Weird Fictions Research Group invites you to join for a fantastic (no pun intended) lecture by our guest, Dr. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn from Manchester Metropolitan University! Prepare yourself, for she will talk about dark and gothic things…
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
4.45 PM
You can get 3 OZN points for participating in this event.
Where?
Dobra 55, room: 2.118
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)
What?
This lecture asks you to consider the dark return of the Gothic 1980s in contemporary culture. Drawing upon ideas and examples of sequelisation, IP branding, apparatus theory, YouTube video curation, nostalgic programming, weird TV, and music, and the confluence of such forms in streaming series including Stranger Things and the current media adoption of Dark MAGA, this lecture invites you to examine the toxicity of the rhetoric of restorative projections and to query its undervalued reflective nostalgia as imagined onscreen to reclaim the future from the precarious dark present.
Who?
Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn is Reader/Associate Professor in Film Studies and American Studies, and a founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, at Manchester Metropolitan University. Ní Fhlainn has published widely in the fields of Gothic and Horror Studies and Popular Culture, specializing in monsters, subjectivity, and cultural history. She is the author of Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction and Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2019), winner of the 2020 Lord Ruthven Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. Recent articles and book chapters include Neoliberal Horror in Joker, and the Retro-1980s in Stranger Things, and the books Twentieth-Century Gothic, co-edited with Bernice M. Murphy (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), Visions of the Vampire (British Library, 2020, co-edited with Xavier Aldana Reyes) and Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer (Manchester University Press, 2017). She is the series co-editor of Multiplexities: Popular Screen Cultures with Manchester University Press and has recently curated and edited special issues of the journals Gothic Studies (July 2022) and Horror Studies (December 2022). In 2023/24, as a Fellow of the Harry Ransom Centre at University of Texas at Austin, her current research project is on the long 1980s onscreen and its unwritten Gothic history.
