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Global Fantastika: July 4-5, 2016 – CFP

Global Fantastika: An Interdisciplinary Conference

July 4-5th 2016, Lancaster University

 

“Fantastika”, coined by John Clute, is an umbrella term which incorporates the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, but can also include alternative histories, steampunk, young adult fiction, or any other imaginative space. The 3rd annual Fantastika conference will focus on productions of Fantastika globally, as well as considering themes of contact across nations and borders within Fantastika. It is our hope to draw together academics with an interest in Fantastika from an international audience to share and disseminate Fantastika-related research globally.

 

We welcome abstracts for 20 minute papers on fantastika as they occur in any medium and form. Some suggested topics are:

– the production and development of Fantastika in non-Western or non-English-speaking countries

– Fantastika genres predominant in non-Western/non-English cultures (e.g. magical realism, contemporary mythologies)

– fictional and real empires

– globalization, industrialization, development and the future

– global networks, mobilities, migrations

– borders, defence of borders, crossing borders and occupations

– (post)colonial texts and readings

– notions of the ‘other’

– ecologies, technologies and biopolitics

 

Please submit a 300 word abstract to fantastikaconference@gmail.com along with a 50 word bionote by March 1st, 2016

 

Visit us at https://fantastikaconference.wordpress.com, like us on Facebook (“Fantastika Conference”), or follow us on twitter (@FantastikaConf) for up-to-date information about the event.

 

And visit http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/luminary to access the “Visualizing Fantastika” edition of The Luminary, featuring extended papers from the 2014 conference, due out June 2015.

Registration is still open for Locating Fantastika 2015 as well. Email fantastikaconference@gmail.com to register.

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Locating Fantastika Conference Schedule

Registration for Locating Fantastika is now open! The conference is free (note that lunch will not be provided). If you are not a presenter, simply email fantastikaconference@gmail.com to register.

And don’t forget to follow us on twitter (@FantastikaConf) and like our Facebook page. Please tweet #Fantastika2015 when tweeting details of the event.

Day 1, Tuesday, July 7th, 2015

8:30am – 9:30am        Registration

9:30am – 11:10am      Panel 1

11:20am – 12:20pm   Panel 2

12:20pm – 1:50pm     Lunch

1:50pm – 3:00pm       Keynote

3:10pm – 4:30pm       Panel 3

4:40pm – 5:40pm       Panel 4

7:00pm                        Dinner in the city

Day 2, Wednesday, July 8th, 2015

8:30am – 9:00am        Registration

9:00am – 10:20am      Panel 5

10:30am – 11:50am    Panel 6

11:50am – 1:20pm     Lunch

1:20pm – 2:30pm       Keynote

2:40pm – 4:00pm       Panel 7

4:10pm – 5:10pm       Round Table

Panel Schedule (Click on Panel Titles for Abstracts and Bionotes)

Panel 1.1 Nostalgia of the Ecological Past

Audrey Tayler, Anglia Ruskin University, UK, “Pastoral and Fantasy: A Place in Time?”

Polly Atkin, University of Strathclyde, UK, “Fantastic Grasmere: Inheriting the Uncanny”

Judith Eckenhoff, University of Freiburg, Germany, “Supernatural Wilderness in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest”

Kaja Franck, University of Hertfordshire, UK, “Hunting the Last Werewolf: Ecology, Fantastika, and the Wilderness of the Imagination”

 

Panel 1.2 – Narrative Structures of Fantastika

Thomas Tyrrell, Cardiff University, UK, “‘Milton said it. And he was blind.’ Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Paradise Lost”

Chris Hussey, University of Cambridge, UK, “And to stretch from UnLondon to London  is a very long way indeed”: Exploring Relationships with Real and Fantastic Place in China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun”

Tim Jarvis, University of Bedfordshire, UK, “‘A Perichoresis, an Interpenetration’: Place and the Representational Praxis of Weird Fiction.”

