Thursday:

Board meeting: Dinner at 6:00 at the P.J Harrigan’s (hotel restaurant); meeting to follow

Friday:

8:30-9:45

  • Engaging Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Theoretical and Literary Interventions: Materialist, Transnational, Queer, and Postcolonial Feminist Perspectives on Labor and the Environment
  • Aishah Alreshoud, Susan Comfort, Sheila Farr, Lauren Shoemaker
  • Graphically Gothic
  • Christina Elvidge: “Happily Ever After: The Doomed Aristocracy of Jane Austen’s Persuasion”
  • Michael Cox: “Graphic Horror & Provocative Depiction from Bernie Wrightson's Graphic Pen: ‘Jenifer’”
  • Nicole Batchelor:“Erotic Suffering in Julia Gfrorer's Black Is the Color”
  • Televised Terror
  • Renae Applegate House: “The Walking Dead: Contemporary Monster Lore and the Post-Christian Narrative”
  • Robert F. Kilker: “Gods and Monsters: Reframing Religion in 21st Century Doctor Who”
  • Jennifer N. Tabor:“Beautiful Violence and The Walking Dead: Channeling Flannery O’Connor’s Philosophy of Violence as a Force of Change”
  • Stephen Zimmerly:“The Need for Humanity Amidst the Horror: Spike Stoker and His Relationship with Thursday Next”

9:55-11:10

  • The Horror! The Horror!: Pedagogy and Literature
  • John Marsden:“Teaching Law and Literature in the Undergraduate Classroom”
  • Sandy McChesney: “Deconstructing the Perceived Horror of Freshman English Literature: A Pedagogical Approach to Student Progression from Abhorrence to Appreciation in Fifteen Bloodless Weeks”
  • Dibakar Pal: “Of Scholarly Writing and Creative Writing (an Avant-Garde Approach)”
  • Gerald Siegel:“Teaching the Living Dead: Bringing Pre-Zombie Fiction to the Classroom”
  • Popular Supernatural Culture Topics
  • Alyce Baker:“Gothic Sensibilities in Ransom Riggs’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and Hollow City”
  • Fabrizio Cilento:“Where Do Zombies Get the Blues: Love and Supermodernity in Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies”
  • Amanda Scheibner:“Buffy’s Significant ‘Others’: Riley and Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer”
  • Amy Williams Wilson:“Sookie, Sucking, and the Savior: The Belongingness Postulation Regarding Why Humans Crave Vampires”
  • Female Subjects of Horror
  • Meghan Carlton:“Girl on (Last) Girl Violence: Or, Why Jennifer's Body is not a Feminist Horror Film”
  • Katherine Lashley:“Accepting Blindness in Cherie Priest's Bloodshot”
  • Tammie Merino:“Angela Carter’s “Company of Wolves”: Navigating Desire in a Predatory Culture”
  • Rebecca Willoughby:“#YesAllWomen and The Exorcism of Emily Rose: Skepticism as Activism”

11:20-12:35

  • Exorcising and Monstrous Mothers
  • M. Suzanne Harper: “The Exorcist: The Devil Made Her Do It”
  • T. Madison Peschock: “Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart: A New HBO Documentary that Examines Smart’s Murder Trial and the Effects and Consequences Media Coverage has on the Judicial System”
  • Erika Rothberg:“What the Hell to Expect When You're Expecting: An Examination of Demonic Pregnancies in Horror Literature and Film”
  • Dana Washington:“When Mother Nature is the Monster: If This is so Scary, Why are we Laughing?”
  • Awakening the Dead (Students): Writing Pedagogy
  • Chuck de Wald & Eileen Morgan: “All you Zombies: Awakening Student Engagement in the Wake of NCLB”
  • Michal Horton: “Expanding Burke’s Human Rhetoric: Teratology as Response to Technology”
  • Angelique Medvesky:“Teaching the Developmental Student in Freshman Composition”
  • David von Schleichten:“Psychotic-Bunny Writing Instructor: Haunted House as Paradigm in Composition Classes”
  • Mommy, Where do Vampires Come From?
  • Sharon M. Gallagher: “Frankenstein Meets Varney the Vampire; or, Considering the Influence of Mary Shelley on James Malcolm Rymer”
  • Melissa Powell:“The Sublime and Beautiful in Dracula: How the Collective Unconscious Evokes Fear”
  • Marijana Stojkovic:“Society and the Vampire: The Discriminating Premise of the Other in Anglo-American Literature”

