I had a lot of fun keynoting at the Monster Media conference on 18 June, despite doing the talk online and on the road! I had a few technical issues at my end at the very start, but all went smoothly from there.
My talk was called “Making Media Monstrous: Frankenstein and the Feminist Killjoy”. Instead of talking about specific research I am working on, I decided to do something a little more metatextual, just for this conference, and look at some of the many examples of academics and PhD researchers comparing themselves either to Victor Frankenstein, or to his creation. With help from Sarah Ahmed’s The Feminist Killjoy Handbook (2023), and following from her call to ‘be monstrous!’, I used examples from Frankenstein to illustrate how we might make monster studies more monstrous rather than less—i.e. how can we become monsters in a radical way, resisting the exploitative and exclusionary ways academia is often monstrous now.