I was recently contacted by Dr. Hannah Priest, who would like to spread the word about a werewolf-related conference happening in the UK this September. I’ll get out of the way and let Dr. Priest explain:
The conference is entitled She-Wolf: Female Werewolves, Shapeshifters and Other Horrors in Art, Literature and Culture (but She-Wolf for short). It’s on Thursday 9th – Friday 10th September 2010, at the University of Manchester, UK.
The conference is being run by myself, Dr. Hannah Priest (University of Manchester), and a final year PhD student, Carys Crossen. I recently completed a PhD on monstrous characters in medieval romance, and Carys is working on her thesis on post-1800 werewolves. The idea for the conference came when I was working on gender and werewolves in medieval texts. I was struck by the fact that all the werewolves I was looking at were male. As a big fan of Buffy and Ginger Snaps, I knew that there were female werewolves out there… and I thought it was about time people started talking about them.
Since I started planning the conference, there’s been a bit of a female werewolf invasion. A number of new books, TV series and films have appeared. So obviously I wasn’t the only person who noted their absence. As a sister-event to the conference, we’re going to have a discussion panel with some writers who are currently working with female werewolves (and vampires) in their own work, and we’ll be discussing the challenges and attractions of such female monsters.
At the conference itself, we’ll have papers on Terry Pratchett, Angela Carter and contemporary fantasy fiction – of course. But we’ve also got speakers lined up to talk about 1940s cinema, Roman literature and Scottish witchcraft narratives. It’s going to be a fascinating few days.
For information on registration, or to find out more about the event, you can contact Hannah Priest at hannah.priest@manchester.ac.uk
You can also visit the conference’s web site, where you’ll find a registration form and a programme of talks and speakers. Registration for students is £40 and £70 for everyone else. The deadline for getting your form in is 5:00 P.M. Friday, August 6th. If you’re in the area you should go; I know I would! See a summary of the programme after the jump– there’s some pretty cool stuff up for discussion.
These items are current as of this post and are subject to change. Check the conference web site for the most up-to-date programme.
Session 1: Monstrous Sexuality (Chair: Carys Crossen)
Tim Snelson (University of East Anglia): ‘Women Can Be Wolves Too’: The Cry of the Werewolf (1944), the Female Monster and the Contested Bodies of Wartime Women
Kerstin Frank (University of Heidelberg): Angela Carter’s Wolf-Girls: Power Struggles, Transformation and Gender in her Rewritings of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’
Eva Bru-Dominguez (University of Birmingham): Reclaiming Desire: the She-Wolf in Mercè Rodoreda’s Death in Spring
Museum Workshop:
Monstrous Material Culture (led by Sam Alberti and Bryan Sitch)
Session 2: Shapeshifting Sisters (Chair: Hannah Priest)
Linda McGuire (Independent Researcher): Magical Transformations: Owl Women and Sorcery in Latin Literature
Geoff Holder (Independent Researcher): Were-Cats, Were-Deer and Were-Whales: Female Shapeshifting in Scottish Witchcraft Narratives
Laura Wilson (University of Manchester): Dans Ma Peau: Shape-shifting and Subjectivity
Session 3: Of Otherness and Conformity (Chair: Linda McGuire)
Brian Feltham (University of Reading): Imagined Identities – The Woman in the Wolf Suit
Shannon Scott (University of St. Thomas): Lycanthropic Representations of Native Americans in Henry Beaugrand’s ‘The Werewolves’
Carys Crossen (University of Manchester): ‘The Complex and Antagonistic Forces that Constitute One Soul’; Religious Conviction versus Feminist Principles in Clemence Housman’s The Werewolf
Keynote Address: Peter Hutchings (Northumbria University)
The She-Wolves of Horror Cinema: Marginality, Transformation and Rage
Session 4: Fantasy and the She-Wolf (Chair: Brian Feltham)
Nickianne Moody (Liverpool John Moores University): Supernatural Hierarchies: The Place of Werewolves in the Paranormal Romance and Contemporary Urban Fantasy
Hannah Priest (University of Manchester): I Was a Teenage She-Wolf: Boobs, Blood and Chocolate
Jacquelyn Bent and Helen Gavin (University of Huddersfield): An Überwald Werewolf Howled in Patrician
Session 5: Creating the She-Wolf (Chair: Nickianne Moody)
Jazmina Cininas (RMIT University): The Girlie Werewolf Hall of Fame: Historical and Contemporary Representations of the Female Lycanthrope
Chantal Bourgault du Coudray (University of Western Australia): ‘You Should Write a Werewolf Screenplay’: Meeting the Challenge
Allison Moon (Independent Researcher): Courting the Lunatic Fringe: Shapeshifting at the Vanguard of Queer Activism and Post-Gender Feminism