Monsters, mashups, and popular culture
Last week I gave a keynote at the fantastic Electricdreams (Sognielecttrici) film festival and conference in Milan. This was the third year the festival was running, with a conference theme of ‘Conflicts and Margins: Imagining Otherness, Ecocatastrophes, Perpetual War, Technological Imbalance, and Systemic Injustice Through Speculative Fiction’.
My talk was called ‘Salvaging the Future: Speculative Exercises in World(un)building’.
Now that the reviewer reports are back, I am pleased to officially announce the forthcoming publication of Embodying Contagion: The Viropolitics of Horror and Desire in Contemporary Discourse. Bringing scholarship from cultural and media studies into conversation with scholarship from the medical humanities and social sciences, this collection (edited by myself, Sandra Becker, and Sara Polak) aims to give readers a fuller picture of how we make sense of contagion in contemporary global culture.
I’ve written a piece on mannerpunk, or fantasy of manners fiction, for Deletion, the open access online forum in science fiction studies.
Check out an excerpt below, and read the full article at the link.
A massive ‘Thank You’ to everyone who attended Monday’s Fantasies of Contemporary Culture symposium at Cardiff University, either in person or on Twitter. I enjoyed the day (and all the papers) immensely, and feel very honoured to have been a part of it. I’ve compiled some of the images, tweets, and Facebook posts into a (very long) … Read more
This week a lot of work has gone into the Fantasies of Contemporary Culture symposium that I’m organising with Tom Harman. The event will take place at Cardiff University on 23 May, and the programme and registration will hopefully go live sometime next week. Today, the finishing touches have been put to the event poster … Read more
In addition to all the wonderful conferences I’m hoping to attend in 2016, I happen to be co-organising a symposium of my own, on the role fantasies play in the construction of contemporary reality. Whatever your background, discipline, or career phase, we want your abstracts (and we just want to meet you). Have a look at the … Read more
Things are happening in the world of popular (neo-)Victorianism! This week not one, but two calls for papers graced my inbox. The first is for a symposium (a.k.a. a one-day conference) in Amsterdam on historical and neo-historical fiction, and the second is for a symposium in Portsmouth on Victorian materiality and the material object. If you’re interested in alternate … Read more
This post originally appeared on the Victorianist, the postgraduate blog of the British Association for Victorian Studies, on 18 May 2015. It is reposted here with the kind permission of the editors. I should probably preface this post by admitting that I’m not a real Victorianist. The Victorians were one of my undergraduate passions, and … Read more
Terry Pratchett’s publisher just announced that the Discworld author, who spent many years struggling with Alzheimer’s, has passed away. He was only 66. I have no words at the moment to express the loss that I – or that many other fans – will feel at this moment. I can only offer my heartfelt thanks for the many … Read more
“Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.” –Terry Pratchett, Hogfather (London: Corgi, 1997), p. 422 This blog has recently undergone a move from WordPress.com to a real domain, as well as a re-design that includes a new name – something more vivid and less technical than ‘Neo-Historical … Read more