Conference Schedule

Note: Papers in red will be presented online

DAY 1

Thursday 2 March 09.30-10.00, MCS 304

Opening remarks

Thursday 2 March 10.00-12.00

Girls, Women, Victims, 2 March 10.00-12.00, MCS 401/16

Chair: Heather Humann

    • Vik Gill, I Feel Your Pain: How the Novel Form Uses Feminist Vigilantes or Vengeful Ghosts to Encourage Empathy for the Suffering of Women and Girls
    • Karen Budra, Gothic Gossip Girls: True Crime and Female
    • Garima Yadav, Witches, Wives, and Wrongdoing: Examining Intersections of Violence against Women and Gothic in Anvita Dutt’s Bulbbul
    • Tanima Kumari, Examining the Infamous Rape Case of Nirbhaya through India’s Daughter (2015) and Delhi Crime (2019) (8.30-10.30, India)

Gothic, Crime and Japan, 2 March 10.00-12.00, MCS 304

Chair: Shweta Sachdeva Jha (8.30-10.30, India)

    • Christophe Thouny, DOKU the Destroyer – Lu Yang’s Aesthetics of Deformation
    • Joseph Crawford, ‘What form did you have?’: Warring Genres in Umineko: When They Cry
    • Leonie Rowland, ‘She Gets You Through the Phone’: Criminal Commodities and Communications Technologies in the Techno-Animism of One Missed Call (2003)
    • Damini Ray, Crimes of Many Names: The Relationship between Shinigami and Humans in Death Note(8.30-10.30, India)

Thursday 2 March 13.00-14.30

Serial Killers, 2 March 13.00-14.30, MCS 601/5

Chair: Elizabeth Gurian

    • Parnal Chirmuley, Tweaking the Gothic Mode: Adaptations and Retellings in True Crime
    • Abhishek Sarkar, Aestheticization of Crime for Bourgeois Entertainment: Two Bengali Serial Killer Films (11.30-13.00, India)
    • Neerja Vyas and Rohit Dey, Cinematic Representation of Serial Killers in Bollywood: Tracing the Evolution and the Major Trends (11.30-13.00, India)

Crime, Gothic, Revenge, 3 March, 13.00-14.30, MCS 501/5 (fully online)

Chair: Ffion Davies

    • Louie Jon A. Sanchez, Gothic and Revenge in Philippine Teleseryes (14.00-15.30, Philippines)
    • M Ramakrishnan, The Handling of Crime and Revenge in Literary and Film Genres in South India (11.30-13.00, India)
    • Venkata Naresh Burla, Ghost Film Genre as an Effective Medium for Handling Crime and Fictional Narratives: A Comprehensive Study on Recent Movie Productions in South India (11.30-13.00, India)

East Asian Gothic: Women, Bodies and Fears, 2 March, 13.00-14.30, MCS 304

Chair: Sang-hyon Nam

    • Hyeyoung Jung, A World of Pre-modern Bizarreness and Fantasy
    • Hyunhee Lee, Creatures of Modern Science: Fear of Artificial Humans
    • Selki Noh, A Gothic Variant of Poe: Kenzaburō Ōe’s The Beautiful Annabel Lee Was Chilled and Killed

Thursday 2 March 14.45-16.15

Gothic peripheries, 2 March 14.45-16.15, MCS 601/5

Chair: Kerstin-Anja Münderlein (8.45-10.15, Germany)

    • Celeste McAlpin-Levitt, Hillbilly Gothic: Settler Sexuality and the Inbred Grotesque
    • Bede Scott, Enchanted Topographies: Forensic Science and the Supernatural in Nii Ayikwei Parkes’ Tail of the Blue Bird (15.45-17.15, Singapore)
    • Šárka Dvořáková, The Sins of Our Fathers: The Gothic Possibilities of Scottish Islands (8.45-10.15, Czech Republic)

