Join Weird Fictions Research Group for the second lecture in the Weird Medicine series!
The meeting will be held online.

Laura Kremmel
(Niagara University)

Scared Sick: Medicine and the Gothic Tradition

Thursday, November 9, 2023
 5.30PM

You can get 2 OZN points for participating in this event.

Where?

This lecture will be streamed online. To attend, join via Zoom or paste the link into your browser: https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/j/95915693010

What?

Fear, uncertainty, and unease have been vital in shaping actions and attitudes towards health and healthcare both today and throughout the history of the Gothic as a literary tradition. It reflects and articulates those fears by providing a shared language and imagery to express and explore anxieties about our most important assets: our bodies and minds. This talk will be grounded in the foundational Romantic period and will explain ways in which Gothic works reflected some of the most controversial medical pursuits, playing out their possibilities and dangers. At the same time, medical writings and theories drew on Gothic images and aesthetics to develop understandings amongst both fellow professionals and public patrons.

This talk will also address the pandemic and the ways in which the Gothic and horror reflected and addressed our most recent fears. When the media shows us casualty numbers, horror confronts us with bodies. When contagion causes us to fear each other, it helps us to understand why. When isolation causes lasting impacts, it reminds of its dangers. Whether considering the medical innovations of today or the past, the Gothic is unafraid to recognize, even value, the darkest corners of the human body and mind.

Who?

Laura Kremmel is an assistant professor in the English Department at Niagara University, where she teaches 18th-and-19th-century British Literature and Gothic Literature. Her work explores the intersections of Gothic Studies, Health Humanities, History of Medicine, Disability Studies, and Death Studies. Her monograph, Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies, was published in 2022. She has also recently published chapters on Gothic Ecoburial in Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene (2022), on the ambivalent relationship between the Gothic and the Health Humanities in Twentieth-Century Gothic (2022), on contagious disease and fears of altering identity in Evolutions of Horror in the Twenty-First Century (2023), and on literary depictions of disparity and organ harvesting in the Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (2023).

 

Year 2024/2025

November 21: “House of Horrors: Familial Intimacies in Contemporary American Horror Fiction” Author’s Meeting

November 19, 2024

Join us on November 21, 2024 for an author’s meeting with Dr. Agnieszka Kotwasińska about her book “House of Horrors: Familial Intimacies in Contemporary American Horror Fiction” published last year by the University of Wales Press. Dr. Kotwasińska will be joined by Dr. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, and the event will be moderated by Dr. Jędrzej Burszta.

Year 2024/2025

November 20: ‘A Plane out of Phase’ – The Dark Continuance of the Gothic 1980s

November 19, 2024

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! 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.

Year 2024/2025

November 18: After the US Elections: The Futures of European Security and Transatlantic Cooperation

November 18, 2024

Together with Gazeta Wyborcza we are delighted to invite you to the whole-day conference “After the US Elections: The Futures of European Security and Transatlantic Cooperation” dedicated to the global and regional (CEE) impact of the results of the 2024 US presidential elections. We will try to parse through the scenarios regarding the relationship between the US and Europe, human rights and democracy worldwide, aid to Ukraine, and new global threats. The invited guests include President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, ASC professors, external policy experts, and journalists and editors from GW.

Year 2024/2025

November 14: Recruitment for the Student Chapter of the Gender/Sexuality Research Group

November 14, 2024

We are happy to announce that we are opening recruitment for the team coordinating the activities of the Student Chapter of the Gender/Sexuality Research Group at the ASC! This year, we would like to invite new members of the ASC community (and not only) to our team, in order to coordinate the next series of events and, above all, to make our space available to different classes of graduates at the BA and MA level.

News

The Office for Student Affairs will be closed on November 14.

November 13, 2024

We would like to kindly inform you that the Office for Student Affairs will, exceptionally, be closed on November 14. We apologize for the inconvenience.