciplinary in approach and engage with the medical humanities, interrogating relationships between medicine and history, class, gender or race. Our collection aims to be international in scope, so submissions about period dramas from/situated in any country are welcome.


Please send a 500 word abstract and brief biography by Sept 15, 2018 to:

Julie Anne Taddeo: taddeo@umd.edu

James Leggott: james.leggott@northumbria.ac.uk

Katherine Byrne: kbyrne@ulster.ac.uk

CFP The Silent Revolution Conference (6/30/2018; Lisbon 11/5-6/2018)

1818-2018 – the silent revolution: of fears, folly & the female
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/22/1818-2018-%E2%80%93-the-silent-revolution-of-fears-folly-the-female

deadline for submissions: June 30, 2018

full name / name of organization: Universidade Catolica Portuguesa

contact email: cecc@fch.lisboa.ucp.pt




1818-2018 – the silent revolution: of fears, folly & the female

Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon

5-6 November 2018


In 2018 we celebrate events which took place two hundred years ago: the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the birth of Emily Brontë. While the two events are markedly different, as the former is a tangible work of art and the latter more of a promise of what was to come, both have contributed to challenge and change the conceptions and perceptions of the time, thus performing a silent, subtle revolution in the world of letters.


Shelley and Brontë are mostly famous for one novel each, but these novels have helped shape Western imagination and literature, as they arguably ‘disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination’, as Walter Scott said a propos Shelley’s oeuvre [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 2 (March 1818)].


By focusing on characters who do not belong anywhere – ‘I am an unfortunate and deserted creature; I look around, and I have no relation or friend upon earth’ (Shelley, 2004: 160) and ‘Not a soul knew to whom it [Heathcliff] belonged’ (Brontë, 1965: 78) –, both novels seem to question the hegemonic discourse of the time. As such, their global appeal may precisely reside in their radical difference and ‘unbelonging’ (Rushdie, 2013), which, paradoxically, make them potential sites for multiple identifications – the female, the savage, the foreigner.


This conference brings the two female authors together, for their œuvres, as different as they are, may shed light on a topic that resonates nowadays – how gender impacts on authorship, imagination, and a sense of humanity. If, as Woolf claims, ‘women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man as twice its natural size’ (Woolf, 2000: 45), is it entirely possible that women authors have resorted to the misshapen, dark, monstrous Other as alter egos of their own perception of themselves and their place in society?


The conference wishes to be a locus of celebration and discussion, both by placing the authors in the context of their time (coeval artists and ideas), and by displacing them and investigating their impact on literature and other media (music, cinema, videogames, etc.). By rereading the works critically in the context of a 200-hundred-year time lapse, the conference aims to look at the texts as clues ‘to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name – and therefore live – afresh’ (Rich, 1979: 35).



Papers on the following topics are welcome:

• Male privilege in literature: revising concepts of authority and authorship
• Female gaze and the imagination
• 19th-century language, gender and cultural filters
• Concepts of human being, humanity, humanness and ‘technogenesis’
• Displacement and replacement as male anxieties
• 1st-person narration: giving voice and / or visibility to ghosts, monsters and waifs
• The impact of Shelly and Brontë in English-speaking and world literature
• Pseudonymity and power
• The monster within: representations of (female) fear and folly in literature
• ‘Savagery’ at the heart of Europe and the ideal of la mission civilisatrice
• Siting contestation: literature on progress and knowledge
• Is Gothic literature female?
• Translating ‘strangeness’ into different languages and / or media
• The afterlife of Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights in art and pop culture
• Fandom and the Gothic experience

Keynote speakers:

Luísa Leal Faria (Universidade Católica Portuguesa)

Marie Mulvey-Roberts (University of the West of England – Bristol)




Click below for further information.

Romantic Assembly (2018 International Conference on Romanticism) (expired)

Sorry to have missed posting this earlier:


International Conference on Romanticism
Romantic Assembly
http://pearce.caah.clemson.edu/international-conference-romanticism/
October 25-28, 2018

From Bodies Assembled to Assembled Bodies

To acknowledge and celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, we invite reflection on the notion of assembly: from bodies assembled to assemblies of bodies. We look forward to paper proposals on related acts of embodiment, factory production, and political assembly (from the National Assembly during the French Revolution to the recent waves of public protest that embody the right to assemble enshrined in the US Constitution). We aim to look both backward and forward, and we invite all participants to explore what it means to assemble various and sundry things, even things we sometimes call persons.

Scholars working in any area of Romanticism are invited to submit proposals for the annual meeting of the International Conference on Romanticism (ICR) to be hosted by Clemson University and held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Greenville, South Carolina.


We have called this year’s conference “Romantic Assembly” to acknowledge and celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. We invite broad reflection on the notion of assembly and look forward to paper proposals on related acts of embodiment, factory production, and political assembly (from the National Assembly during the French Revolution to the recent waves of public protest that embody the right to assemble enshrined in the US Constitution). From bodies assembled to assemblies of bodies, we aim to look both backward and forward, and we invite all participants to explore what it means to assemble various and sundry things, even things we sometimes call persons.


