Conference Programme

22nd March-26th March 2021

This virtual symposium will be hosted over Microsoft Teams and all presentations will be available asynchronously. Please watch the presentations in your own time and use the channels to ask questions and interact with presenters and fellow attendees. The presentations will be available from the 22nd March. The 26th March will be a live session of panels and activities. You can register via our website here. Full abstracts are available here.

1. Beaches and Shores

Ursula Kluwick
Mediterranean Beaches as Haunted Landscapes in Narratives of Violent Displacement

Rachel M. Friars
“White snakes of sea-foam”: Coastal Boundaries and Lesbian Spectrality in Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines

Matthew Wynn Sivils
The Spectral Shoreline of Henry Beston’s The Outermost House

Clare Slack
Foulness Island: Scarelore and the Eerie in an Isolated Coastal Landscape

Catherine Howe-Evans
The Anorexic Logic of the British Seaside

Katy Shaw
The Presence of Absence: Missing Children in Littoral Literatures of Contemporary Britain

2. The Caribbean

Ellen Howley
“the ghostly sound / of waves”: Encountering the Past in Derek Walcott’s Omeros and “The Schooner Flight”

Giulia Champion
Caribbean Coasts and Colonial Ghosts

Sara Crouch
The Woman of Colour, A [Gothic] Tale: Liberty, Trauma, and Migration in the Eighteenth-Century Gothic

3. Cornwall

Virginia Richter
A Grave for Fish: the Haunted Shore in Wyl Menmuir’s The Many

Beth Howell
“Beyond it lay the ghostly, the intangible:” Tracking the skeleton of the Isles of Scilly’s gothic literary legacy in the archipelagic work of Bram Stoker, Thomas Hardy, and Daphne du Maurier

Simran Dhingra 
Cornish Coast as a repository of horror, smuggling and patriarchal clutches:  Reading Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn

Indu Ohri
“Their Friend, The Third Part of their Lives”:Reconstructing Lost-at-Sea Narratives in Mary Butts’s Ghost Stories

4. The Long Nineteenth Century

Talitha Slabbert
Joseph Conrad’s Haunted Seashore

Amy Ainsworth
Alfred Döblin’s Nature as Secret in Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter

Janice Niemann
Wood’s Shores and Genres: Subversive Settings in Ellen Wood’s The Red Court Farm

Jordan Welsh
Nautical Tragedies: Coleridge’s “Mariner” and Hopkins’ “Wreck”

5. The Non-Human

Charles Paxton
Sea serpents and giant gooseberries: the changing reality of sea monsters in the 19th century

Lucy Arnold
Beaches of Bones: Non-Human Hauntings and Littoral Legacies of Animal Cruelty in Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter

Juliana Amir
Conscious and Unconscious Fears: the ecogothic, the nonhuman, and the shore

Jennifer Schell
The Trouble with Ecogothic Wilderness: The Extinction Stories of the Great Auk and Steller’s Sea Cow

6. Scotland and the North

Kristy Strange
Coastal Hauntings: Examining the disposal of feminine bodies and the fight to reclaim narrative and corporeal authorship within coastal spaces in Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock 

Camilio Peralta
Horror in the Hebrides: The Scottish Coast in the Gothic-Conservative Imagination of Johnson, Waugh, and Kirk

Rachel Hill
“But Which Self?” Antarctica’s Fluctuating Shorelines and the Ice-Sea Gothic

Barbara Franchi
Gothic Hauntings and Uncanny Resurfacings in Sarah Moss’s Bodies of Light and Night Waking

7. The Romantics and Romanticism

Sophia Moellers
Where Past and Present Collide: Haunted Seascapes and Gothic Exile in Godwin’s Deloraine

Madeline Potter
‘A Fiery Ocean’: An Oceanic Geography of Damnation in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer

Liz Wan
Seashore Suicide and Spectrality in Mary Shelley’s Matilda

Roslyn Irving
Ann Radcliffe’s Coastal Spirit, Trapped in The Romance of the Forest (1791)

8. Seas & Waters

Steven Burke
Entering the ‘mighty Orinoco’: Coastal Encounters in British post-Napoleonic travel writing

Dorka Tamas
The Haunting Presence of the Father in Sylvia Plath’s Waters

Morgan Daniels
Ghosts of Electricity

Chantelle Mitchell and Jaxon Waterhouse
The Shores of an Inland Sea: the Eromanga and the ur-haunting of the once-coastal

Octavia Cade
The Ghosts of Coastlines Past: Eco-Poetry and the Oceanic Ecological Gothic 

9. Visual Cultures

Tosha R. Taylor
Littoral Haunting and Body Horror in Lisa Brühlmann’s Blue My Mind

Gavin Davies
‘My body may be present, but my soul is on the beach’: Collective isolation and the videogame Death Stranding (2019)

Brandyn Whittaker
‘There is Enchantment in the Light:’ An EcoGothic Study of Lighthouses in Video Games

Live Session: 26th March

All times in GMT.

Note on attendance: We are very sensitive to the unique demands of working from home during the pandemic. We welcome pets, children, interruptions, taking time away from the screen, the postman knocking on the door, and eating lunch, dinner and snacks during the live sessions (on mute!) Please feel free to attend one, some, or all of the sessions. We look forward to your insights and contributions.

10.00am: Roundtable
Chair: Jimmy Packham

A panel of researchers share their experiences working on the littoral Gothic.

11.00am: The Future of the Network

Join us to reflect on the network, share ideas, and consider possible opportunities for future events and projects.

14.00pm: PGR and ECR Reading Group

A reading group for idea exchange for postgraduate researchers and anyone who defines themselves as an early career researcher.

17.00pm: Methods and Practice 
Chair: Emily Alder

A showcase of researchers working on collaborative projects, the public humanities, and creative practice.

David Williams
The Melancholy Menace of Their Tone: The Ghost Story As Coping Mechanism

Catherine Spooner
Sunder-land: coastal disturbances and the legacies of slavery

Claire Connolly, Rita Singer and James L. Smith 
Interpreting Gothic Strangeness and Tragedy at the Coast in Public Humanities Storytelling