Dr Isaraporn Pissa-ard teaches undergraduate courses in world literature, mythology and folklore, and translation at Chiang Mai University, Thailand. Her research interests include Gothic literature and posthumanism, world literature, comparative literature, nature writing, mythology and folklore.
https://chiangmai.academia.edu/isarapornpissaard
https://www.cmu.ac.th/en/faculty/humanities/teacher/db5d90f4-2c56-4af1-9237-cb57411131ca
http://mdc.library.mju.ac.th/ebook/359481.pdf
Dr Ivan Stacy is Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Beijing Normal University. He is the author of The Complicit Text: Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction, published by Lexington in 2021. He has also published articles on Kazuo Ishiguro, W. G. Sebald, China Miéville, and on the American television series The Wire, focusing on his main research interests, which are complicity and the carnivalesque. He has taught in China, Thailand, the UK, Bhutan, Libya, and South Korea.
Dr Arthit Jiamrattanyoo is Lecturer in the Department of History, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. He received a doctoral degree in Southeast Asian history from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2022. His areas of interest include modern Thai and Philippine literature, periodical studies, and affect and sensory studies. He is currently translating Nick Joaquin\’s tropical Gothic tales into Thai and working on a research project on crime and horror ballads in the history of sensationalist mass media in Thailand
Dr Verita Sriratana is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. She is former Visiting Research Fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Lund. Her recent publications include “The Land of Smiles, Nazi Chic and Communist Cool: Personality Cult and ‘Democide & Holocaust Indifference’ in Thailand”, as part of Proceedings of the First International Symposium, Identifying and Countering Holocaust Distortion: Lessons For and From Southeast Asia (Never Again Association, 2022), (https://online.fliphtml5.com/zfgnm/rbue/#p=84) and “‘Thailand—A Queer H(e)aven?’ & ‘Queering Misogyny’ in the Contexts of Thai Constitutional Court Ruling against Same-Sex Marriage and the Roe v. Wade Reversal” (https://prachatai.com/english/node/9916). Her forthcoming works include a research article entitled \”I Burn (Marx’s) Paris: \’Capital\’ Cities, Alienation & Deconstruction in the Works of Bruno Jasieński\”, published in the Temporalities of Modernism Center of European Modernist Studies Volume (La Casa editrice universitaria Ledizioni).
Friday 3 March, 16.30
LASALLE College of Arts, Singapore
The modern city-state of Singapore is globally known both for its adherence to law and for its gleaming, futuristic architecture and attractions—and the nation thus might appear to stand at first glance in stark opposition to the Captivating Criminality 9 conference’s themes of crime and the gothic. And yet, as one might expect, both crime and gothic-tinged environments do of course exist both at the peripheries of Singapore’s present-day reality and even more so in the country’s popular fictions, which give full voice to that which is repressed in the dominant national narrative of progress and prosperity.
This presentation will examine one popular arena for the articulation of themes of crime and the gothic (and, significantly, their intersection)—the Singapore horror film. Indeed, in a sense the modern Singapore horror film was born of the criminal, two of the very first (1991’s Medium Rare and 1997’s God or Dog) both being inspired by a notorious real-life case of ritual murders replete with gothic dimensions (both in reality and on screen). And criminal narrative lines and criminal characters have subsequently remained a distinctive and important part of the Singapore horror film’s DNA (often providing a pretext for the genre’s gothic turns). This talk will work to demonstrate this tendency of modern Singapore horror by tracing the tandem operation of crime and the gothic through several key examples, including the work of directors Sam Loh and Chai Yee Wei.
Professor Adam Knee is the Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Media and Creative Industries at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. He holds a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University and is an authority in Southeast Asian cinema. Prior to joining LASALLE, Professor Knee held the post of Head of School of International Communications at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China from 2013–2017. He has also held teaching posts at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore – where he served as the Head of Division of Broadcast and Cinema Studies – and Ohio University, USA.A recipient of the prestigious Fulbright and International Institute for Asian Studies fellowships, Professor Knee has published extensively on Southeast Asian and popular American cinema. He is co-editor of the Palgrave Series in Asia and Pacific Studies and serves on the editorial boards of the Celebrity Studies (Taylor & Francis) and Plaridel journals, as well as the Amsterdam University Press Critical Asian Cinemas series.
