Tag: Frankenstein

Frankenstein 2018: 200 Years of Monsters (CFP)

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The call for papers is now out for the “Frankenstein 2018: 200 Years of Monsters” conference hosted by the Australian National University and the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, Australia (12 – 15 September 2018). I will be giving one of the four keynote talks — on Frankenstein in film and other media. Proposals are being solicited for talks on a range of Frankensteinian topics, including:

  • Literary studies, especially of the long eighteenth century, Romanticism, Victorian and neo­‐Victorian literature
  • Re-tellings and re-­‐imaginings of the Frankenstein story in various modes and genres, e.g. SF, steampunk, speculative fiction, slash fiction, etc.
  • Film, television, theatre and performance, and visual studies
  • Digital humanities, reception studies, histories of popular culture, and media ecologies
  • Gender studies, queer theory, and the history of sexuality
  • Disability studies and post‐humanism
  • The history of medicine, especially reproductive technologies
  • Science and technology studies; images and imaginaries of science and scientists
  • The history and philosophy of biology, especially in relation to vitalism
  • Eco‐criticism and the Anthropocene
  • Affect theory and the history of emotions
  • Frankenstein and race, colonialism, empire
  •  Global and local Frankensteins, e.g. Australian Frankensteins
  • Frankenstein and material history
  • Cyborgs, robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning
  • Synthetic biology, genetic engineering, and artificial life

For more info and the CFP, take a look at the conference website: http://rsha.cass.anu.edu.au/events/conference-frankenstein-two-hundred-years-monsters

Fembots: From Representation to Reality

deFren-Poster

On Monday, November 13, 2017 (5:30pm in Oshman Hall, McMurtry Building), media maker/scholar Allison de Fren (Occidental College) will be on hand for a screening of her 2010 documentary The Mechanical Bride and her 2015 video essay Fembot in a Red Dress. The screening, which is free and open to the public, will be followed by a Q&A.

Sponsored by the Stanford Department of Art & Art History, the Documentary Film Program, and Stanford’s Frankenstein@200 Initiative.

What Is Monster? What Is Human? (Update)

F200 Opening Colloquium 10 2017 poster

This is the updated poster for the opening colloquium for Stanford’s Frankenstein@200 Initiative, October 17, 2017 (7:00-8:30pm in Cubberley Auditorium, Stanford School of Education). I’ll be speaking alongside Denise Gigante (English Department), Aleta Hayes (Theater and Performance Studies), Russ Altman (Bio-Engineering, Genetics, Medicine, Computer Science), and Hank Greely (Law and Genetics), moderated by Jane Shaw (Dean for Religious Life).

Free and open to the public: All humans, monsters, cyborgs, others welcome.

The Meaning of “Animation” in Edison’s Frankenstein (1910)

This video is an experimental “annotation essay” that develops a reading of Edison’s Frankenstein (1910) through on-screen text annotations. This is the complete film, unedited except for the annotations and new digital intertitles.

The video’s argument is adapted from Chapter 3 of my book Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface: “Monsters in Transit: Edison’s Frankenstein.”

This is my second Frankenstein-themed video essay. The first one, on sound in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), can be found in the online journal [in]Transition.

What is Monster? What is Human?

Frankenstein-Opening-Colloquium

Poster for the opening colloquium for Stanford’s Frankenstein@200 Initiative, October 17, 2017. I’ll be speaking alongside Denise Gigante, Aleta Hayes, Russ Altman, and Hank Greely, moderated by Jane Shaw. Location TBA.

Free and open to the public: All humans, monsters, cyborgs, others welcome.

Frankenstein@200

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Happy to be on the steering committee for Frankenstein@200 — a year-long series of events taking place at Stanford in 2018. I’ll be participating in a number of ways, including  talks and several courses related to Frankenstein, among other things. I’ll post details here in due time. Also be sure to check out the project website, which is still under construction, but which is already chock full of announcements and constantly being updated.

The year 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of the publishing of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. The novel is eerily relevant today as we face ethical dilemmas around appropriate use of stem cells, questions about organ donation and organ harvesting, as well as animal to human transplants. Additionally, the rise of artificial intelligence portends an uncertain future of the boundaries between machines and humans. Frankenstein@200, will be a year-long series of academic courses and programs including a film festival, a play, a lecture series and an international Health Humanities Conference that will examine the numerous moral, scientific, sociological, ethical and spiritual dimensions of the work, and why Dr. Frankenstein and his monster still capture the moral imagination today. This project will be sponsored by the Stanford Medicine & the Muse Program in partnership with the Stanford Humanities Center, the Stanford Arts Institute, the Office of Religious Life, the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, Stanford Continuing Studies, the Cantor Arts Center, the Department of Art & Art History, and the Center for Biomedical Ethics.

Animating Frankenstein (Stanford Graphic Narrative Project, Nov. 16, 2016)

animatingfrankenstein-poster

This coming Wednesday (Nov. 16, 2016 at 6pm), I will be presenting a talk titled “Animating Frankenstein: Film, Comics, Visual Culture.” The event is organized by the Stanford Graphic Narrative Project (under the leadership of Mia Lewis and Scott Bukatman) and hosted by the Stanford Humanities Center. More info here.

Postnaturalism reviewed in MEDIENwissenschaft

medienwissenschaft-review

The latest issue of MEDIENwissenschaft: Rezensionen/Reviews includes a nice review of my book Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface. 

For those of you who read German, you can find the entire text of the review, by Anya Heise-von der Lippe (Tübingen/Berlin), here. For everyone else, here is a (rough) translation of the reviewer’s summary statement:

“Postnaturalism offers a philosophical approach and an engagement with fundamental ontological and phenomenological questions of human and nonhuman materiality, which is indispensable especially for a post-postmodernity characterized by resource scarcity, climate change, and species extinctions, as well as the threat of a return to essentialist positions in politics and popular culture. Adapting a phrase from Bruno Latour, Denson counters the latter with a postnatural position: “We have never been natural” (24). Furthermore, Denson’s detailed examination — at the level of content, reception, and production — of Frankenstein adaptations is an asset for the analytical and production-aesthetic [produktionsästhetische] investigation of a central text (or modern myth) and its many adaptations in a wide range of text-critical disciplines: from media studies to literary to cultural studies.”

(Again, the translation is rough. Tweaks are more than welcome! Especially if you have suggestions for produktionsästhetisch or for making that first sentence more readable, drop me a line in the comments below…)

Finally, make sure you check out the entire issue of MEDIENwissenschaft, which is chock full of great stuff. Of particular interest to readers of this blog, among other things: the “Perspectives” section contains a longer piece on seriality and television series’ interrelations by Tanja Weber and Christian Junklewitz.

Check out the full contents of the issue here.