40th Annual Conference of the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association
Worcester State University (Worcester, Massachusetts)
19-20 October 2018
Friday, 19 October at 2-3:15
Session 2: Frankenstein 1818 to 2018: 200 Years of Mad Scientists and Monsters I (S-205)
Chair: Saraliza Anzaldua (UCLA)
Frankenstein: A Personal History
Daniel Shank Cruz (Utica College)
Daniel Shank Cruz grew up in New York City and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of Goshen College (B.A.) and Northern Illinois University (M.A., Ph.D.) and is currently an Associate Professor of English at Utica College in upstate New York. Daniel is the author of Queering Mennonite Literature, which is forthcoming from Penn State University Press in spring 2019. He has also published articles on a variety of contemporary North American authors in journals such as Crítica Hispánica, Mennonite Quarterly Review, the Journal of Mennonite Writing, and the Journal of Contemporary Thought, as well as in several book collections. His research interests include the intersections between ethnic minority literatures (especially Mennonite literature and Latinx literature) and queer literatures, archiving, and the role of geographical space in literature.
Looking at Frankenstein: Ten Filmmakers Capture the Monster
James Osborne (College of Saint Rose)
James Osborne teaches writing and film in the Department of English at the College of Saint Rose, Albany, New York. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Arizona, an MA in English from Brooklyn College/CUNY, and a BA in English, with Dramatic Arts as a related field, from the University of Connecticut. His principal area of academic research is in adaptation studies, an interest explored in his dissertation, “Looking at Frankenstein: Ten Film Visions of Mary Shelley’s Novel, 1990-2015.” He lives in Albany, New York, with his wife Denise, a lecturer in Portuguese at the University at Albany.
Frankenstein and Transatlantic Monster Making in Robert J. Myer’s The Cross of Frankenstein (1975)
Matt Grinder (Union Institute and University)
Matt Grinder is a PhD Candidate at Union Institute and University where he studies literature and culture with an emphasis on Native American Literature. He also works as an English and Philosophy adjunct faculty member at Central Maine Community College.
Friday, 19 October at 3:30-4:45
Session 10: Frankenstein 1818 to 2018: 200 Years of Mad Scientists and Monsters II (S-205)
Chair: Marty Norden (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
New Adam, New Eve: The Brides of Frankenstein in Theodore Roszak’s Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (1986) and John Kessel’s Pride and Prometheus (2018)
Faye Ringel (U. S. Coast Guard Academy, Emerita)
Faye Ringel, the founder of the Fantastic Area, is Professor Emerita of English at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, CT, having taught in the Department of Humanities for 25 years. She directed the Honors Program and taught the Honors Colloquium, composition and literature. After retiring from CGA, she taught British Literature at UConn Avery Point. Faye holds an A.B. in Comparative Literature from Brandeis University and doctorate in Comparative Literature from Brown University. She is the author of New England's Gothic Literature: History and Folklore of the Supernatural (E. Mellen Press, 1995) and articles in scholarly encyclopedias, collections, and journals, including a chapter in The Cambridge Companion to the American Gothic (2017) edited by Jeffrey Weinstock. Faye is a long-time NEPCA member and presenter, and she has published articles and presented conference papers on (among many other subjects) New England vampires, urban fantasy, demonic cooks, Lovecraft, King, Tolkien, Yiddish folklore, and sea music.
Frankenstein’s Justine Moritz: The Female Monster and Her Body
Saraliza Anzaldua (UCLA)
Saraliza Anzaldua, a frequent presenter in the Fantastic Area, is a teratologist with a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Texas, Dallas and an M.A. in English Literature from National Taiwan University. She is currently a doctoral student with the philosophy department of UCLA. Her work is devoted to promoting teratology as a framework for social theory and moral inquiry. She also studies Chinese social philosophy, and Japanese martial philosophy.
Saturday, 20 October at 8-9:15
Session 18: Fantastic I: Deciphering Disney: Heroes and Villains in Fantastic Films of the Walt Disney Company (S-205)
Chair: Amie Doughty (SUNY Oneonta)
Merlin Knows Best: Patterns of Masculine Identity in Disney’s Animated Fantasies
Michael A Torregrossa (Independent Scholar)
Michael A. Torregrossa is a graduate of the Medieval Studies program at the University of Connecticut (Storrs). He is founder of both the Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain and the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture and is the outgoing Fantastic (Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror) Area Chair for NEPCA. His research interests include adaptation, Arthuriana, comics and comic art, medievalism, monsters, and wizards, and his presentation builds upon his previous studies on Merlin included in Film & History and The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy.
Girls who are BRAVE: Young Women Warriors of the Spiritual Realm
June-Ann Greeley (Sacred Heart University)
June-Ann Greeley, PhD, is an associate professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. She is also a board member of the Women's Studies Program and Director of the Middle Eastern Studies Program at SHU. June-Ann also chairs the “Belief” area of NEPCA.
