HWA Academics

Keynote speaker: Dr Kate Egan, Northumbria University: ‘Nostalgia for British Comedy’s Past: Monty Python, the 1960s and 1970s, and Fan Memories’

Film and TV genres and nostalgia have long been intertwined. Fundamentally, both are rooted in the practice of creatively recycling and adapting modes of the past; Steve Neale’s (1990) assertion that genres are processes of repetition and variation is also applicable to many films and programmes which reimagine historical events, past eras, earlier styles and classic works of literature. Period dramas regularly cite the codes and conventions of past genres as a means of triggering collective memories of an era, while for multiple other film and TV genres, the past is a key component: for instance, science fiction might depict the past as a function of time travel, while the Western is founded on its 19th century American frontier setting, and gothic horror is often associated with Victorian England or based on fin de siècle literature.

Relationships between genre and nostalgia are regularly explored in isolated studies, while broader publications and events often focus on one or the other. However, the focus is rarely on the relationship and interaction between them. This may in part be due to lingering doubts on the value of exploring it. When, in 1991, Fredric Jameson identified what he called ‘the nostalgia film’, he cited genre texts like the neo-noir Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974) as evidence of ‘the waning of our historicity’ (1991: 21). In their repetition of previously mediated images, it was, to a large extent, the genericity of films like these which so concerned Jameson and led him to judge them as lacking in historically critical depth. This perspective has to some extent persisted in studies of period and historical dramas, where engagements with the past in popular genres like horror, comedy and science fiction are considered less ‘serious’ or historically significant. Meanwhile, Jameson’s reading of postmodern nostalgia as inherently regressive, despite being subsequently questioned (see, for instance, Hutcheon 2000; Dika 2003), has encouraged some studies to look sceptically on the presence of nostalgia, reading it as a more or less straightforward indicator of longing for a simplified, comforting past rather than as a complex phenomenon.

Yet, links between genre and nostalgia have only deepened in the increasingly media-saturated 21st century. More genre films and programmes have opted for past settings, and more period dramas, in their style of historical adaptation, have rejected traditional notions of ‘authenticity’ in favour of self-reflexive genericity. As such, this one-day symposium, which we hope will lead to the development of an active research network, seeks to explore connections between film and television genres and nostalgia, memory and other manifestations of the past. The aim is to facilitate dialogue between these two rich and increasingly interconnected areas of study, and to connect scholars at all levels working in these areas.

Possible areas that may be explored include, but are not limited to:

• Retro style in film and television genres such as comedy, horror, science fiction, the Western, noir, etc., and specific case studies of genre texts engaging with these styles
• Reappropriations of past genre tropes in period dramas or other generic forms
  
• Other forms of media, such as books, music videos and video games (e.g. L.A. Noire, 2011), which engage nostalgically with film and television genres
• Foregrounding ignored or marginalised histories (e.g. via new representations of gender/race/class/sexuality) in period genres (e.g. literary adaptations, Westerns)
• Revisiting genre texts on new platforms (e.g. streaming services), and the role of nostalgia in ways of watching (e.g. binge watching, or interactive texts like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, 2018)
• Nostalgias for genre texts and the nostalgic practices of fans, audiences and/or fan-creators
• Recycle, remake, reboot: nostalgia’s role in genre seriality and multiplicities
• The role of nostalgia in the reappraisal, re-release and/or canonisation of genre texts
• Key genre filmmakers, showrunners, or other creatives engaging with nostalgia (e.g. Greta Gerwig, Ryan Murphy)
• Genre stardom and nostalgia
• The role of nostalgia in genre development, stages, eras and/or cycles
• Genre narratives about nostalgia or memory (e.g. Ready Player One, 2018; 13 Going on 30, 2004, Westworld, 2016-)
• Nostalgia in hybrid genres (e.g. Ashes to Ashes, 2009-2010; Back to the Future, 1985; Ripper Street 2012-2016)
• Rewriting or rethinking historical narratives via genre (e.g. Once Upon A Time…in Hollywood, 2019; Jojo Rabbit, 2019; Chernobyl, 2019)
• The past in the introduction of new generic styles and forms (e.g. steampunk, neo-noir)
• Retro period ambiguity (e.g. It Follows, 2014; The Guest, 2014; Sex Education, 2019-)

We invite abstracts of c.200-250 words, along with a short biography, to be sent by March 31st 2020 to the organisers: Dr Caitlin Shaw (c.shaw3@herts.ac.uk) and Dr Laura Mee (l.mee2@herts.ac.uk). Acceptances will be advised as soon as possible in the same week. Costs are to be confirmed ASAP, but as we would like to connect researchers at all stages, we are aiming to keep registration fees nominal in order to avoid being prohibitive.

