2016 Conference Schedule

CRSF 2016 is being held at the University of Liverpool on Monday 27th June, the planned schedule is as follows:

9:00-9:30: Registration and Refreshments

9:30-10:30: Keynote Lecture #1: Dr Caroline Edwards,
"But there is still such beauty”: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Eco-Eschatological Time in the 21st-Century

10:30 -12:00: First Round of Panels
1.1: Press START to Play
- Andrew Ferguson - Clipping Out of Bounds: Reading House of Leaves Through Portal
- Britanny Kuhn - Awaiting Title
- Ivaylo Shmilev - Oppression, Warfare and Transcultural Memory in the Complex Post- Apocalyptic Environments of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Game Series

1.2: Horrific Narratives
- Travis Gasque - The New Cosmic Horror: A Genre Molded by Tabletop Roleplaying Games and Postmodern Horror
- Matthew McCall - “My manez mynde to maddyng malte”: Tracing Horror in the Middle English Pearl
- Selena Middleton - Climate Collapse and the Uncontained Body in James Tiptree Jr.’s A Momentary Taste of Being

1.3: You’re Only Young Once
- Lan Ma - Censorship and Resistance: Information Control in Japanese Dystopian Young Adult Fiction in the 21st Century
- Alison Baker - Protocols for the education of young witches and wizards
- Arunima Dey - The Grotesque in the Harry Potter Series

12:00 -13:00: Second Round of Panels
2.1: Beasts and Bestiaries
- Rob O’Connor - ‘The History of All Hitherto-Existing Societies is the History of Monsters:’ The Bestiary and the Depiction of Monsters as Social Commentary
- Sandra Mänty - Representation and function of animals in the world of Harry Potter

2.2: The Greater Good
- Maxine Gee - “If something stinks put a lid on it, don’t see it”: Self-censorship and the brave new world of Psycho Pass
- Jonathan Ferguson - Crimes Against The Greater Good are Victimless Crimes?

2.3: Character Studies
- Beata Gubacsi - Monstrous Transformations: Becoming posthuman through art in Vandermeer’s Ambergris novels
- Matteo Barbagallo - Do we have a deal? Petyr Baelish, Varys, Rumpelstiltskin and their role as Doppelganger

13:00 -13:45: Lunch Break

13:45 -14:45: Keynote Lecture #2: Dr Patricia Wheeler
"She can’t love you, she’s just a machine": Metal-fevered Boys and their Passion for New Eves

14:45 -16:15: Third Round of Panels
3.1: Revenge of the Film
- Pablo Gómez Muñoz - Greening Apocalypse: Eco-Conscious Disaster in Twenty-First Century Science Fiction Cinema
- Josephine Swarbrick - Monstrous Men and Masculine Monsters: Gender and the Cyborg in Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop (1987) and José Padilha’s Robocop (2014)
- David Contreras - Gothic Surrealism in Mexican Cyberpunk Short Film: The Borderlands Strike Back

3.2: Theoretically Speaking
- Jo Lindsay Walton - The Dystopian Glimpse
- Artem Zubov - Science fiction studies and genre theory
- Pascal Lemaire - Fans of history first, fans of S-F more distantly ? Alternate History as a form of History’s fan fiction

3.3: Tell Me a Tale
- Kanta Dihal - Science and Religion in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials
- Rina Jean Baroukh - "Your Light Has Come" : Fantasy and Reality in Shimon Adaf’s Sunburnt faces
- Laura-Marie von Czarnowsky - Re-Defining the Bildungsroman: Traumatic Journeys as a Trend in Contemporary Fantasy Fiction

16:15 -16:30: Refreshment Break

16:30 -18:00: Fourth Round of Panels
4.1: Perceptions of the Female Self
- Sonya Dyer - aPOCalypso: Janelle Monae and (Science) Fictional Black Feminisms
- Sarah Lohmann - “Solar Loyalties”: The Utopian Ethics of Posthumanism in Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman
- Mylène Branco - The Construction of the Female Self in L.P. Hartley’s Facial Justice

4.2: Alternate Beings
- Tom Kewin - ‘A Society of Screens’: The State of Digital Surveillance and the Repercussions for the Humanist Subject
- Mattia Petricola - From mesmeric trance to living avatars: Rethinking consciousness and death after Mr Valdemar

4.3: Dystopian Time, Resurgent Space
- Gabrielle Bunn - Future Ruins: The intersection of nature and culture in the post-apocalyptic landscape of J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962)
- Hollie Johnson - Anarchy, Nostalgia, and Resistance: The Role of Nature in We, Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Thomas Connolly - “There was a thing called Heaven”: The end of time in Huxley’s Brave New World

18.00 -19.00: Post-Conference Wine Reception and Official Conference Group Photo

You can download a PDF of the schedule here.