Thursday 2 March, 17.00
Dir. Tom Waller (2014)
Inspired by true events, THE LAST EXECUTIONER is the story of Chavoret Jaruboon, the last person in Thailand whose job it was to execute by gun – a wild rock and roller who took a “respectable” job to support the family he loved devotedly, then constantly tried to reconcile the good and bad karma that came from his decision. It is a story of life at its most beautiful and death at its most surreal.
Starring Vithaya Pansringarm, David Asavanond and Penpak Sirikul. Written by Don Linder. Directed by Tom Waller.
Vithaya Pansringarm is a Thai actor best known for appearing in films like Only God Forgives (Refn, 2013), The Last Executioner (Waller, 2015), A Prayer Before Dawn (Sauvaire, 2017), or Operation Mekong (Lam, 2016). In June 2014, he won Best Actor at the Shanghai International Film Festival for his role as Chavoret in The Last Executioner. The film also won Best Picture and Best Screen Play at the 30th Surasawadi Awards in 2015. Pansringarm graduated in Graphic Design from New York Institute of Technology. He holds a 5th Degree Black Belt (5 DAN) in Kendo (a Japanese martial art) and is President of the Thailand Kendo Club.
Don Linder is an international, award-winning scriptwriter. He previously served as manager of the Creative Writing Program at State University of New York-Binghamton, Programs Director for Poets & Writers, Inc., and Literature Program Director for the North Carolina Arts Council. His 2015 film The Last Executioner won the Tukata Tong Awards for Best Film and Best Screenplay, making Don the first non-Thai to win the award since it was established in 1958. The film had its world premiere by invitation at the Shanghai International Film Festival where it won Best Actor.
His more recent film The Cave about the international efforts to rescue twelve boys stuck in a cave in Northern Thailand, has also won several awards, including the award for the Best Humanitarian Film at Sedona International Film Festival in 2021. In addition, Linder has written Dark Karma for a British producer, Hmongs: Ghost People for a French producer, which was a semi-finalist at the International New York Film Festival and won the Bronze Award in the Beverly Hills Screenplay Contest, and Ancient Angkor 4K, a documentary about Angkor Wat, which was bought by National Geographic, for an American producer. He has recently completed a 6-part TV series, Lured, with Lee Miller.
Agnethe Bennedsgaard is a PhD Student in Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark, working on a project called \”NeoGothic queer in contemporary LatinAsian literature.\” The project aims to develop and investigate how a new neogothic genre hybrid is forming across contemporary Latin American and East Asian literature. The hybrid challenges both physical boundaries of the world as well as boundaries of traditional literary genre conventions such as the Gothic.
Dr Tanima Kumari completed her M.A. (English) from Banaras Hindu University and PhD from IIT (ISM) Dhanbad. Presently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, C.M. College, Darbhanga, under Lalit Narayan Mithila University, Darbhanga, India. Her articles have been published in many international journals, including journals indexed in Thomson Reuters and Scopus databases. She has also presented many research papers at national and international conferences, including Oxford University, U.K. Her areas of specialization are African-American Poetry, Gender Studies, Indian English Poetry, Literary Theory, Indian Theatre, and Postcolonial Studies.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=jFCy6sMAAAAJ&hl=en
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-tanima-kumari-48a81156/?originalSubdomain=i
Dr Somdatta Bhattacharya has a PhD in English Studies from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kharagpur, West Bengal, India. In the past, she has also taught at institutions such as the University of Hyderabad and BITS Pilani, India. Her research interests are rooted in areas of urban cultures, crime fiction, social theories of space and spatiality, crime and city in literature, Indian writing in English, gender and South Asian popular culture, and she has taught, published, presented and supervised extensively in these areas. She has also been an investigator in multiple government and privately funded projects on the Indian urban underclass and their usage of urban space.
Soumyarup Bhattacharjee is presently a doctoral research scholar and teaching assistant at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay, India. His current research is centred on transcultural and transmedial approaches to contemporary gothic literature in South and South East Asia. Previously he has worked as a ‘Guest Lecturer’ at the Department of English, Aliah University, Kolkata. His other areas of interest include adaptation studies, postcolonial Indian writing, and contemporary horror literature/films.
Selki Noh is a Master\’s student at Korea University in South Korea, pursuing a degree in modern Japanese literature. Her Master\’s thesis focuses on Jun Eto\’s literary criticism, which stems from his Pro-US patriotism, and contrasts it with the works of Kenzaburō Ōe. Selki plans to expand her research interests beyond her MA studies to include Asian Gothic themes in media and literature.