If you enjoyed the last two workshops from the Creative Posthumanism project, or if you wanted to attend but couldn’t make it, we’d like to welcome you to our third and final event of the summer, ‘Monstrous Words: Writing and Incoherence’ (Wednesday 27 July 2022, 2-4pm BST)
Join artist Rebecca Jagoe in a play with language and writing incoherence. Incoherence can be expressed in writing on many levels, for instance in terms of narrative, in the sense of neologisms (for instance in the different spellings of Middle English), or in the transcription of nonverbal sound into roman or other characters. We will think together about how a language deficit or specific forms of speech have been used to deny access to the category of the human. This means we will also be writing in defiance of the idea of rationality and knowability—not only of subjects, but of the ability of language to catalogue and define them. We will work towards what Erin Manning (2020) calls a pragmatics of the useless; ‘the way the work’s work eludes us, escapes us, the way it delays the affirmation of its tenuous apparition, the way it touches us, in the lag’ (p. 15).
‘Is remix a monster, and digital humanities the means through which it is destined to bring down the old-fashioned, exclusionary, and hierarchical modes of humanities past?’
At long last my first book, Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture, is 
A few weeks ago I posted about the 
I’ve been sitting on this review of Leila Taylor’s Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul for almost a year. It’s not difficult to summarise my feelings—Darkly is a brilliant book. I’ve mainly been unsure how to do it proper justice. Darkly is everything I love about the Gothic as a mode: it contains multitudes. As Taylor writes, ‘Goth alone is too big, too broad’ (20) to capture, and likewise ‘Black contains multitudes…literally. As a pigment it is all colors at once, but black is also the complete absence of all light. Black is […]everything and nothing at the same time’ (83). There are many ways to be a Goth, and to be a Black Goth.
Over the past year I’ve been slowly working on a chapter for a new edited collection, Gothic Mash-Ups: Hybridity, Appropriation, and Intertextuality in Gothic Storytelling, and I’m pleased to announce that both chapter and book are now finally confirmed! Adapted from the CfP:
There is still time to register for the British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies’ first virtual conference, on ‘Crisis in Contemporary Writing’—free access to this event closes on Monday 22nd June.
You still have two weeks to send in an abstract for this fantastic-looking edited collection, under contract with the new University Press of Mississippi’s