Boris Karloff was born William Henry Pratt in 1887, in the then-small village of Camberwell, Surrey (now part of South London). Most often remembered as the star of Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1931) and two of its sequels (Bride of Frankenstein in 1935 and Son of Frankenstein in 1939), Karloff’s career spanned more than half a century, from the silent era to New Hollywood where he worked with Peter Bogdanovich on the highly experimental film Targets (1968), in what proved to be one of his final feature performances. In addition to Whale and Bogdanovich, Karloff worked under a number of significant directors over the course of his career, including Mario Bava, Roger Corman, Michael Curtiz, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Michael Reeves, Douglas Sirk, Jacques Tourneur, and Robert Wise. For many, Karloff was and remains “one of the screen’s greatest madmen” (Darryl Jones, 2002). While Karloff’s star image is mostly intertwined with the horror genre, this dedicated symposium hopes to invite both new perspectives on some of the actor’s most iconic roles, as well as draw attention to the many other faces of Boris Karloff, both on- and off-screen. It is our aim to demonstrate that Karloff was more than the sum of his most famous parts; that the mercurial man who gave a “profoundly sympathetic performance” (Jones) as Frankenstein’s infamous monster was an actor with impressive range that is demonstrated by a rich and expansive filmography.

Boris Karloff: The Many Faces of a Film Icon will take place at Plymouth College of Art on 30 October 2020 where we hope to draw together a range of speakers and attendees all interested in various aspects of Karloff’s life and career.

In correspondence with this event, we will showcase archival materials hitherto unseen that relate to Karloff’s career. The event is being organised in collaboration with the Plymouth Arts Cinema who will be providing an evening programme which includes screenings of some of Karloff’s feature films. More information regarding the event, as well as the keynote speakers, will be announced in due course.
Boris Karloff: The Many Faces of a Film Icon has already attracted the attention of a publisher. Our hope is that this symposium will lead to a peer-reviewed publication, providing an opportunity for some of the speakers to expand their work into full chapters in an edited collection.
Topics for chapters may include, but are not limited to:

Any of Karloff’s feature films
Karloff and his collaborators (co-stars, directors, producers, etc.)
Karloff in Hollywood
Marketing Karloff
Karloff and film stardom, or uses of his star image
Karloff’s performances, including as a silent film star through to his late-career performances
Karloff and franchises
Karloff as a horror icon
Karloff as a transnational star
Karloff and masculinity
Karloff and race
Karloff and monstrosity
Archival work on Karloff
Writing on Karloff, including biographies
Your own suggested idea

Submission details

We would like to invite abstracts for 20 minute papers of approximately 250 words, accompanied by a short biographical statement. The deadline for proposals is Friday 29th May 2020 (with confirmation to follow in the weeks following that). Please address any inquiries to Dr Eddie Falvey at efalvey@pca.ac.uk who will reply on behalf of the organising panel. Abstracts should be emailed to boriskarloff@pca.ac.uk.

Head Press

Headpress was founded in Manchester, England, in 1991, ostensibly to release a film by cult German director Jörg Buttgereit on VHS. With revenue from the sales of that film (Der Todesking, limited to 500 copies), the publication of a magazine soon followed. Headpress was a long-running journal on a variety of topics, which contitute, it might be said, the ebb and flow of the counterculture in the last decade of the twentieth century. Running concurrent to the magazine was the Headpress book publishing arm, which emerged in 1992 and continues to this day. Subject matter of Headpress books is wide-ranging and includes cult film, strange music, pulp literature, fanzines, conspiracy theories, sex and gender, occult and folklore, true crime, and pop culture in general. Headpress is run by David Kerekes, one of the three original founders.

Publisher's Website: https://headpress.com/
Submission information: https://headpress.com/about-us/

Per the website: Headpress isn’t publishing fiction, prose or poetry. If you have an idea for nonfiction or work that you think we may be interested in, please feel free to get in touch via the Contact Us button below, allowing four weeks for a reply (send a gentle reminder if you haven’t heard from us in that time). Please submit info and short text samples if you have them but no email attachments at this point.

Abstract submissions are invited for a special issue of the Journal of Fandom Studies. This issue will focus on archives and special collections relevant to scholars of fan studies. Topics addressed might include profiles of institutional collections with primers for use, research, archiving and curatorial practices performed by fans, and archival and archontic theory.Other possible topics include:

• Historical perspectives on collecting fan material in libraries and archives
• Race, gender and queerness in fan collections and in library subject indexing
• Logistical and ethical issues of access to fan materials
• Current research and collecting gaps in the documentary record

Contributors may also submit short profiles (500 words) of relevant institutional collections with curatorial contact information as part of a special ‘Research Guide’ section of this issue. All articles submitted should be original work and must not be under consideration by other publications.