12:40-1:55Lunch and Keynote Speakers: John Russo and Russ Streiner

2:00-3:15

  • Listening and Lovecraft
  • Peter Cullen Bryan: “Hawthorne, Lovecraft, and King Walk Into A Peculiar Little Town: The Particular American Horror of the Small Town”
  • Ryan Haggerty: Audio Book: HP Lovecraft
  • Paul Ruben: “Audiobook Narration: How Storytellers Connect the Author’s Voice to Listeners”
  • Speaking Through the Dead: Who Are These Ghosts That Haunt Us?
  • Alyssa Bersine, Cameron Contois, Andrea Wuorenmaa
  • Fantastic Literature Scholarship
  • Stan Hunter Kranc, Stephen Messimer, Michelle A. Shade, Chip St. Clair

3:25-4:40

  • Fragments and Fiction:Novels and Stories
  • Bim Angst: “‘Burrs’: Original Short Fiction”
  • Michael Cox:“Interlude: A Child Is Born”
  • Michael Hyde: “‘Page Missing’: In the Gothic Tradition of Found Fragments”
  • Grace Sikorski:“The Gatehouse”
  • The Horror of the Real: Zizek in Popular Culture
  • Carol Fox, Whitney Sandin, Hannah Talbot, proj

7 p.m.Movie: Night of the Living Dead followed by Q&A with John Russo and Russ

Streiner (free for conference registrants)

Saturday:

8:30-9:45

  • Spaces for Ghosts
  • Marwa Aldaraweish:“Transforming the Function of Souls: Death in Twentieth-Century American Poetry”
  • Carly Dunn: “‘A house that belonged to ghosts’: Spirits, Ghosts, and the Gothic in Molly Keane’s Big House Novels”
  • Maureen Gallagher:“Ghosts, Doppelgangers, and Lyric Subjectivity in Elizabeth Robinson’s Post-Language Poetry”
  • Nicole Burkholder-Mosco: “Visions and Vastations: Henry James, William James, and Subversions of the Real”
  • “They’re Coming to Get you, Barbara”: All Things Zombie
  • Emmanuel Abreu:“‘They're Us, That's All’: Zombies and the Horror of Familiarity”
  • Maryann Di Edwardo:“Zombies as Archetypes of the Masculine and Feminine Inspire Creative Non-Fiction Writers and Poets”
  • Laura Eldred and Kathryn Skutlin: “‘That Was More than a Heartbeat’: The Reversion to Traditional Gender Norms in Post-Romero Zombie Narratives”
  • John M. Ulrich:“World War Z and the Geopolitics of the Zombie”

9:55-11:10

  • Frightful Films
  • Tom Bierowski: “James Dickey's Deliverance: Penetration and the Ultimate Patriarchal Nightmare”
  • Edward Tabor:“The Suburban House as Para-Site: The Terrible House in Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity”
  • Noel Sloboda: “Undead Shakespeare: Art, Authority, and Authorship in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive”
  • Adam Wassel: “Witnessing a Witness: Kurt Gerstein in Costa-Gavras's Amen”
  • Weeping and Wailing: Reading Cultured and Gendered Bodies
  • Lawrence Evalyn:“Distant-Reading Gendered Gothic Motifs”
  • Itzi Meztli: “La Llorona, or The ‘Weeping Wailer,’ in Mexican American Culture: How Supernatural Horror Literature Reinforces Social-Cultural Taboos”
  • Tyler Roeger: “Civil Sensationalism: The Gothic Body in Antebellum Slave Narratives”
  • Rod Taylor:“Assimilating Performance: African-American Abolitionists”

11:20-12:35

  • Scary Scribes:Stories, Memoirs, and Poems
  • Tom Bierowski:TwoScary Short-Short Stories
  • Catherine Cox:“To Return Again to Where I am: A Narrative of South Africa”
  • Marjorie Maddox: “Horror and Hope in the Headlines: A Reading of Local News from Someplace Else”
  • Antonio Vallone:“Tweets and Twerks: a Poetry Reading”
  • Forms, Spaces, and Experiences of Student-Faculty Scholarship
  • Jessica Beard, Adam Haley, Ben Rowles, proj

12:45-2:00

  • Publish or Perish: A chat with the Pennsylvania English staff (Dead and Alive)
  • Jess Haggerty, Jon Marsden, Tony Vallone, Michael Cox, Ryan Haggerty, Jackie Atkins
  • Dissecting Good and Evil
  • Salvador Ayala: “A Wild Sulfurous Lustre: Light and Color in Poe’s Gothic Tales”
  • John Branscum:“The Horrors of Being: Nameless Animal Bodies in the Pet Stories of Lisa Tuttle, Joyce Carol Oates, and Patricia Highsmith”
  • Amanda Lagoe:“Constructing Evil through Narrative Distance in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula”
  • Laura Rutland: “The Supernatural and Levels of Power in Charles Williams’s War in Heaven and ‘The Greater Trumps’”