The IUP Literature and Criticism program was well-represented at the recent Festival of Monsters conference hosted by the University of California Santa Cruz’s Center for Monster Studies, October 16–18.
Monster Studies is an emergent and rapidly growing interdisciplinary field that focuses on the role that monsters play in art and culture. Reflecting this diverse focus, conference panels explored such topics as the relationship between monstrosity and environment, the representation of ethical monstrosity in contemporary Black American and African literature, monsters and monstrosity in videogames and tabletop roleplaying games, and monsters and horror in photography and dance, among many other topics.
Five current and former members of the Literature and Criticism community presented work at the conference. Mike Sell presented an argument for approaching monsters from the first-person perspective, using horror-themed tabletop roleplaying games as his illustration. Recently minted PhD Zebadiah Kraft presented his scholarship on recent shifts in the way zombies are represented in horror films. Among current L&C doctoral students was Avalon Manly, who presented on “the transformative uncanny of fungal horrors” in recent videogames and television series; Emily Hicks, who analyzed the representation of Black heroism in Jordan Peele’s film Nope; and Kaylyn Zamierowski, whose paper on the representation of monstrous madness and women’s anger in David Cronenberg’s body-horror classic The Brood was presented by Sell due to scheduling conflicts.
While IUP doesn’t yet have its own center for monster studies, it’s evident that significant work on monsters and monstrosities is happening here.