Please send abstracts of 250 words (including a title and keywords) with biographical statements of 100 words to Cait Coker (cait@illinois.edu) and Jeremy Brett (jwbrett@library.tamu.edu) by 28 February 2020. If accepted, contributions should be no longer than 9000 words, including notes and references, with completed drafts expected in October 2020. All articles submitted should be original work and must not be under consideration by other publications.

Journal of Fandom Studies is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal, first published by Intellect in 2012. The multi-disciplinary nature of fan
studies makes the development of a community of scholars sometimes difficult to achieve. Journal of Fandom Studies seeks to offer scholars a
dedicated publication that promotes current scholarship in the fields of fan and audience studies across a variety of media. We focus on the critical
exploration, within a wide range of disciplines and fan cultures, of issues surrounding production and consumption of popular media (including film,
music, television, sports and gaming). Journal of Fandom Studies aims to address key issues, while also fostering new areas of enquiry that take us
beyond the bounds of current scholarship.

CALL FOR PAPERS (general)

Potential topics include:
• ethics of fan studies
• historical perspectives on fan studies
• gender
• methodology
• consumer/producer interactions
• archival work (using collections such as the AMPAS collection of fan
letters, fanzine collections or online archives)
• competing histories of fan practices and fan studies
• analyses of specific fandoms (i.e. Buffy, Supernatural, Justin Bieber,
True Blood, etc.)
• fan studies theory/cultural studies theory

The editors welcome general papers (between 6000 and 9000 words), interviews and book reviews (between 800 and 1200 words) as well as suggestions for thematic issues. Journal contributors will receive a free PDF copy of their final work upon publication. Print copies of the journal may also be purchased by contributors at half price.

Deadline: February 28, 2020
Contact: arts-sfmedhumscollection@glasgow.ac.uk

The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities will be a key intervention, analysing and exploring the fruitful intersection between science fiction and the field of the medical humanities. The medical humanities are becoming an increasingly important area as their first wave is interrogated by a critical medical humanities approach (for example, in The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, 2016). This volume will be in conversation with that debate, and will explore the ways in which science fiction studies can contribute to such discussions. Science fiction challenges techno-optimism and offers a non-realist avenue for the expression of the illness experience. Science fiction also estranges its readers from their societies and the medical possibilities inherent in those societies, inviting consideration of how medicine may be complicit with, or opposed to, other structures of power. Meanwhile, the promised technoscientific improvement of medical technologies invites extrapolations that may be more influenced by a reified science-fictional imaginary than by a genuinely democratic shaping of future possibilities. By engaging these concerns, this volume offers a unique viewpoint on the power of the future to shape the present.

 

The collection is under contract with Edinburgh University Press. This is an outcome of the Wellcome Trust-funded Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities project at the University of Glasgow (2015-2017) and potential contributors may wish to consult the project’s blog (scifimedhums.glasgow.ac.uk) and the special theme issue of BMJ Medical Humanities (42.4, 2016) produced by the project for some scholarly context.

 

Submissions are welcome addressing any of the chapter headings listed below. If you find the collection appealing but would like to address a subject not listed, feel free to contact the editors via the mailbox below for further discussion. We hope this collection will pay due consideration to World SF and represent the diversity of science-fictional futures and fandom, so would be particularly interested in ideas that engage with the Global South, Chinese SF, Afrofuturism, Africa, and the African diaspora, fan and convention culture.

 

Abstracts of 250 words should be emailed to arts-sfmedhumscollection@glasgow.ac.uk with an accompanying CV by Friday 28 February. Complete drafts of 6000 word chapters will be due 30November 2020.

Late-Nineteenth Century
Graphic Novels
Life Extension
Film and Television
Science Fiction Horror
Medical Press and Advertising
Dystopia
Susceptibility
Soviet Science Fiction
Mutation
Indigenous Science Fiction
Nutrition
Global Health
History of Art
World SF

*Anthropocene Gothic*

The newly established MLA (Modern Language Association) Gothic Studies forum is soliciting abstract proposals for paper sessions to be held at the 2021 Convention in Toronto, to be held from January 7th-10th.

How and why is the gothic being used to narrate the anthropocene? How is the gothic transformed by this focus? Papers on literature, film, or other media. 250-word abstracts (March 1): teresa.a.goddu@vanderbilt.edu

Deadline for submissions: Sunday, 1 March 2020

Editors: Karrȧ Shimabukuro and Wickham Clayton
Deadline: 2020-06-01 (EXTENDED FROM original 3/31)

On first consideration it may not seem like “nostalgia” and horror and slasher films have any clear connections. Usually nostalgia is applied to events and experiences that have a pleasant connotation, even if these pleasant feelings are a result of a rose-tinted view of the past. While nostalgia can refer to personal feelings as well as larger communal or cultural memory and pleasure, there is also an implied action to it- that someone is seeking to reclaim, or revisit a specific time period or place for an explicit reason. Applying this understanding to remakes, revisions, reimaginings helps us understand what the purpose of these reworked creations are, the work they’re doing, and how they build on and expand on an already understood and accepted set of narratives, tropes, characters, and beliefs.