Folklore, Festivals and Occult Detectives, 2 March 14.45-16.45, MCS 501/5

Chair: Ruth Heholt

    • S Sindhu, Of Goddess, Demons and Sleuths: Swirling through the Mysteries of Suzhal: The Vortex
    • Somdatta Bhattacharya, Reason and Unreason as Tools of Detection: The “Astro-detective” in Manjiri Prabhu’s Fiction
    • Debaditya Mukhopadhyay, Bridging through a Reversal: Transformation of the Occult Detective Figure in Aghori (13.15-15.15, India)
    • Marie Vozdova, L. T. Meade and Supernatural Elements in the Process of Detection (8.45-10.45, Czech Republic)

Gothic and Contemporary Crime Fiction, 2 March 14.45-16.45, MCS 304

Chair: Karen Budra

    • Linda Ledford-Miller, The ‘Literary Noir’ of Emily St. John Mandel’s Early Novels
    • Heather Humann, Locating the Gothic in the Jonathan Moore’s The Dark Room
    • Anna Christie K. Villarba-Torres, Subverting Social Order: A Critique of Selected Philippine Crime Fiction
    • Sharon Dempsey, The Abject Body and the Fractured Mind: Gothic Criminality in Stuart Neville’s The House of Ashes and Catriona Ward’s The Last House on Needless Street (7.45-9.45, UK)

Thursday 2 March 17.00-19.45 (Bangkok), MCS 9th Floor Hall

    • Film: The Last Executioner (dir. Tom Waller, 2014) – film screening + Q&A session with Don Linder (screenwriter) and Vithaya Pansringarm (lead actor)

Thursday 2 March 17.00-18.30 (online only, Bamberg server)

Holmes- and Ripper-verse, 2 March 17-00-18.30 (11.00-12.30 Bamberg)

Chair:

    • Moritz A. Maier, In the Spirit of Jack: Ghostly Afterimages and Gothic Revisions across Ripper Fiction (11.00-12.30, Germany)
    • Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko, The Gothicised Storyworld of the Versus Narratives (11.00-12.30, Poland)
    • Joseph Mead, ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood…’ Sherlock Holmes as Victorian Supernatural (10.00-11.30, UK)

Forensics, Medicine, Psychology, 2 March 17-00-18.30 (11.00-12.30 Bamberg)

Chair: Patricia Green

    • Mona Raeisian, Of Monsters and Medical Professionals: An Analysis of Medicine and Liminality in American Police Procedural Fiction (11.00-12.30, Germany)
    • Laurence Talairach, Sensational Forensic Evidence: Wilkie Collins’s Haunting Corpses(11.00-12.30 France)
    • Paola Della Valle, Isolation, Madness and Trauma: The New Zealand Gothic (11.00-12.30, Italy)

Thursday 2 March 18.45-20.15 ( online only, Bamberg server)

Men, Women, Crime, 2 March 18.45-20.45 (12.45-14.45 Bamberg)

Chair:

    • Debora A. Sarnelli, Moving Betwixt and Between Boundaries: Redefining Domestic Space Through Liminal Masculinities in Wilkie Collins’s Sensation Novels (12.45-14.45, Italy)
    • Izabela Morska, A Christian Woman in Distress: Hilary Mantel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street 12.45-14.45, Poland)
    • Sarah Sproston, ‘Except for the body, I was the only woman’: Urban Fantasy and the Female Detective (11.45-13.45, UK)
    • Patricia Green, Gothic Configurations and Excess in the Female Mexican Crime Narrative: Reading Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (8.45-10.45, Argentina)

Crime Gothic Framed, 2 March 18.45-20.45 (12.45-14.45 Bamberg)

Chair:

