‘Casting Off’ was the third event of the Scottish Shores: Gothic Coastal Environments RSE workshop. It was a research symposium exploring relationships between Scottish literature, coastal environments, and the Gothic in regions of the globe beyond Scotland. For this event, we invited international and UK speakers to join Scottish Shores collaborators to share their research, and the event was open to wider online participation.
Over two evenings, we presented papers from nine scholars studying coasts in different national and regional contexts worldwide – from Scottish islands to Pacific islands, from African beaches to Irish seas, from beached bodies to Cornish shores.
Recordings for registered delegates are available here.
See our programme below or download it here (poster) and here (accessible):
Tuesday 6th December
7.45pm GMT – Introduction – Emily Alder
8pm GMT – Panel 1: The Global Coast (10 am HST/7 am AEDT)
Craig Perez Santos (University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa) – “Mapping Decolonial Gothic Coastlines in Pacific Islander Climate Literature”
Kevin Dawson (University of California, Merced) – “Waterscapes and Wet Bodies: Beach Culture in Atlantic Africa and the Diaspora, 1444-1888”
Daniel Cook (University of Dundee) – “Ecogothic Bodies Onshore: The Recovered Corpse Motif”
Wednesday 7th December
3pm GMT – Introduction & Panel 2: British & Irish (Gothic) Coasts
Darryl Jones (Trinity College Dublin) – “Ghosts, Coasts, and M. R. James”
Scott Brewster (University of Lincoln) – “The ‘Wide, Waste, Engulphing Ocean’: Irish Coastlines and Inland Seas”
Joan Passey (University of Bristol) – “Towards a Queer Gothic Ecology of the Coast: From Armadale to Armfield”
4.35pm – Break
5pm GMT – Panel 3: (Gothic) Scottish Shores & Scottish Diaspora (12pm CDT)
Carla Manfredi (University of Winnipeg) – “Copra Shores: Robert Louis Stevenson and Pacific Trade”
Alison Cathcart (University of Stirling) – “‘The Scattered Isles in The Polar Ocean’: Scotland’s Northern Shores in the Sixteenth Century”
Michael Morris (University of Dundee) – “Scotland and the Caribbean: Archipelagos and Atlantic Memory”
6.30pm – Break
6.40-7pm GMT – Closing Remarks – Emily Alder