Deadline for submissions: April 13, 2018
Full name / name of organization: De Montfort University
Contact email: cath.postgrad@gmail.com

Call for Papers

‘It Is True, We Shall Be Monsters’: New Perspectives on Horror, Science Fiction and the Monstrous Onscreen.

Wednesday 13th of June 2018

Postgraduate Conference

Cinema and Television History (CATH) Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Dr Laura Mee and Dr Johnny Walker

The Cinema and Television History (CATH) Research Centre, De Montfort University, invites postgraduates and early career researchers to its seventh annual postgraduate conference.

2018 marks the 200-year anniversary of Mary Shelley’s seminal novel Frankenstein, sojoin us in celebrating all things monstrous as we re-consider, interrogate and offer new approaches to the genres of Horror and Science-Fiction on screen. In light of the recent burgeoning of these genres in mainstream film and television, such as the Duffer Brother’s Netflix series Stranger Things (2016-), Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror (2011-), and Oscar winners The Shape of Water (Del Toro, 2017)and Get Out (Peele, 2016), Horror and Sci-Fi are gaining new audiences across multiple platforms. Therefore, it seems a pertinent time to interrogate the tensions and emergent trends in these two persevering and continually developing genres onscreen.

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

• Female directors and women in horror
• Screening violence (exploitation and slasher films)
• Social/political/cultural representations of fear in the Horror/ Sci-Fi film
• Texts – remakes, paratexts, and adaptations
• Relationships between human and machine, technology replacing the monster
• Monstrous representations of gender and the body
• Unmade Horror and Sci-Fi
• Representations of disability in Sci-Fi and Horror
• Fandom and audiences
• Transnational production contexts of Sci-Fi and Horror cinema
• Use of special effects and prosthetics in Sci-Fi and Horror
• New Readings of classic Horror and Sci-Fi cinema
• Nostalgia in Horror and Sci-Fi
• Depictions of race in Sci-Fi and Horror

Proposals for twenty-minute presentations should include the title of the presentation, a 250-word abstract, and a brief biographical statement. Proposals should be submitted to cath.postgrad@gmail.com by Friday 13th April 2017. Applicants will receive a response by late April.

Keynote Speaker Information:

Dr Laura Mee is a Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Hertfordshire. Laura’s research interests are in horror media and adaptation. She has produced a number of journal articles and chapters on these topics, and is the author of Devil’s Advocates: The Shining (2017), as well as is in preparation for her new monograph Reanimated: The Contemporary American Horror Remake (2019).

Dr Johnny Walker is a Senior Lecturer in Media at Northumbria University, he has published widely on horror and exploitation cinema, and is co-editor of the Global Exploitation Cinema book series. He is also the writer of Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (2015) and co-editor of Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (2016).