Frankenstein and Popular Culture

press release:

Friday, October 27, 7:15 PM    DeLuca Forum, Discovery Building, 330 N. Orchard Street

    Welcome and Opening Remarks; Film Screening: The Bride of Frankenstein (1935);  Post-Screening Discussion

Saturday, October 28, all conference events in Union South; see signboard “Today in the Union” for specific location

9:30 AM – 10:30 AM   Session One: Monster Theory. Stephen Asma, Columbia College Chicago, “Hybridity and Imagination: the culture and cognition of gods and monsters.” Catherine Belling, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, “Frankenstein among the Aliens: Circular Creation and a Posthuman Prometheus.”

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM        Session Two: Film. Barry Grant, Brock University, St. Catharine’s Ontario, “‘Just a Few Stitches -- and Look’: Popular Film as Frankenstein.” Susan Lederer, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, “Dr. Frankenstein, I Presume: Medicine and the Monster in Film.”

1:00 PM – 2:00 PM        Session Three: History of Science and Bioethics. Paul Root Wolpe, Emory University, “Frankenstein and the Golem: Two models of aesthetics and creation for modern biotechnology." Allison Kavey, CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the CUNY Graduate Center, “‘The inestimable benefit which I shall confer on all mankind to the last generation’: The contest over the means and motivating for making natural knowledge in Frankenstein.”

2:30 PM – 3:30 PM        Session Four: Disability. Mark Mossman, Western Illinois University, “Atypical Bodies, Personal Narrative, and the Nation: Physical Difference in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Angela Smith, University of Utah, “Walk this Way: Frankenstein’s Monster, Zombies, and Disability Simulation.”

4:00 PM – 5:00 PM        Session Five: Theater. Tess Jones, University of Colorado Medical School, “‘What was I?’: Human Experimentation in Shelley’s Frankenstein and Buchner’s Woyzeck.” Matthew Buckley, Rutgers University, “‘It lives! It lives!’: Gaslight, Neo-Gothic Melodrama, and Frankenstein’s Popular Cultural Birth”

7:30 PM    Lecture, Union South: see signboard “Today in the Union” for specific location. Lester Friedman, Hobart and Smith College, “Creature Features: Frankensteins on Film”

Sunday, October 29

9:30 AM – 10:30 AM        Section Six: Technology.  Despina Kakoudaki, American University, “Unmaking People: The Politics of Negation from Frankenstein to Westworld.” David Guston, Arizona State University, “Frankenstein and Contemporary Techno-Science”

10:30 AM – 11:30 AM        Session Seven: Graphic Narratives. Lisa Diedrich, SUNY Stony Brook, “Monster en abyme: sympathy and ill feeling in graphic Frankenstein narratives.” Elizabeth Young, Mt. Holyoke College, “Black Frankenstein at the Bicentennial”

11:30 AM – 12:00 PM     Wrap Up Comments