Horror in Disney: Mob Mentality and Ideology in Beauty and the Beast (1991) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)
Kellie Deys (Nichols College)
Kellie Deys is an Associate Professor of English at Nichols College. She chairs the English Department and the College’s Writing-Across-the-Curriculum program. She recently launched a Gender and Diversity Studies program. Her teaching and research interests include: Cultural Studies, Composition, Gender and Body Studies, Young Adult Literature, and Victorian Literature. Kellie has published on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, celebrity culture, and practical applications of Freire’s problem-posing method.
Saturday, 20 October at 9:30-10:45
Session 21: Fantastic II: Heroes Reborn: New Models of Heroism in Fantastic Fiction (S-205)
Chair: Sharon Yang (Worcester State University)
The Librarians, Flynn Carsen, and the Aesthetics of Heroism
Nova Seals (Salve Regina University)
Nova Seals, a frequent presenter in the Fantastic Area, is a PhD candidate in Humanities at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island. Nova is the Director of the Library and Archives at St. George’s School, an independent preparatory school in Middletown, Rhode Island where she also teaches philosophy courses. Her academic and research interests are philosophy, technology and aesthetics. Nova is particularly interested in how groups of people use technology, especially social media, to learn and transform artistic knowledge.
A More Feminine Way of Being: Growth and Aging in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu (1990) and The Other Wind (2001)
Kathleen Healey (Worcester State University)
Kathleen Healey is an Adjunct Professor of English at Worcester State University. She is the editor with Sharon Healy-Yang of Gothic Landscapes: Changing Eras, Changing Cultures, Changing Anxieties. Her interests include Gothic literature, American literature, fantasy, and science fiction, as well as the relationship between literature and the visual arts.
Decentering Monsterhood: John M. Ford’s The Last Hot Time
Angela Gustafsson Wyland (Southern New Hampshire University)
Angela Whyland graduated in 2017, with a MA in English Literature from Southern New Hampshire University, and has past degrees in Fashion Merchandising, Business Administration and Interdisciplinary Studies. In 2017, she was honored to have her MA thesis accepted for presentation by the Minnesota Teaching Conference on Writing and English and a paper on subversive colonial feminine captivity novels accepted for a panel at the annual National Women’s Studies Conference. Also that year, Angela presented a paper on “Spinning Threads: Fantasy and Reality in George MacDonald’s The Princess and Curdie” at the “North American Society for the Study of Romanticism” in Ottawa, CA, and her essay on “Schwab’s Imaginary Ethnographies: A Student’s Wanderings through Familiar Literary Texts and the Development of New Subjectivities” was published in “Dream & Reality”, a special issue of Acta Iassyensia Comparationis, an international journal of comparative literature. Recently, her essay on “The Role of the Fool within Dystopian Spaces,” which looks at the SF/F writer Steven Brust’s novel Vallista, was published in the 2018 volume of St. John’s University Press Humanities Review.
Reluctant Royals: Reading Royalty in YA Fantasy
Amie Doughty (SUNY Oneonta)
Amie Doughty, another veteran of the Fantastic Area, is a professor of English SUNY Oneonta and teaches children’s lit, fantasy, linguistics and composition. She is also Children’s and YA Lit and Culture Area Chair for PCA/ACA. Amie is the author of two monographs and the editor of a collection of essays. She works with both children’s and YA literature and urban fantasy and is currently working on a project about royalty in children’s and YA literature.
Saturday, 20 October at 11-12:15
Session 29: Fantastic III: Horrific Spaces (S-205)
Chair: Faye Ringel (U. S. Coast Guard Academy, Emerita)
A Realm for the Reanimated: The Magnificent Nightmare of Dr. Porter and Prof. Poe and Their Attempts to Raise the Dead in Victorian New England
Michael J. Bielawa (The Barnum Museum)
Award-winning author Michael J. Bielawa’s explorations have taken him to the Northeast's most exotic, and mysterious, places. He is the author of numerous articles and five books, including Wicked Bridgeport (which received the first-ever New England Paranormal Literary Award) and Wicked New Haven. Bielawa has discussed Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein on NPR and brought Connecticut’s unique folklore to light on WABC-TV affiliate programs, Good Morning Connecticut and Connecticut Style. Mike has written for Major League Baseball (about abandoned 19th century ballparks), Connecticut Magazine (“The Lost Treasure of Seaside Park”) and London’s Fortean Times (“Barnum and the World’s Greatest Ghoul”); forthcoming works include an essay in the Autumn 2018 issue of The Edgar Allan Poe Review. Mike has shared his research with radio audiences on WCBS, WABC-AM, and WPLR-FM, and he celebrated New Haven’s 17th century “Phantom Ship” when he created the 4-story-tall illuminated art installation, “The Persistence of Legend.” Mike is an ongoing lecturer and consultant for The Barnum Museum ,and he has lectured about Jackie Robinson for the NEA. His dedication to preserving New England history has been covered by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
American Mythology and Mythopoeia: Blackwood and Lovecraft
Russell Brickey (Youngstown State University)
Russell Brickey holds an MFA and PhD from Purdue University, and he is currently an instructor at Youngstown State University. Russell’s publications include a number of scholarly, journalistic, and creative works, including a reader’s guide to Sharon Olds and two books of poetry.