Since the national and global trauma of 9/11 we have seen dozens of remakes, reboots, revisions, and reimaginings of horror and slasher films from the 1970s and 80s. Each work seeks to capture some element of the original- the simple understanding of good and evil, the audience reaction to scares, an aesthetic homage, the commercial popularity. If we shift our perspective to view these films through the lens of nostalgia, we can see that many of these narratives are grounded in trauma, the performance of it, the aftermath, how people survive and later work through it. Whether it is a movie, mini-series, television show, or video game, these remakes can be organized according to several subtopics that perform different work within the media and reflect different fears, anxieties, and desires of a specific historical and cultural moment, although the argument could be made that some texts belong in a variety of categories, and there is noticeable overlap.

Movies such as Carrie (2013) , Prom Night (2008), The Fog (2005), Piranha (2010), and Piranha 3DD (2012), My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009), Friday the 13th (2009), Predators (2010), The Predator (2018), and Fright Night (2011) as well as the television show Ash vs. Evil Dead (2015-2018) all seek to recapture the pleasant memories either of the creator upon their first exposure, or the often initial teenage experience of the audience. It’s also worth noting remakes that seek to capture this feeling and audience reception but fail as is the case with Pet Semetary (2019) and Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017) or remakes of films that were considered cult classics, or lacked the recognition of many of these titles such as Sorority Row (2009). While many of these movies have trauma as their inciting incident, or backstory, films such as The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Amityville Horror (2005), and The Thing (2011), explicitly deal with trauma in their narratives. A large number of remakes seek to correct or revise perceived errors, erasures, or missteps in the original source material. Certainly this is true in The Shining (1997 mini-series), The Stand (1994 and in production 2020), The Last House on the Left (2009), Straw Dogs (2011), Suspiria (2018), and Nightmare on Elm Street (2010). Some texts like The Haunting of Hill House (2018-present) begin as a revision but ultimately go deeper, seeking to uncover a narrative within the source material. With the explosion of streaming services, alternative storytelling, and multimedia narratives, we’re seeing more and more adaptations that use horror or slasher narratives as their foundation but create their own stories from them. Bates Motel (2013-2017), The Exorcist (2016-2018), Doctor Sleep (2019), Castle Rock (2018-present), The Conjuring (2013), and Hannibal (2013-2015) all fit this category.

This edited collection would seek contributions that view these and other texts through this lens of nostalgia, how these remakes, reboots, revisions, and reimagings are the vehicle for the anxieties and concerns of a particular moment, and what work they are doing. We’re particularly interested in contributions that analyze texts that interact with the source material in new and interesting ways, deconstruct tropes and styles innate to these genres, as well as the application of adaptation and fan studies to these works. The editors are accepting proposals for chapters focusing on nostalgia in horror after 9/11. Topics for contributions, focused through a lens of nostalgia, can address, but are not limited to:

Case studies that relate to nostalgia as:
 - Trauma
 - Revision/Rewriting
 - Recapturing past pleasure
 - Using past forms to fill new concerns

Theoretical approaches to understanding horror and trauma
Understanding socio-political and economic cultural contexts
Pleasures of horror nostalgia post- 9/11
Slashers, subtexts, and tonal intensification
Paranormal embodiments of contemporary fears


Proposals should be submitted by 31 March 2020 to Karrá Shimabukuro khkshimabukuro@gmail.com and Wickham Clayton wickscripts@hotmail.com. First drafts due 31 December 2020. We welcome questions and expressions of interest at any stage.

Deadline: December 7, 2019
Contact: io3jc@virginia.edu

Seeking paper abstracts for the panel “Supernatural Visions” at the British Women Writers (BWWC) Conference in Forth Worth, Texas, from March 5-7, 2020. The panel organizer invites submissions that analyze works by eighteenth and nineteenth-century women writers that explore ghost-seeing, supernatural visions, and the invisible. In recent years, scholars such as Shane McCorristine, Srdjan Smajic, and Sarah Willburn have explored the significance of ghost-seeing in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the time, people emphasized the importance of the sense of sight to ghostly encounters through phrases such as “ghost-seeing,” “second sight,” and “sixth sense.” Scientists also debated whether the alleged ghosts that witnesses glimpsed were the result of visionary, psychological, or imaginative factors.  This panel will participate in the emerging critical conversation on women‘s Gothic, folklore, and ghost stories and recognize the centrality of this female literary tradition to the British canon. Please email your CVs and 250-300 word abstracts to Indu Ohri at io3jc@virginia.edu by Saturday, December 7, 2019.