We are excited to see the theme interpreted broadly and in ways we have not anticipated, but some possible modes of approach could include the following:

• Anthologies, literary history, and assembling Romantic texts
• Assembling words: rhetoric and form
• Assembly and the senses
• Bodies and embodiment
• Categories of knowledge as assemblies
• Disassembly, dissolution, fragmentation
• Genre as assembly
• Identity as assembly or assemblage
• Industrialization
• Military and martial assembly
• Nation formation
• Political assembly and acts of protest
• Romantic and post-Romantic philosophies and critical theories of assembly
• Romantic-era assemblies: Halls, Balls, Lectures, Schools
• Romantic systems
• Scientific assembly
• World-building

Deadline for presentation abstracts and complete panels or roundtables: April 1, 2018



The International Conference on Romanticism was founded in 1991 and aims to pursue the study of Romanticism across linguistic, national, and political disciplines. For more information please visit http://icr.byu.edu. Conference attendees and participants must be current members of ICR. Please visit http://icr.byu.edu/membership to become a member or renew your membership.

Frankenstein and Its Classics

Due out this summer:
Frankenstein and Its Classics: The Modern Prometheus from Antiquity to Science Fiction

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/frankenstein-and-its-classics-9781350054875/
Editor(s): Benjamin Eldon Stevens, Jesse Weiner, Brett M. Rogers

Published: 08-09-2018
Format: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Extent: 288
ISBN: 9781350054875
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Classical Reception
Illustrations: 14 bw illus
Dimensions: 6 1/8" x 9 1/4"
List price: $29.95

Also available in hardcover and ebook formats.



About Frankenstein and Its Classics

Frankenstein and Its Classics is the first collection of scholarship dedicated to how Frankenstein and works inspired by it draw on ancient Greek and Roman literature, history, philosophy, and myth. Presenting twelve new essays intended for students, scholars, and other readers of Mary Shelley's novel, the volume explores classical receptions in some of Frankenstein's most important scenes, sources, and adaptations. Not limited to literature, the chapters discuss a wide range of modern materials-including recent films like Alex Garland's Ex Machina and comics like Matt Fraction's and Christian Ward's Ody-C-in relation to ancient works including Hesiod's Theogony, Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Apuleius's The Golden Ass.

All together, these studies show how Frankenstein, a foundational work of science fiction, brings ancient thought to bear on some of today's most pressing issues, from bioengineering and the creation of artificial intelligence to the struggles of marginalized communities and political revolution. This addition to the comparative study of classics and science fiction reveals deep similarities between ancient and modern ways of imagining the world-and emphasizes the prescience and ongoing importance of Mary Shelley's immortal novel. As Frankenstein turns 200, its complex engagement with classical traditions is more significant than ever.


Table of contents

Introduction: The Modern Prometheus Turns 200
Jesse Weiner, Hamilton College, USA; Benjamin Eldon Stevens, Trinity University, USA;
Brett M. Rogers, University of Puget Sound, USA

Section 1: Promethean Heat

1. Patchwork Paratexts and Monstrous Metapoetics: “After tea M reads Ovid”
Genevieve Liveley, University of Bristol, UK

2. Prometheus and Dr. Darwin's Vermicelli: Another Stir to the Frankenstein Broth
Martin Priestman, University of Roehampton, UK

3. The Politics of Revivification in Lucan's Bellum Civile and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Andrew McClellan, University of Delaware, USA

4. Romantic Prometheis and the Molding of Frankenstein
Suzanne L. Barnett, Francis Marion University

5. Why “The Year without a Summer”?
David A. Gapp, Hamilton College, USA

6. The Sublime Monster: Frankenstein, or The Modern Pandora
Matthew Gumpert, Bogaziçi University, Turkey

Section 2: Hideous Progeny

7. Cupid and Psyche in Frankenstein: Mary Shelley's Apuleian Science Fiction?
Benjamin Eldon Stevens, Trinity University, USA

8. “The Pale Student of Unhallowed Arts”: Frankenstein, Aristotle, and the Wisdom of Lucretius
Carl A. Rubino, Hamilton College, USA

9. Timothy Leary and the Psychodynamics of Stealing Fire
Nese Devenot, University of Puget Sound, USA

10. Frankenfilm: Classical Monstrosity in Bill Morrison's Spark of Being
Jesse Weiner, Hamilton College, USA

11. Alex Garland's Ex Machina or The Modern Epimetheus: Science Fiction after Mary Shelley
Emma Hammond, University of Bristol, UK

12. The Postmodern Prometheus and Posthuman Reproductions in Science Fiction
Brett M. Rogers, University of Puget Sound, USA

Suggestions for Further Reading: Other Modern Prometheis
Sam Cooper, Bard High School Early Colleges Queens, USA

Works cited
Index


Reviews

“Frankenstein's patchwork of classical allusions were as diverse and uncanny as the monster itself. Putting Prometheus back into the “promethean”, this timely and exciting volume shows how classical mythology, refracted through Frankenstein, shapes ethical debates prompted by technological and scientific advances today.” – Jennifer Wallace, Harris Fellow and Director of Studies in English, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, UK.

“This highly scholarly, yet very accessible, collection grounds the original Frankenstein and adaptations of it in numerous ancient Greco-Roman sources, some for the first time and all with a revealing thoroughness unavailable until now.” – Jerrold E. Hogle, Professor of English and University Distinguished Professor, University of Arizona, USA.