    • Carina Hart, Framed Texts and Framed Characters: Gothic Style and the Whodunnit in the Thousand and One Nights and My Name is Red (11.45-13.45, UK)
    • Rebecca Lloyd, Criminal Stories: Gothicising the Fairy Tale and Animal Abuse in Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad (1992) (11.45-13.45, UK)
    • Christopher Pittard, ‘A Gothic arched door’: Sherlock Holmes, Gothic Architecture and Pedagogy (11.45-13.45, UK)
    • Brontë Schiltz, ‘Of course it doesn’t make sense, it’s not real’: Dream as Detection in Twin Peaks and Sherlock (11.45-13.45, UK)

DAY 2

Friday 3 March 10.00-12.00

True Crime, 3 March 10.00-11.30, MCS 501/17

Chair: Garima Yadav

    • Kalsang Wangmo, Is There an End to the Violence against the Depressed and the Marginalised Population in India (8.30-10.00, India)
    • Jan Marvin A. Goh, ‘H(a)unting the Aswangs’: Urban Gothumentary, Critical Gothic Realism, and Folkloric Spectrality of Philippine ‘War on Drugs’ in Alyx Arumpac’s Aswang (2019) (11.00-12.30, Philippines)
    • Hector Duarte Jr, Dredging the Swamp: The Murder of Christian Aguilar (Thursday 22.00-23.30, USA)

Troubled Masculinities, 3 March 10.00-11.30, MCS 501/13

Chair: Debaditya Mukhopadhyay (8.30-10.00, India)

    • Deimantas Valanciunas, Tropical Crime Gothic in South Indian Cinema
    • Enakshi Samarawickrama, ‘All Sons Disappointed Their Fathers’: Navigating Father-Son Relationships Amid Social Pressures of Performing Masculinity, Generational Trauma, Haunting Family Secrets and the Sins of Our Fathers in the Malaysian Gangster Novel Kings of Chinatown
    • Katarzyna Ancuta, Blood, Magic and Bullets: Gothic Masculinities in Gangster Films of Kongkiat Khomsiri

Crime, Music, Science, 3 March 10.00-12.00, MCS 304

Chair: Linda Ledford-Miller

    • Kristin M. Franseen, ‘Then came that terrible rumour’: Gothic Musical Crimes in 19th-Century Popular Fictions about Antonio Salieri (Thursday 22.00-00.00, Canada)
    • Dorota Babilas, Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’Opéra: Between the Gothic and Crime Fiction
    • Tsung-Han Tsai, ‘He keeps people alive’: War, Medical Ethics and Crime in E. M. Forster’s ‘Dr Woolacott’
    • Arthit Jiamrattanyoo, Singing Crimes, Rhyming News: Folksong Newsprint and the Rise of Sensationalist Mass Media in Siam, 1920s-1940s

Friday 3 March 13.00-14.30

Supernatural Horror Mysteries, 3 March 13.00-14.30, MCS 501/17

Chair: Mariaconcetta Costantini

    • Pamela K. Gilbert, When Horror Gothic Meets the Scientific Detective Story: Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘The House and the Brain’
    • Ruth Heholt, A Bird of Ill Omen: The ‘Mysteries’ Tradition, Real Life Crime, and the Gothic in the Pitch-Black Tales of Catherine Crowe
    • Shengyu Wang, Dangerous Corpses: Crimes of the Undead in Qing Dynasty Chinese Zombie Tales (14.00-15.30, China)

Gothic and Society in East Asian Film and Television, 3 March 13.00-14.30, MCS 501/13

Chair: Selki Noh

    • Ae-soon Choi, A Bizarre Variation of Korean Literature Films in the 1970s – A Mystery Surrounded by Islands, Shamans, and Legends
    • Jaejin Yu, The Fear in Modern Asia Society – Comparison of Japanese and Korea films of Yusuke Kishi’s Black House
    • Sang-hyon Nam, Anxiety and Fear created by the Loophole of Legal System in Modern Japanese Society – Japanese TV series Mr. Frog the Serial Killer (2020)

Criminal Sexualities and Gender in East Asian Cinema, 3 March 13.00-14.30, MCS 401/5

