Showing posts with label Hannah Priest. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hannah Priest. Show all posts

Friday 27 April 2012

OUT NOW: Journal of Monsters and the Monstrous, Vol. 1, No. 2 (September 2011)




Contents:

Freeing Woman from Truth and the Unknown: Using Kahlo and Irigaray to Liberate Woman from Haggard's She - Cameron Ellis

The Monstrification of the Monster: How Ceauşescu Became the Red Vampire - Peter Mario Kreuter

Monster as Victim, Victim as Monster: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Redemptive Suffering and the 'Undead' - Sarah Malik Bell

Digging Our Own Grave: Monster Trucks and America - Callie Clare

Monstrous Literature: The Case of Dacre Stoker's Dracula the Undead - Hannah Priest

Film Reviews:

The Dreamers of Dreams: Inception - Sarah Juliet Lauro

The Status is Not Quo: Reflections on Villains as Heroes in Despicable Me (2010), Megamind (2010) and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (2008) - Harvey O'Brien

Thirst - Colette Balmain

Book Reviews:

Monsters of the Gevaudan: The Making of a Beast - Lance Eaton

Monsters or Martyrs? A Review of Blood That Cries Out From the Earth: The Psychology of Religious Terrorism - John Donovan

Umwege in die Vergangenheit: Star Trek und die griechisch-römische Antike [Detours to the Past: Star Trek and the Greek-Roman Antiquity] - Peter Mario Kreuter

The Victorians and Old Age - C. Riley Augé

In a Glass Darkly - Lee Baxter

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - Lee Baxter

Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film - Colette Balmain

For more information, or for subscriptions, please click here.



Tuesday 21 February 2012

Monsters: Subject, Object, Abject

Kanaris Lecture Theatre and Conference Room
Manchester Museum, Oxford Road,
Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom

Thursday 12th April – Friday 13th April 2012

Conference Programme

Thursday 12th April

9.00-9.30am: Registration

9.30-11.00am: Opening Remarks (Dr. Hannah Priest, University of Manchester) and Session 1: Monsters in Popular Culture (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Matthew Freeman (University of Nottingham): Who’s Monster?: Monsters, Subjectivity, and the Figure of the Child in Doctor Who
(ii) James Campbell (University of Stirling): ‘Welcome to the Madhouse’: The Conflation of Monstrosity, Madness and Mental Illness in DC Comics’ Batman Franchise
(iii) Christina Wilkins (University of Southampton): Transatlantic Differences and the Importance of Religion in Post-9/11 Monsters

11.00-11.30am: Coffee

11.30-1.00pm: Parallel Sessions

Session 2a: Literary Monsters (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Lisa Tagliaferri (The Graduate Center, CUNY): S’el fu sì bel com’elli è ora brutto: Dante’s Vision of Lucifer
(ii) Imke Heuer (University of Southampton): ‘A brood of monsters like myself’: Joshua Pickersgill’s The Three Brothers, Byron’s The Deformed Transformed and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(iii) Giulia I. Sandelewski (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham): Vengeful or Revenger? Renaissance Drama as a Lens for Vallgren’s Hercules Barefoot

Session 2b: Making Monsters (Conference Room)
Chair: TBC
(i) Lisa Temple-Cox (Independant Researcher): Making Myself a Monster: Self-Portraiture as Teratological Specimen
(ii) Rosie Garland (Independent Researcher): ‘The Girl You Never Loved But Always Looked For’: Occupational Therapy and the Development of the Performance Persona Rosie Lugosi the Vampire Queen
(iii) Susanne Hamscha (FU Berlin): “Gaga, Ooh La La”: Lady Gaga and the Pleasures of Being a Freak

1.00-2.00pm: Lunch

2.00-3.30pm: Parallel Sessions

Session 3a: Embodying Monstrosity (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Tracy Fahey (Limerick School of Art and Design, LIT): Invisible Monsters: Gothic and the Diabetic Body
(ii) Michel Delville (University of Liège) and Andrew Norris (Institut Supérieur des Traducteurs et Interprètes): Monstrosity, Hunger and Resistance
(iii) Lorie Hamalian (California State University): Swans and Prawns: Monster Metamorphoses and Hybrid Identities in Aronofsky’s Black Swan and Blomkamp’s District 9

Session 3b: Monsters of Literature (Conference Room)
Chair: TBC
(i) Jessica George (Cardiff University): Celtic Subject and Racial Other in Arthur Machen’s ‘The White People’
(ii) Kay Lint (University of Hertfordshire): ‘Mangy fur and red, smouldering eyes’, The Monstrous Dog in Graham Masterton’s Charnel House
(iii) Rick Hudson (Bath Spa University): ‘Their Hand Is At Your Throat, But Ye See Them Not’: Monstrous Absence in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft

3.30-4.00pm: Coffee

4.00-5.00pm: Parallel Sessions

Session 4a: Folk Monsters (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Carla Bascombe (University of the West Indies): Monsters of the Caribbean: A Portrait of the Traditional Torturer in the Untraditional Tale
(ii) Alexandra McGlynn (Independent Researcher): Kappa: Buttocks-Ball Eating Monsters of Shintõ Suijin

Session 4b: Monsters of Cinema (Conference Room)
Chair: TBC
(i) Michael C. Bongiorno (CUNY, College of Staten Island): Another One for the Fire: Spectatorship, Apparatus and Recognition in Night of the Living Dead (1968)
(ii) Joshua Peery (Independent Researcher): Fear the Ma(SHE)ne: Monstrous Female Machines in Sci-Fi Cinema

5.00pm: Close

7.30pm: Conference Dinner at Felicini

*****

Friday 13th April

9.30-11.00am: Parallel Sessions

Session 5a: Old Monsters, New Faces (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Rachel Mizsei Ward (University of East Anglia): Munchkin Cthulhu, My Little Cthulhu and Chibithulu: The Transformation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu from Horrific Body to Cute Body
(ii) Carys Crossen (University of Manchester): ‘The loup-garou has a duty: justice’: The Law, Justice and Vigilantism in Contemporary Lycanthropic Fiction
(iii) Kim Wilkins (University of Queensland): Writing the Medieval Monstrous

Session 5b: Spaces of Monstrosity
Chair: TBC
(i) Ersi Ioannidou (University of Brighton): Dismembered Domesticity: the House as Monster
(ii) David Allen (Midland Actors Theatre): Expedition Everest
(iii) Garfield Benjamin (University of Wolverhampton): Virtual Monsters: Becoming Death and the Quantum Immortal

11.00-11.30am: Coffee

11.30-1.00pm: Parallel Sessions

Session 6a: Of Monstrosity and Humanity (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Maria Chatzidimou (Aristotle University of Thessaloni): I am not an elephant! I am not a man! I am a colonized abject! : Re-viewing David Lynch’s The Elephant Man
(ii) Ian Pettigrew (University of Miami): The Monster’s Choice to Be Human: Guillermo del Toro’s Incarnations of a Hitchcockian Theme

Session 6b: More Literary Monstrosity (Conference Room)
Chair: TBC
(i) Martyn Colebrook (University of Hull): ‘The Last Banned Book in Britain’: David Britton, Michael Butterworth, Lord Horror and Monstrosity
(ii) Eva Bru (Independent Researcher) The Spectacle of the Monstrous: Enforcing Normalcy in Mercè Rodoreda’s Death in Spring
(iii) Kristy Butler (Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick): Breaking the Frame: Alternative Histories, Monstrous Ideologies and the Political Gothic

1.00-2.00pm: Lunch

2.00-3.00pm: Monsters, the Museum and Sacrificial Theory: Workshop with Bryan Sitch (Manchester Museum) (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)

3.00-3.30pm: Coffee

3.30-4.30pm: Session 7: The Monstrous Human (Kanaris Lecture Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Abby Bentham (University of Salford): The Monster in Me: On Cultural Fascination with the Fictional Psychopath
(ii) David McWilliam (Lancaster University): Demystifying the Folk Devil: The Humanization of Aileen Wuornos in Patty Jenkins’s Monster (2003)





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.

Saturday 17 December 2011

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.

Sunday 12 December 2010

Beautiful, Strong, Broken Women

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that tonight I watched Buffy s5 ep12 ('The Body') for the first time in ages. In case you can't recall, this is the episode where Buffy finds her mother's dead body on the couch and has to deal with the immediate aftermath. The episode is wonderfully played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, and beautifully directed. There is no soundtrack, and each of the central characters plays out the most attractive facet of their character. As I said on Twitter, I'll only get behind a Buffy reboot if they can pull off something as beautiful as that episode.

Sarah Michelle Gellar's performance as the amazingly strong, yet perfectly vulnerable, Buffy got me thinking about femininity. And the way in which women are forced to juggle 'surviving' with 'being beautiful' and 'being good'. This is something I've had to deal with in my own life - as an apparently 'confident' and 'successful' woman - and I'm going to give you a run-down of women that have given me strength. Don't get me wrong... I find strength in so many women (from Emmeline Pankhurst to my bestest mate K), but these are the beautiful, strong, broken women who speak to my experience.

I would love to hear who your beautiful, broken icons are...