Farah Mendlesohn, Anglia Ruskin University, UK, “The Structural Narratives of the SF Short Story”

Panel 2.1 Locating Monstrosity in Machine versus Human Intelligence

John Sharples, Lancaster University, UK, “‘Everything was Black’: Locating Monstrosity in Robert Löhr’s The Chess Machine (2008)”

Stephen Curtis, Lancaster University, UK, “Moon Kampf: The Rise of the Lunar Nazi in Speculative Fiction”

Panel 2.2 Landscapes in Fixidity and Flux

Christina Scholz, University of Graz, Austria, “‘Lost in the Back Yard Again’: Uncertain Landscapes in M. John Harrison

Karen Graham, University of Aberdeen, UK, “There’s no Place like Oz: Oz Reimagined On Screen and Off”

Keynote: Ruth Heholt, Falmouth University, “Land of Myth and Magic: ‘West Barbary’ and the Hammer House of Cornish Horror”

 

Panel 3.1 Tangible Boundaries

Hannah Boaden, Lancaster University, UK, “Dreadful Doorways: Anxious Explorations of Transitional Spaces in Visual Culture”

Corinna Joerres, University of Oxford, UK /University of Bonn, Germany, “Reimaginings of Hadrian’s Wall in the worlds of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels and Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series”

Brian Baker, Lancaster University, UK, “The Cosmological Bedroom: The Voyage Out and Coming Home in SF Cinema”

Panel 3.2 Urban Landscapes

Will Smith, Lancaster University, UK, “‘The Erection of the Monster’: Frank Lillie Pollock and The Skyscraper”

Rob O’Connor, York St. John University, UK, “‘A Tourist Guide to Besźel and Ul Qoma’: Unseeing and the Re-interpretation of Psychogeography in China Miéville’s The City and the City”

Vladimir Rizov, University of York, UK, “The Dialectics of Documents: The Case of Parisian Landscape in Atget and Cartier-Bresson”

 

Panel 4.1 Haunted Buildings

Kevin Corstorphine, University of Hull, UK, “‘Sometimes on earth a cruel shift takes place. Time splits’: Jack Cady’s The Well”

Nicola Bowring, University of Nottingham, UK, “Village of Fools to City of Madness and Vice: Reading Gotham”

Panel 4.2 Pattern Constructions of Video Games

Dawn Stobbart, Lancaster University, UK, “Telling Tales with Technology: Remediating Folklore and Myth through the Videogame Alan Wake”

Tom Brassington, Lancaster University, UK, “Inheriting Traditions: Comparing Hero Construction and Landscape in the Oddworld and Skyrim Video Games”

Panel 5.1 Heterotopias of Fantastika

Sean Wilcock, Leeds Beckett University, UK, “Mendlesohn’s Taxonomy of Fantasy Applied to the Interaction between the Quotidian and the Internet-as-Heterotopia”

Rachel Fox, Lancaster University, UK, “‘The other garden’: Palimpsestic and Abject Faerie Spaces and Species in J. M. Barrie’s and Arthur Rackham’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens”

Lauren Randall, Lancaster University, “Fantastical Florida; or, (Re)Imagined Realities and Worlds of Darkness in Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!”

 

Panel 5.2 Mapping Carroll-esk Landscapes

Francesca Arnavas, University of York, UK, “The Fantastic Worlds of the Alice Books and the Imaginary Mind”

Nina Lyon, Cardiff University, UK, “Mapless Maps and Speculative Spaces: Metaphysics and Satire in The Hunting of the Snark and Flatland”

Panel 6.1 Mapping Political Ideologies of Fantastika

Aishwarya Subramanian, Newcastle University, UK, “The Magician’s Map: Textuality, Terrain and Imperial Possession in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”

Nick Hubble, Brunel University London, UK, “‘The Kind of Woman Who Talked to Basiliks’: Travelling Light Through Naomi Mitchison’s Landscape of the Imaginary”

Sarah Lohmann, Durham University, UK, “Relocating Utopia: Complexity Theory and the Emergence of Utopia in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time and Joanne Russ’s The Female Man”

Panel 6.2 Monsters in Transition

Jen Aggleton, UK, “Is this the Real Life, or is this just Fantasy? Constructing Fantastic Locations in A Monster Calls”

Alan Gregory, Lancaster University, UK, “Nightmares and Inscapes: Pathways to Thoughtworlds of the Imagination in Joe Hill’s NOS4R2”

Keith Scott, De Montfort University, UK, “From R’lyeh to Whitehall: Charles Stross and the Bureaucratic Fantastic”

 

Keynote: Philippa Semper, University of Birmingham, “‘The past is a fantastical country’: otherworlds from medieval to modern”

 

Panel 7.1 World without Borders

Douglas Leatherland, Durham University, UK, “The Nomos of Fantasy: Natural and Artificial Boundaries in Tolkien’s Middle-earth and Le Guin’s Earthsea”

Catherine Spooner, Lancaster University, UK, “‘It’s just the travelling that’s such a drag’: Mobility, Tourism and Globalised Vampires in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive”

Chris Pak, Lancaster University, UK, “The Independent Entrepreneur and the Terraforming of Mars”

Panel 7.2 Fantastika Performances

Nik Taylor, University of Huddersfield, UK, “Strange Ceremonies: The Laboratory, Library and the Living Room; Creating Imaginative Spaces in Bizarre Magick”

Neil McRobert, UK, “In the Land of Gods and Monsters: The Fantastic in American Carnival Narratives”

Mark Valentine, UK, “Supernatural Landscape in British Ambient and Drone Music”

Round Table: Ruth Heholt, Philippa Semper, Catherine Spooner, Brian Baker, Eddie Robson

Note that the schedule has been updated (June 2nd, 2015).

