Thursday:
Board meeting: Dinner at 6:00 at the P.J Harrigan’s (hotel restaurant); meeting to follow
Friday:
8:30-9:45
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Engaging Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Theoretical and Literary
Interventions: Materialist, Transnational, Queer, and Postcolonial Feminist Perspectives on
Labor and the Environment
o Aishah Alreshoud, Susan Comfort, Sheila Farr, Lauren Shoemaker
Graphically Gothic
o Christina Elvidge: “Happily Ever After: The Doomed Aristocracy of Jane Austen’s
Persuasion”
o Michael Cox: “Graphic Horror & Provocative Depiction from Bernie Wrightson's
Graphic Pen: ‘Jenifer’”
o Nicole Batchelor: “Erotic Suffering in Julia Gfrorer's Black Is the Color”
Televised Terror
o Renae Applegate House: “The Walking Dead: Contemporary Monster Lore and the
Post-Christian Narrative”
o Robert F. Kilker: “Gods and Monsters: Reframing Religion in 21st Century Doctor
Who”
o Jennifer N. Tabor: “Beautiful Violence and The Walking Dead: Channeling Flannery
O’Connor’s Philosophy of Violence as a Force of Change”
o Stephen Zimmerly: “The Need for Humanity Amidst the Horror: Spike Stoker and
His Relationship with Thursday Next”
9:55-11:10
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The Horror! The Horror!: Pedagogy and Literature
o John Marsden: “Teaching Law and Literature in the Undergraduate Classroom”
o Sandy McChesney: “Deconstructing the Perceived Horror of Freshman English
Literature: A Pedagogical Approach to Student Progression from Abhorrence to
Appreciation in Fifteen Bloodless Weeks”
o Dibakar Pal: “Of Scholarly Writing and Creative Writing (an Avant-Garde
Approach)”
o Gerald Siegel: “Teaching the Living Dead: Bringing Pre-Zombie Fiction to the
Classroom”
Popular Supernatural Culture Topics
o Alyce Baker: “Gothic Sensibilities in Ransom Riggs’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar
Children and Hollow City”
o Fabrizio Cilento: “Where Do Zombies Get the Blues: Love and Supermodernity in
Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies”
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o Amanda Scheibner: “Buffy’s Significant ‘Others’: Riley and Spike in Buffy the Vampire
Slayer”
o Amy Williams Wilson: “Sookie, Sucking, and the Savior: The Belongingness
Postulation Regarding Why Humans Crave Vampires”
Female Subjects of Horror
o Meghan Carlton: “Girl on (Last) Girl Violence: Or, Why Jennifer's Body is not a
Feminist Horror Film”
o Katherine Lashley: “Accepting Blindness in Cherie Priest's Bloodshot”
o Tammie Merino: “Angela Carter’s “Company of Wolves”: Navigating Desire in a
Predatory Culture”
o Rebecca Willoughby: “#YesAllWomen and The Exorcism of Emily Rose: Skepticism as
Activism”
11:20-12:35
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Exorcising and Monstrous Mothers
o M. Suzanne Harper: “The Exorcist: The Devil Made Her Do It”
o T. Madison Peschock: “Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart: A New HBO
Documentary that Examines Smart’s Murder Trial and the Effects and
Consequences Media Coverage has on the Judicial System”
o Erika Rothberg: “What the Hell to Expect When You're Expecting: An Examination
of Demonic Pregnancies in Horror Literature and Film”
o Dana Washington: “When Mother Nature is the Monster: If This is so Scary, Why
are we Laughing?”
Awakening the Dead (Students): Writing Pedagogy
o Chuck de Wald & Eileen Morgan: “All you Zombies: Awakening Student
Engagement in the Wake of NCLB”
o Michal Horton: “Expanding Burke’s Human Rhetoric: Teratology as Response to
Technology”
o Angelique Medvesky: “Teaching the Developmental Student in Freshman
Composition”
o David von Schleichten: “Psychotic-Bunny Writing Instructor: Haunted House as
Paradigm in Composition Classes”
Mommy, Where do Vampires Come From?
o Sharon M. Gallagher: “Frankenstein Meets Varney the Vampire; or, Considering the
Influence of Mary Shelley on James Malcolm Rymer”
o Melissa Powell: “The Sublime and Beautiful in Dracula: How the Collective
Unconscious Evokes Fear”
o Marijana Stojkovic: “Society and the Vampire: The Discriminating Premise of the
Other in Anglo-American Literature”
12:40-1:55
Lunch and Keynote Speakers: John Russo and Russ Streiner
2:00-3:15
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Listening and Lovecraft
o Peter Cullen Bryan: “Hawthorne, Lovecraft, and King Walk Into A Peculiar Little
Town: The Particular American Horror of the Small Town”
o Ryan Haggerty: Audio Book: HP Lovecraft
o Paul Ruben: “Audiobook Narration: How Storytellers Connect the Author’s Voice
to Listeners”
Speaking Through the Dead: Who Are These Ghosts That Haunt Us?