Chair: Linnie Blake

    • Carissa Foo, Crooked Women and P(r)etty Crimes: Lesbian Paradigms in Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden
    • Jerrine Tan, Moral Reckoning and Masculinity in Triad Films Andrew Lau’s Infernal Affairs and Martin Scorsese’s The Departed
    • Jiaying Sim, Access through Excess: The Somnambulist and the Scapegoat in Park Chan-Wook’s Decision to Leave

Friday 3 March 14.45-16.15

Genre Bending, 3 March 14.45-16.15, MCS 501/17

Chair: Fiona Peters

    • Ffion Davies, Tradition vs. Mode: Genre Hybridism in Crime Fiction
    • Sarah Olive, Textual Instability around Gendered and Sexual violence in Stephenie Meyer’s YA Vampire Fiction
    • Matthew Gurteen, Removing the Romance from Mr Rochester: How Jane Eyre’s Hero Becomes a Gothic Murderer in Adaptation (7.45-9.15, UK)

Crimes of the North, 3 March 14.45-16.15, MCS 501/13

Chair: Li-hsin Hsu

    • Aratrika Mandal, The Haunted Mountains and the Haunting Past: A Study of Gothic Spaces in Trapped
    • Mariaconcetta Costantini, Arctic Crimes and Ecogothic Anxieties in Fortitude: Rethinking the Roles of Humans and Nature in the Late Anthropocene
    • Laura Major, The Holocaust as Deus ex Machina: Excessive Gothic in The Crow Girl (9.45-11.15, Israel)

Nostalgia and Neoliberal Futures, 3 March 14.45-16.15, MCS 401/5

Chair: John Strachan

    • Linnie Blake, From the Kwangju Uprising to the Corporatized Present: The South Korean Serial Killer, Neoliberal Gothic and the Time Slip Phenomenon
    • Suriyaporn Eamvijit, The Hauntological Fifth Tiger: 90’s Nostalgia as Horror in Concrete Clouds (2013) and The Promise (2017)
    • Šarūnas Paunksnis, Haunted Neoliberalism and Posthuman Horror in India: A Case of 13B: Fear Has a New Address (9.45-11.15, Lithuania)

Beyond the Gothic, 3 March, 14.45-16.15 (8.45-10.15 Bamberg)

Chair: Vik Gill

    • Dorothea Flothow, Crime, Gothic and the Historical Novel – The Politicised Uses of Intergeneric Features in the Mid-Victorian Age (8.45-10.15, Austria)
    • Piotr Sobolczyk, Failed Crime Story or Gothic Art of Failure? Witold Gombrowicz between The Possessed and Cosmos (8.45-10.15, Poland)
    • Monika Vecerova, Gothic or Anti-Gothic? The Naturalist Monster in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) (8.45-10.15, Czech Republic)

Friday 3 March 16.30-18.00, MCS 9th Floor Hall

    • Keynote Address: Adam Knee, Crime and Gothic in Singaporean Cinema

DAY 3

Saturday 4 March 10.00-12.00

The Gothic and the Oriental, 4 March 10.00-12.00, MCS 501/17

Chair: Joseph Crawford

    • Peter J. Church, ‘If he was a highwayman, it was altogether the fault of the highways’: Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug (1839) Revisited through the Lens of the Newgate Crime Tradition
    • Ming Panha, A Dreadful-looking Creature: Uncanny Recognition of Interspecies Kinship at the Time of British Imperial Decline in ‘The Adventure of The Crooked Man’ (1893) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
    • Abhinaba Chatterjee, The ‘Supernatural’ India: A Study of Orientalism in Bithia Mary Croker’s ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’ (8.30-10.30, India)
    • Isaraporn Pissa-ard, The Gothic and the Oriental in Blanche d’Alpuget’s White Eye (online, Thailand)