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Official Announcement and Locating Fantastika Details

I’d like to officially announce that we are extending the conference to two days. All 40 abstracts confirmed acceptance! We will be holding the conference on Tuesday, July 7th, and Wednesday, July 8th.

The official conference dinner will be held on Tuesday, July 7th, but we plan to have informal dinner and drinks on July 6th and 8th, for any of you who are planning to come into Lancaster early or leaving late and don’t fancy eating dinner alone (or for anyone who simply wants to grab a meal or drink with friends!). Details of these social events will be announced in June.
We are ending the conference with a round table with Ruth Heholt, Philippa Semper, Catherine Spooner, Brian Baker, and Eddie Robson. For those of you planning to leave immediately after the conference, the conference should end roughly before 5:30pm on Wednesday.
Please note that there is no registration fee. However, this means that we will not be providing lunch, but we will be scheduling substantial time for a lunch break, and will point you in the direction where you can get a meal on campus.
For those of you looking for accommodation, please note that the campus of Lancaster University is outside of town, about a 20-30 minute bus-ride from city centre. However, the evening meals will be taking place in city centre, so if you intend to stay in accommodation on campus, you will have to travel back from town if you wish to attend these events. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please be aware that if you decide to stay on campus, there may be fewer facilities open in the evening for meals as it is the summer break time, but there will still be one or two places open for those of you wishing to stay on campus. All of the evening meals in the city will take place approximately a 15 minute walk away from the train station, to accommodate anyone who will have to leave straight away or are arriving straight from the train. For more information on how to get to Lancaster University, please follow this link: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/contact-and-getting-here/maps-and-travel/ . For accommodation information, there are bed and breakfasts available on campus ( http://www.conferences.lancs.ac.uk/bedandbreakfast/ ) and Lancaster uni recommends these places as well: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/family/visiting-advice/stay/ , but I also suggest that the Travelodge in town might be inexpensive, especially for a weekday stay.
We hope to have the conference schedule out in the next few weeks. In the meantime, if you are aware of anyone who would like to attend the conference but are not presenting a paper, please have them register by emailing us.
If you have any other questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us.
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Locating Fantastika: An Interdisciplinary Conference

Locating Fantastika: An Interdisciplinary Conference

Wednesday, July 8th, 2015, Lancaster University

Following the success of Visualising Fantastika in 2014, Lancaster University invites all academics with an interest in the field to participate in this interdisciplinary conference. “Fantastika”, coined by John Clute, is an umbrella term which incorporates the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, but can also include alternative histories, steampunk, young adult fiction, or any other imaginative space. The theme for 2015, “Locating Fantastika,” explores all areas of space, setting, and locations, either in the fictional world of fantastika or in fantastical networks with the real world.

 

We are pleased to announce Dr. Philippa Semper and Dr. Ruth Heholt as our keynote speakers. Dr. Semper (University of Birmingham) lectures in medieval English, with a special interest on the interaction between text and image in manuscript studies; she also teaches and publishes on fantasy literature. Her keynote will be examining the relation between the medieval world and modern fantasy. Dr. Heholt (Falmouth University) is a senior lecturer focusing on the supernatural. Her recent work has focussed on the concepts of regions and the Gothic and haunted landscapes. She is editor of a new e-journal, Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural: http://www.revenantjournal.com.

We welcome abstracts for 20 minute papers on fantastical locations as they occur in any medium and form. Some suggested topics are:

– buildings, houses, or other location-specific constructs

– landscapes or geography

– world-building or setting

– regional, national, or cultural spaces

– urban vs rural communities

– maps or mapping

– eco or ecology-readings

Please submit a 300 word abstract to fantastikaconference@gmail.com along with a 50 word bionote by April 1st, 2015

Visit us at https://fantastikaconference.wordpress.com or like us on Facebook (“Fantastika Conference”) for more up-to-date information about the event.

And stay tuned for the special “Visualizing Fantastika” edition of The Luminary, featuring extended papers from last year’s conference, due out in 2015.