o Alyssa Bersine, Cameron Contois, Andrea Wuorenmaa
Fantastic Literature Scholarship
o Stan Hunter Kranc, Stephen Messimer, Michelle A. Shade, Chip St. Clair
3:25-4:40
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Fragments and Fiction: Novels and Stories
o Bim Angst: “‘Burrs’: Original Short Fiction”
o Michael Cox: “Interlude: A Child Is Born”
o Michael Hyde: “‘Page Missing’: In the Gothic Tradition of Found Fragments”
o Grace Sikorski: “The Gatehouse”
The Horror of the Real: Zizek in Popular Culture
o Carol Fox, Whitney Sandin, Hannah Talbot, proj
Movie: Night of the Living Dead followed by Q&A with John Russo and Russ
Streiner (free for conference registrants)
7 p.m.
Saturday:
8:30-9:45
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Spaces for Ghosts
o Marwa Aldaraweish: “Transforming the Function of Souls: Death in TwentiethCentury American Poetry”
o Carly Dunn: “‘A house that belonged to ghosts’: Spirits, Ghosts, and the Gothic in
Molly Keane’s Big House Novels”
o Maureen Gallagher: “Ghosts, Doppelgangers, and Lyric Subjectivity in Elizabeth
Robinson’s Post-Language Poetry”
o Nicole Burkholder-Mosco: “Visions and Vastations: Henry James, William James,
and Subversions of the Real”
“They’re Coming to Get you, Barbara”: All Things Zombie
o Emmanuel Abreu: “‘They're Us, That's All’: Zombies and the Horror of Familiarity”
o Maryann Di Edwardo: “Zombies as Archetypes of the Masculine and Feminine
Inspire Creative Non-Fiction Writers and Poets”
o Laura Eldred and Kathryn Skutlin: “‘That Was More than a Heartbeat’: The
Reversion to Traditional Gender Norms in Post-Romero Zombie Narratives”
o John M. Ulrich: “World War Z and the Geopolitics of the Zombie”
9:55-11:10
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Frightful Films
o Tom Bierowski: “James Dickey's Deliverance: Penetration and the Ultimate Patriarchal
Nightmare”
o Edward Tabor: “The Suburban House as Para-Site: The Terrible House in Oren
Peli’s Paranormal Activity”
o Noel Sloboda: “Undead Shakespeare: Art, Authority, and Authorship in Jim
Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive”
o Adam Wassel: “Witnessing a Witness: Kurt Gerstein in Costa-Gavras's Amen”
Weeping and Wailing: Reading Cultured and Gendered Bodies
o Lawrence Evalyn: “Distant-Reading Gendered Gothic Motifs”
o Itzi Meztli: “La Llorona, or The ‘Weeping Wailer,’ in Mexican American Culture:
How Supernatural Horror Literature Reinforces Social-Cultural Taboos”
o Tyler Roeger: “Civil Sensationalism: The Gothic Body in Antebellum Slave
Narratives”
o Rod Taylor: “Assimilating Performance: African-American Abolitionists”
11:20-12:35
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Scary Scribes: Stories, Memoirs, and Poems
o Tom Bierowski: Two Scary Short-Short Stories
o Catherine Cox: “To Return Again to Where I am: A Narrative of South Africa”
o Marjorie Maddox: “Horror and Hope in the Headlines: A Reading of Local News from
Someplace Else”
o Antonio Vallone: “Tweets and Twerks: a Poetry Reading”
Forms, Spaces, and Experiences of Student-Faculty Scholarship
o Jessica Beard, Adam Haley, Ben Rowles, proj
12:45-2:00
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Publish or Perish: A chat with the Pennsylvania English staff (Dead and Alive)
o Jess Haggerty, Jon Marsden, Tony Vallone, Michael Cox, Ryan Haggerty, Jackie
Atkins
Dissecting Good and Evil
o Salvador Ayala: “A Wild Sulfurous Lustre: Light and Color in Poe’s Gothic Tales”
o John Branscum: “The Horrors of Being: Nameless Animal Bodies in the Pet Stories
of Lisa Tuttle, Joyce Carol Oates, and Patricia Highsmith”
o Amanda Lagoe: “Constructing Evil through Narrative Distance in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula”
o Laura Rutland: “The Supernatural and Levels of Power in Charles Williams’s War in
Heaven and ‘The Greater Trumps’”