Warning to the Curious: A Ghostly Online Conference

Romancing the Gothic presents its fifth annual online conference over two days - 23rd and 24th August. The conference celebrates 100 years of M. R. James' A Warning to the Curious and Other Stories with a series of talks, events, workshops, live readings and an author round table with Nghi Vo, Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Suzan Palumbo.

You can also get tickets here - https://buytickets.at/romancingthegothic/1707567 (we pay less fees)

The conference is designed to cover different timezones so the days are long. People are recommended to come for as long as they want. The talks and sessions are recorded so that you don't miss anything even if you can't be there in person for specific times/sessions.

Early Bird Tickets, Concessions and Free Tickets

There will be early bird discounts on tickets until 30th June 2025. Concession tickets are for students, the unwaged, retired people or anyone whose economic situation makes it necessary. We also offer a limited number of free tickets for those who cannot pay the ticket price, please email sam@romancingthegothic.com for more information. You can donate a ticket for those who are unable to afford to come.

Accessibility

We have live auto-generated captions. We provide slides and, where possible, scripts before the conference with alt-text for images. We have regular breaks and encourage people to take part in ways that are most comfortable for them. There is no forced participation.

If you have any accessibility needs, please get in touch at sam@romancingthegothic.com and I will do my best to make sure these accommodations are provided.

PROGRAMME

Saturday 23rd August

10.00 – 10.30 – Introductions

10.30 – 11.30 – Panel 1 – Jamesian Architecture (panel chair: Brontë Schiltz)

Octavia Cade - Opposite Architectures: The Jamesian Well as Inverted Lighthouse

Helen Grant – Lingering Memories of the Treasure: Abbot Thomas and the Steinfeld stained glass

11.30 – 11.45 – BREAK

11.45 – 12.45 – Keynote – Darryl Jones - A Warning to the Curious: ‘flying Time and all it had taken out of my life’

12.45 – 1.00PM – BREAK

1.00 – 2.30 – Writing Workshop – Mimi Manyin – ‘Summoning the Ghosts in Haunted Objects: A Study of MR James’ Ghost Stories and Crafting Cautionary Tales’

2.30 – 3.15 – LUNCH

3.15 – 5.05 – Panel 2 – Archives and Archaeology (Panel chair: Rebecca Stone Gordon)

Amy LeBlanc - Think about what you don't get to see: Ghosts, Archives, and Images in Leanne Shapton's Guestbook: Ghost Stories

Susan Maxwell - A Catalogue of Terrors: Archives, Fiction, and Archival Fiction

Mark P. Williams - ‘Excavating the ( )hole Complex: Re-reading M. R. James via Reza Negarestani; Or, The Chthonic Modernism of ‘Count Magnus’, ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ and ‘Mister Humphreys and His Inheritance’’

Tracy Hayes - Codicology releases Demons - The Antiquarian Gothic

5.05 – 5.15 – BREAK

5.15 – 7.00 – Panel 3 – Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Writers (Han O’Flanagan)

John Hartley - Streamlined with the spears of mysterious forces: anthologies of ghostly, supernatural and weird short fiction in the 1920s and 1930s

Stefanie Tegeler - Antiquarians in Frankenstein's Footsteps? Reading M. R. James's Characters as Gothic Mad Scientists

Kellie Miller - The Specter Speaks - the channeling of Feminine Voices in Victorian Ghost Narratives

Sontje Schulenburg - Overshadowed by M. R. James: The Supernatural Fiction of Eleanor Scott

7.00 – 7.15 – BREAK

7.15 – 8.45 - Panel 4 – Haunting Obligations: Political Ghost Stories (Panel Chair: Wade Newhouse)

Corinne Andersen – “She saw herself domesticated with the Horror”: a Comparative Analysis of Andrea Dworkin’s Right Wing Women and Edith Wharton’s “Afterward”

Beth Kusko – “Alone and Afraid: Hannah Arendt’s Understanding of Loneliness in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House”

Wade Newhouse – “Seeing Dead People: Haunted Spectatorship in Ghost Story and A Ghost Story”

8.45 – 9.00 – BREAK
9.00 – 10.00 – Cocktail and Mocktail hour with Julia O’Connell (original recipes inspired by M R James stories!)

Sunday 24th August

9.45 – 10.00 – Introductions

10.00 – 11.00 – Panel 5 – The History Behind the Tale (Panel Chair: Kasey Waite)

Lukasz Hajdrych – The dead speak?! The fear of wraiths in early modern Poland

Lily Bentley – Ghosts in the Courtroom: M. R. James’ ‘Martin’s Close’ and supernatural justice in Early Modern England

11.00 – 11.15 – BREAK

11.15 – 12.15 – Keynote - Zoë Lehmann Imfeld - MR James and Theology

12.15 – 12.30 - BREAK

12.30 – 2.00PM – Panel 6 – Language and the Ghostly (Panel Chair: Julie Larson)

Jenny Amos – I seen it wive at me: an exploration of dialect representations in M R James’ Suffolk characters

Susan Vanderborg – Porpentine’s Ghosts: Kenning the Bodies, Exhuming the Poems

David Oakey – A corpus-assisted exploration of reticence in The Collected Ghost Stories of M R James

2.00 – 3.00 – LUNCH

3.00 – 4.45 – Panel 7 – Sound and Senses (Panel Chair: Evan Hayles Gledhill)

Kendra Leonard – Sound and Music in M. R. James’ Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

Eptisum Laskar – Horror of the Mind, Horror of the Stomach: A Comparative Study of Supernatural Hunger in M. R. James and Bengali Ghost Stories

Alessandra Pino – You’ve Blown It Now: Who Is This Who Is Coming? Dark Memory and Dark Food in M.R. James’s Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad and Edgar Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute

4.45 – 5.00 – BREAK

5.00 – 6.15 – Workshop – ABS – A Wandering for the Curious - Ways to adventure playfully and make playful adventures

6.15 – 6.30 – BREAK

6.30 – 7.30 – Author Panel – Supernatural Short Fiction Today

Confirmed Guests: Suzan Palumbo, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Nghi Vo

7.30 – 8 – BREAK and Final Discussion

8.00 – 9.00 – Live Performance of 'A Warning to the Curious' with Robert Lloyd Parry