Conference Programme
Phobia: The Phenomenology of Cultural Fear, 1789-Present
Friday May 8th and Saturday May 9th 2009
Friday May 8th
9.45-10.30: Registration and Coffee
10.30: Welcome (Professor Jeff Wallace)
10.45-12.00: Plenary Lecture
Professor Laura Otis
‘Terrifying Readers: The Scariest Moments in 19th-Century Literature’
12.00-12.45: Lunch
12.45-2.15: Panels A & B
Panel A
Fear of Illness and the Medical Encounter
1. Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys (Manchester): “Hydrophobia: The First Phobia”
2. Keir Waddington (Cardiff): “‘Wurst than the other sausages’: Fear, Nation and Sausages in Victorian and Edwardian Britain”
3. Joanne Winning (Birkbeck): “Fear in the Medical Encounter”
Panel B
Gothic Fears
1. Aishah Al-Shatti (Kuwait): “‘The bravest mind is capable of fear’: Fear and Masculinity in Joanna Baillie’s The Dream”
2. Amy Billone (Tennessee): “Phobia, Longing and the Gothic from 1789 to the Present”
3. Anthony Mandal (Cardiff): “Bibliophobia: Fear, Loathing and Textuality in Contemporary Gothic Fiction”
2.15-2.45: Tea
2.45-3.45: Panels C & D
Panel C
Claustrophobia and Closed Spaces 1
1. Katharine Cox (UWIC): “‘We are all haunted houses’: Spatial Phobia and the Threat to Textual Integrity in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000)”
2. Jo Croft (Liverpool John Moores), ““At Home She was in a Torture Chamber”: The Claustrophobic Dynamics of Adolescent Domestic Space”
Panel D
Anxiety and Creativity
1. Michael Rand Hoare (Royal Holloway): “Georg Büchner’s Lenz: A Landmark in the Literature of Psychosis”
2. Michaela Niculescu (Bucharest): “‘Doomed to Remain a Performer’: The Dynamic Aesthetics of Musical Experience and the Phobia of Disintegration at the Fin de Siècle”
3.45-5.15:
Phobia Workshop
Restoring Human Anxiety to its Central Role in Social Intelligence
1. Jeremy Coplan (SUNY –Downstate Medical Centre)
2. Jacob Sperber (Nassau University Medical Centre)
3. Markus Schwaninger (St. Gallen)
5.15-6.00: Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science Wine Reception
6.00-7.30: Organised Trip to Cardiff Bay
7.30: Dinner at Waterside Restaurant
Saturday May 9th
9.00-10.00: Panels E & F
Panel E
Fear, Excess and Destruction
1. Anna Maria Jones (Central Florida): “‘What should make thee inaccessible to my fury?’: Theorizing Fantasies and Phobias of Revenge in Caleb Williams”
2. Julia Skelly (Queen’s, Canada): “Addictaphobia: Fear, Closets and Visual Culture ”
Panel F
Claustrophobia and Closed Spaces 2
1. Andrew Mangham (Reading): “‘My Fancy Grew Charnel’: Phobia, Live Burial and the Victorian Gothic”
2. Minna Vouhelainen (Edge Hill): “‘Cribb’d, cabined, and confined’: Claustrophobia in Richard Marsh’s Urban Gothic Fiction”
10.00-10.30: Coffee
10.30-11.45: Plenary Lecture
Professor Andrew Thacker
‘Modern Spaces, Modern Phobias’
11.45-12.30: Lunch
12.30-2.00: Panels G & H
Panel G
Modernism, Urbanity and Spatial Phobias
1. Matthew Beaumont (UCL): “Ford Maddox Ford and the Aesthetics of Agoraphobia”
2. Ulrika Maude (Durham): “‘Spaces of Inky Darkness’: Platzangst in Elizabeth Bowen’s Fiction of the 1930s”
3. Laurence Scott (King’s College London): “The Petrified Sphinx: Female Deities and Gothic Villains in the Modernist Crisis of Woolf and Breton”
Panel H
Fear, Technology and Control Society
1. Hannah Abelbeck (Penn State): “Imaginary Lasers, Control Mechanisms, and the Subjectivity of Movers across Thresholds”
2. Neal Alexander (Nottingham): “‘everyone eyes everyone’: Surveillance, Paranoia, and Irony in Ciaran Carson’s Poetry”
3. Silvia Rodeschini (Bologna): “Bringing Hobbes up to Date: The Idea of Governing Fear through Fear”
2.00-2.30: Tea
2.30-4.00: Panel I & J
Panel I
Phobias and Fears on Film and TV
1. Susan Cahill (UCD): “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Fairy Tale?: Contemporary Fairy Tale Film”
2. Jim LeBlanc (Cornell): “The Acrophobe and the Funambulist: An Existential Phenomenological Look at Fear, Anxiety, and Postmodern Panic”
3. Emma Victoria Mason (Hull): “Fear and Slaying: An Apocalyptic Battle”
Panel J
Twentieth-Century War, Conflicts and Anxieties
1. Dennis Lensing (Wisconsin): “Mind Fear: The Threat of Thought in Cold War America”
2. John O’Neill (UCD): “Changing Anxieties in the Novels of J. G. Ballard”
3. Matthew Taunton (Open University): “Anarchophobia: The Structure of G. K. Chesterton’s Conservatism”
4.00: Thanks (Professor Andy Smith)
