The Gothic Networking Day gives postgraduate students and those working in the gothic a unique opportunity to learn about Gothic Studies in the United Kingdom – from some of its major figures. The day will include talks from the Co-President of the International Gothic Association, the Editor of the prestigious journal Gothic Studies, the Editors of the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies,  and the Editor of the University of Wales Gothic Studies Series. Representatives from Twisted Tales and Grimmfest Film Festival will illustrate possibilities for public engagement work and education professionals will talk on Gothic Studies in schools and sixth forms. The day will give you the chance to meet some of the most significant figures in Gothic Studies in the UK and gain a broader sense of the discipline whilst learning about publication opportunities and ways of enhancing your own profile through social media.

This event is supported by the Higher Education Academy.

PROGRAMME

09.00:  Registration and refreshments

10.00:  Introduction to the day (Dr Linnie Blake and Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes, Organisers)

Panel 1. Gothic Communities and Networks

10.15: The International Gothic Association (Dr Catherine Spooner, Co-President)

10.45: The Gothic Imagination (Dr Matt Foley, Website Curator)

11.15: The Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies (Dr Linnie Blake and Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes)

11.45: Research Profiles and Social Media (Helen Malarky, HLSS Project Manager – Research and Impact)

12.15: Lunch (own arrangements)

Panel 2. Gothic Publishing

13.00: Gothic Literary Series at the University of Wales Press (Sarah Lewis, Commissioning Editor)

13.30: Gothic Studies journal (Prof William Hughes, Journal Editor) – TBC

14.00: The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (Dr Dara Downey and Dr Jenny McDonell, Journal Editors)

14.30: Refreshments

Panel 3. Public Engagement

15.00: Grimmfest Horror Festival (Ben Ross, Festival Co-ordinator & Online Content Manager)

15.30: Twisted Tales Events (David McWilliam, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief and Events Coordinator)

16.00: Networking with schools and colleges (Kerry Gorrill, Canon Slade School)

16.30: Closing Remarks

 

SPEAKERS

 

Catherine Spooner specialises in Gothic literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present. Her first book, Fashioning Gothic Bodies, examined the relationship between Gothic literature and dress from the French Revolution to Goth subculture. This was followed by Contemporary Gothic, an exploration of contemporary uses of Gothic in literature, film, television, fashion, art and consumer culture. She is currently working on an AHRC-funded research project entitled Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic, to be published by Bloomsbury in 2015. Catherine is co-president of the International Gothic Association.

 

Matt Foley has recently completed a doctoral thesis on Haunting Modernisms at Stirling and has published on transgression, Gothic 1900-1950, and D.H. Lawrence. He also blogs on haunting, popular culture, and literature from the first half of the 20th Century for The Gothic Imagination. Helen Malarky is HLSS Project Manager (Research and Impact) and Creative Programme Co-ordinator for the Humanities in Public festival. Helen carries a special place in her heart for all things goth and Gothic, having been an 80s regular in such legendary haunts as the Manchester Banshee and Leeds Phono.

 

Sarah Lewis is Commissioning Editor at University of Wales Press. UWP is home to the award winning ‘Gothic Literary Studies’ series, which has nearly thirty volumes either in print, in press, or under contract.

 

Bill Hughes is Professor of Gothic Studies at Bath Spa University, an immediate Past President of the International Gothic Association, founder editor of the internationally refereed journal “Gothic Studies”, a prominent member of the editorial board of MUP’s International Gothic Series and one of the two editors of the Edinburgh University Press Companions series. His fifteen published books include Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and its Cultural Context (2000), Bram Stoker: A Bibliography (1997), an annotated edition of Stoker’s faux vampire novel The Lady of the Shroud (2001) and an annotated student edition of Dracula (2007), Reader’s Guides to Dracula for Palgrave(2009) and Continuum (2009) and The Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature (2013). A further monograph, That Devil’s Trick: Hypnotism and the Victorian Popular Imagination (Manchester University Press), will be published in 2014.

 

Dara Downey was awarded a PhD from  the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, in 2009. In 2010, she secured a two-year post-doctoral fellowship from the then Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, leading to the production of a monograph entitled American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age, to be published by Palgrave in a series on the Gothic edited by Clive Bloom in 2014.  She was appointed Lecturer in American Literature in the School of English, Drama and Film in September 2013, and is currently co-editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies.

 

Jenny McDonnell studied English Literature and German in Trinity College Dublin, before going on to write a Ph.D. thesis on Katherine Mansfield’s emergence as an author within a commercial realm of book and periodical publication. In 2010, her monograph Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public was published by Palgrave Macmillan; in addition to this, she has published articles on Katherine Mansfield and Robert Louis Stevenson. She is also editor of film reviews for the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (to which she regularly contributes film, book and television reviews), and editor of the Katherine Mansfield Society Newsletter.

As Grimm up North’s chief coordinator, Ben Ross handles the logistics of both the monthly screenings and the overall festival itself. As online content manager, Ben is tasked with ensuring online content is constantly up to date, developing an online presence for the Grimm brand and exploring new avenues of online content distribution, having most recently redesigned the Grimm, Not a Numberand White Settlers webpages. Ben loves to develop his historical film knowledge whilst consciously subjecting himself to films that push him far from his comfort zone.  He recently graduated with first class BA-honours in English & Film.

 

David McWilliam is a doctoral student under the supervision of Catherine Spooner, as well as an Associate Lecturer at Lancaster University, Liverpool John Moores University, and Manchester Metropolitan University. His thesis looks at representations of monstrous criminals in contemporary American Gothic culture. He has written articles and entries for Gothic Studies, and the Ashgate Encyclopdeia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters . David is a critic of contemporary genre fiction whose reviews have appeared in Horror Studies, The Gothic Imagination, Vector, Foundation, the Interzone website, and Strange Horizons.

 

Kerry Gorrill is Curriculum Leader at Canon Slade School. Canon Slade is a Church of England secondary school on Bradshaw Brow in Bradshaw, in the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton, Greater Manchester, England.

ORGANISERS

Dr Linnie Blake is Principal Lecturer in Film in the Department of English, Director of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and Pathway Leader for the MA English Studies – The Gothic.  Her work on literary, filmic and televisual texts ranges across genres, national cultures and historical periods. She has published widely on topics as various as seventeenth century Puritanism and zombie apocalypticism, Edgar Allan Poe and the Situationist International, Hillbilly Horror and Post 9/11 Republicanism, Japanese and Thai horror cinema and the contemporary Gothic box set. She is the author of The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity (Manchester: MUP, 2008) and is working on a book on neoliberal gothic TV.

 

Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes is a Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University and a member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. He is the author of Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film (2014), and co-editor of Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage Phenomenon (2015). He has published widely in international peer-reviewed journals such as Gothic Studies, Horror Studies, The Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Actual / Virtual and The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory.