On the 22nd and 23rd of August, Romancing the Gothic is hosting its latest Gothic conference. It’s online. It’s as cheap as we can make it. It’s full of great talks, writing workshops, author roundtables and more!
This year, we’re celebrating 200 years since the publication of Ann Radcliffe’s posthumous works. We’ve got two panels on Radcliffe and her contemporaries but the wider theme is thinking about marginalised genders in the Gothic. Radcliffe is often associated with a ‘female Gothic’ (those who know me know I have serious issues with the binary essentialism and reductionism of the term!) but we widened it out to think about how Gothic and horror can navigate gender from the perspective of women, non-binary, trans and intersex people. Come and join us!
But your tickets HERE or HERE
Find out more about the programme below. All times are BST (London time)
Saturday 22nd August
9.30am – Conference Opening and Welcomes
10am to 11am – Keynote 1: Dale Townshend – Ann Radcliffe’s Posthumous Works
11.15am – 12.45pm – Panel 1: Radcliffe and Her Contemporaries 1
Z I Mahmud – ‘Gothic Stitching in Radcliffe’s Poetry’
Hannah Winspear-Schillings – “Everything is termed nervous now!”: Neurodivergence, Disability, and Labour in the Minerva Press
Theadora Jean – ‘Nameless Terrors’: The Gothic Nightmares of Olivia Fairfield in The Woman of Colour (1808) and the ‘Radcliffean’ Gothic’
12.45-1.45pm – Lunch
1.45pm – 3.15pm: Panel 2: Gothic Parenting
Elif Yagci – ‘Demanding Monstrous Motherhood in The Need’
Aditi Joshi – ‘Domestic Terrors and the Failures of Maternal Imperialism in Memsahib’s Gothic’
Em Loney – ‘Isolation, Autonomy, and the Reproductive Experience: Pregnancy in Post-Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Horror Media’
3.30pm-4.30pm – “Now, albeit the landscape was still wild and woody…” — Crafting Characters in and Characterizations of a Gothic Forest’ – A writing workshop with B. Rae Grosz
5pm-6pm – Panel 3: Trees, Trees Everywhere
Great Dunn – ‘I, U, Tree, Together: Queer Polyamory in the EcoGothic’
Ava DeVries – “She Mustn’t Be Awakened”: The Goddess Archetype in Second-Wave British Folk Horror’
6.30pm-8pm – Author round table
Caitlin Starling, M K Hardy and more authors to be announced
8pm-9pm – Themed Cocktail/Mocktail hour with Julia O’Connell
Sunday 23rd August
9.45 – 10.45 Keynote 2: Sam Hirst – ‘What’s God got to do with it?’: The Theological Complexity of Radcliffe’s Work
11am – 11.45am – Reimagining Radcliffe Round Table
12 – 1.30pm: Panel 4: Gothic Adaptation
Madeline Sporer – ‘When Fear Becomes Horror: Gender, Creation and the Gothic in Frankenstein’
Jennie Kermode – ‘The Thing on the Doorstep: Beyond Gender in HP Lovecraft’s Tale and Its Monstrous Offspring’
Mariana Pinheiro – ‘From Constructed Bride to Abject Subject: “Messy Femininity” and the failure of Gothic Containment’
1.30pm-2.30pm: Lunch
2.30pm to 4pm: Panel 5: Gothic Bodies and Eating
Vani Zaveri – “More Appetites Than Her Reason Could Justify: Hunger, Discipline, and the Biopolitics of the Gothic Body”
Irina Rabinovich – ‘Monstrous Women, Marginalized Bodies: Reassessing Early American Sensation Fiction through Hentz and Hyneman’
Susan Vaderborg – ‘House Ghosts and Demon Feedings: Gothic Women in Comics Poetry’
Thea Perales – ‘Ageing the “Abject”: The Horror of Ageing Women through the “Male Gaze”
4pm-5pm: Panel 6: Female Vampires
Drumlin Crape – “My Coven is Claudia”: Agency, Monstrosity and Sapphic Horror in AMC’s Interview with the Vampire (2022-)
Tara Etherington – ‘Threats and Love Interests: Female Vampires in Gothic Shojō Manga’
5.15pm to 7pm – Panel 7: Radcliffe and Her Contemporaries 2
Oliver Bedard – “Radcliffe, Sade, Smith, and Pitaval: True Crime avant la lettre in The Romance of Real Life (1787) and The Marquise de Gange (1813)”
Mark Grant – ‘Mysteries of Udolpho as Radical Female Moral Education’
Aleksander Arctander Heggelund – ‘Narrating Gothic Sympathy in The Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft’
Alexia Mandla Ainsworth – ‘Exhuming the Female Gothic’
7.15pm – 8.15pm – Writing Workshop – Suzan Palumbo – Creating A Character Arc for Gothic Short Stories
8.30-9pm – Gothic Poetry Reading
Romancing the Gothic 