Haunted Houses / Murder Houses, 4 March 10.00-12.00, MCS 501/21

Chair: Sarah Olive 

    • K. A. Laity, Detective Instinct: Duelling Amateur Sleuths in Crimson Peak (Friday 22.00-23.30, USA)       
    • Sylvia A. Pamboukian, Haunted-House Crime in Agatha Christie and Last Night in Soho (Friday 22.00-23.30, USA)

    • Amala Poli, Knowledge and the Uncanny in The Hound of the Baskervilles (Friday 22.00-23.30, Canada)
    • Kathleen Shaughnessy, What Lies Beneath the Island: Sleepless Society: Insomnia’s Gothic Ghosts (Friday 22.00-00.00, USA)

Crime, Gothic and Asian Literature, 4 March 10.00-12.00, MCS 401/18

Chair: Verita Sriratana

    • Nicole Kenley, ‘A Simple Brush of Skin’: Community, Outbreak, and Criminality in Hye-Young Pyun’s City of Ash and Red
    • Shweta Sachdeva Jha, Terror and Mystery in Postcolonial Fiction in Urdu: Ibn-e Safi and Crime Fiction (8.30-10.30, India)
    • Aparajita Hazra, Crime and the Supernatural: Reading the Gothic Undertones in the Crime Fiction of Hemendra Roy (8.30-10.30, India)
    • Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott, ‘Magic tricks, of course’: Gothic Conjuring in Japanese Honkaku Texts (3.00-5.00, UK)

Saturday 4 March 13.00-14.30

Feminist Noir: Victimhood, Corruption, Resistance, 4 March 13.00-14.30, MCS 401/18

Chair: Katarzyna Ancuta

    • Li-hsin Hsu, Gothic Hospitality and Blood Gold: Gift-Giving and Criminal Circulation in The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful (2017)
    • Verita Sriratana, The Girl and the “Gothic” Gun as a Feminist Noir beyond Feminist Noir: Framing Patriarchy, Necropolitics, Capitalism and Pathology of Violence
    • Haiqa Nowsheen and Jaya Shrivastava, “I had stepped back suddenly”: Failed Resistance through the Lens of Unreliable Narration and Gothic Metaphor in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora and The Healing (11.30-13.00, India)

Saturday 4 March 14.45-16.15

The Golden Age Mysteries, 4 March 14.45-16.15, MCS 501/17

Chair: Leonie Rowland

    • Chiho Nakagawa, Cozy Houses and Gothic Houses (16.45-18.15, Japan)
    • Kerstin-Anja Münderlein, The English Country Mansion: A Gothic Locus in Golden Age Crime Fiction (8.45-10.15, Germany)
    • Maysaa Jaber, Women as Black Angels in Cornell Woolrich’s Noir Fiction (10.45-12.15, Iraq)

Asian Gothic, Female Gothic, 4 March 14.45-16.15, MCS 501/21

Chair: Deimantas Valanciunas

    • Emily Farmer, The Unsustainable Existence of Women: Excess, Decay, and Grotesquery in Natsuo Kirino’s Grotesque ([2003] 2007)
    • Ivan Stacy, Dakinis and Femmes Fatales: Gendered Subversion of the Gothic in Dechen Roder’s Honeygiver Among the Dogs
    • Runa Chakraborty Paunksnis, The Monstrous Feminine: Chudails as Malefactors in Contemporary Hindi Films (9.45-11.15, Lithuania)

Domestic Gothic/Noir, 4 March 14.45-16.15, MCS 401/18

Chair: Dorota Babilas

    • Samantha Landau, Burn the Home, Banish the Ghosts: Crime and the Gothic in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (16.45-18.45, Japan)
    • Katharina Hendrickx, ‘My handsome, psychopathic husband’: The Gothic Heroine’s Struggle Against the Toxic Man in 21st Century Domestic Noir (7.45-9.45, UK)
    • Helen Goodman, Domestic Violence and Gothic Madness at the Margins of Criminality: The Law and the Coded Body from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to The Forsyte Saga