5. Buffy. This time last year, my dad found out he had cancer. During the time of his treatment, I got dumped and had to deal with my younger brother's 'issues' with his relationship to our dad. Of course, there are a lot of background issues, and my brother is only 16 months younger than me, but up until now his whole experience with death has revolved around my protecting him from it (mine hasn't - as my job from being 16 entails I've had to go to a lot of colleagues' funerals). Our (me and my bro) first bereavement was three days before my 8th birthday - I understood, he (aged 6) didn't - and our next was on his 13th birthday, and I've spent a lot of time making sure his birthday doesn't remind him of Grandma's death (he doesn't actually remember that Granny died around my birthday, but I'd rather he didn't remember our first bereavement). When the next death happened (when I was 17, he was 15), I had to be the one to break it to him. I might not be a slayer, but I am a big sister - and a child of a cancer patient -which is why Buffy is the first on my list of beautiful women. I can't show the whole episode, and you really do need the whole soundtrack-less thing to get the picture, but you'll get it from this:




4. Stacey Slater in Eastenders. Bipolar rape victim who wasn't totally sure what consent might mean when she was ill. (And the older, wiser me will say, hun, you can't consent if you're having an episode. And yes - I am bipolar. And yes - I am a rape victim.) Found one good man... and he died for her 'crime'. Beautifully, beautifully portrayed by Lacey Turner:



3. Tina Turner. This should be considered a clarion call to all of us who have suffered domestic abuse. And trust me, I know whereof I speak (My ex - hit me, hit his son, hit the cat). When they hit us, when they make us feel small, when they rape us, we should remember:




2. Blanche Dubois. A double one here. The character is a (possibly) mentally ill rape victim; the actress is a perfect, fragile, violent, broken harridan. No-one wanted to help Blanche or Vivien, because they were too much like hard work. I'm mentally ill (which should have been apparent throughout this post), and I've been forced to accept all NHS treatments short of sectioning. Blanche took it like this (I didn't... and Vivien Leigh didn't either...):



1. Judy Garland. I left her to last, because this says it all. For me, she is the beautiful, strong, broken woman par excellence. This is one of the most painful videos I've ever seen. Look into her eyes. You will see her soul... and mine:

Sunday 22 August 2010

She-Wolf Fringe Poster


Here's our fabulous poster for the She-Wolf Fringe Events. It's been designed for us by Helen Taylor, one of my undergraduate students at Manchester. I'm pretty impressed by the she-wolf she's created for us. If you have anywhere that you could display the posters, please get in touch with me (Hannah Priest) and I can either email you a pdf or pop some paper copies in the post.

Saturday 14 August 2010

Books We Like...

Hosting the Monster, ed. by Holly Lynn Baumgartner and Roger Davis (Rodopi, 2008)

A inter-disciplinary collection of essays exploring monsters, the monstrous, identities and boundaries. This collection grew out of the Fifth Global Monsters and the Monstrous Conference, held at Mansfield College, Oxford in 2007.

I'm sure eagle-eyed readers will spot the chapter on medieval werewolves written by yours truly!

For more information, click here.

Contents:

Hosting the Monster: Introduction
Holly Lynn Baumgartner and Roger Davies

"I Live in the Weak and the Wounded": The Monster of Brad Anderson's Session 9
Duane Kight

The Monster as a Victim of War: The Returning Veteran in The Best Years of Our Lives
Amaya Muruzabal Muruzabal

Human Monstrosity: Rape, Ambiguity and Performance in Rosemary's Baby
Lucy Fife

The Monstrous and Maternal in Toni Morrison's Beloved
Inderjit Grewal

The Witch and the Werewolf: Rebirth and Subjectivity in Medieval Verse
Hannah Priest

It's Never the Bass: Opera's True Transgressors Sing Soprano
Holly Lynn Baumgartner

Joseph Merrick and the Concept of Monstrosity in Nineteenth Century Medical Thought
Katherine Angell

Herculine Barbin: Human Error, Criminality and the Case of the Monstrous Hermaphrodite
Jessica Webb

Literary Monsters: Gender, Genius, and Writing in Denis Diderot's 'On Women' and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Cecilia A. Feilla

Sweet, Bloody Vengeance: Class, Social Stigma and Servitude in the Slasher Genre
Sorcha Ni Fhlainn

It Cam from Four-Colour Fiction: The Effect of Cold War Comic Books on the Fiction of Stephen King
David M. Kingsley

The Monsters that Failed to Scare: The Atypical Reception of the 1930s Horror Films in Belgium
Liesbet Depauw

"a white illusion of a man": Snowman, Survival and Speculation in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake
Roger Davis