Childhood as Landscape in The Village of the Damned (1960)
Heather Flyte (Lehigh University)
A second-year presenter in the Fantastic Area, Heather Flyte joined Lehigh University in 2018 as a doctoral student in English literature. She will be focusing on Victorian literature, print culture, and science fiction. She earned her Master’s Degree in English Literature from Kutztown University, and her thesis investigated the transference of Victorian values in the translation of Japanese fairy tales. She presented at the 2017 Northeastern Popular Culture Association conference at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, on The Princess Bride and psychoanalytic theory. She is a non-traditional student who has previously worked in journalism and web development
Mash-Ups and Moral Philosophy: An Approach towards Combining Ethics and Zombie Studies
Bryan Hall (St. John’s University)
Dr. Bryan Hall is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St. John’s University. Bryan received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 2005, and he is a two-time Fulbright scholar and author of two books on the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In a slight departure from his previous research, Bryan is now working at the intersection of Ethics and Zombie Studies and shares some of this work today.
Saturday, 20 October at 1:45-3
Session 37: Fantastic IV: Making Monsters (S-205)
Chair: Don Vescio (Worcester State University)
Gender, Trauma, & the Domestic in Exorcism Novels
Bridgit Keown (Northeastern University)
Bridget Keown is a Ph.D. candidate at Northeastern University (Boston, MA), who received her BA from Smith College and her MA in imperial and commonwealth history from King’s College London. Her work focuses on British and Irish women and their experience of war trauma during the First World War and Irish War of Independence, and Bridgit has been awarded the Larkin Research Fellowship in Irish Studies from the American Conference for Irish Studies to continue this research. During the summer of 2017 she contributed guest blogs for the American Historical Association as one of two AHA Today Blog Contest winners, and you can read her postings at http://blog.historians.org/2017/06/gendered-treatments-trauma-first-world-war/. Bridget is also currently a contributing writer to Nursing Clio; her posts can be accessed at https://nursingclio.org/author/bkeown/.
More Than Human: A Crip Theoretic
Christopher Ketcham (University of Houston Downtown)
Chris Ketcham earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He teaches risk management and ethics for The University of Houston Downtown. His interests, however, go beyond business and into the philosophy of the uncertain and mysterious through film and popular culture. Chris has explored Ridley Scott’s Insomnia through Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of responsibility, and he has analyzed Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener through the eyes of the American work ethic through the question: do we work to live, or live to work? Chris’s other forays into popular culture include analyses of the television series Downton Abbey, Orange is the New Black, Orphan Black, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Adventure Time, Mr. Robot, and The Man in the High Castle. He has also written about philosophy and Deadpool, Jurassic Park, Superman and Batman, Dracula, and Frankenstein.
Project Alice: Ultimate Woman Warrior or Frankenstein’s Monster in the Resident Evil Film Series
Kristine Larsen (Central Connecticut State University)
Dr. Kristine Larsen, a veteran of the Fantastic Area, is Professor of Astronomy at Central Connecticut State University. Her teaching and research focus on issues at the boundary between science and society, including science ethics, science and gender, the history of women in science, and scientific motifs in popular media. She is the author of Stephen Hawking: A Biography, Cosmology 101, and the 2017 volume The Women Who Popularized Geology in the 19th Century, as well as the co-editor as The Mythological Dimensions of Doctor Who and The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman. Her complete CV can be found at http://www.ccsu.edu/astronomy/larsencv.html.
Saturday, 20 October at 3:15-4:30
Session 45: Fantastic V: New Insights into Science Fiction (S-205)
Chair: Kristine Larsen (Central Connecticut State University)
Daddy Issues: David in Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017)
Leslie Stratyner (Mississippi University for Women)
Leslie Stratyner is a full professor of English at Mississippi University for Women. She teaches various ancient and medieval literatures, as well as composition and survey courses.
Indigenous Aliens: Science Fiction and Native America
Meredith James (Eastern Connecticut State University)
Meredith James is an Associate Professor at Eastern Connecticut State University. Her specialties include Indigenous/Native American Studies and American Studies.
Bridging Realities: Time Travel in A Wrinkle in Time
Don Vescio (Worcester State University)
Don Vescio, a frequent presenter in the Fantastic Area, is a faculty member of Worcester State University’s Department of English. After serving ten years as Worcester State’s Chief Information Office/Vice President of Information Technologies and two years as Vice President of Enrollment Management and Marketing, Don now focuses his energies on teaching undergraduate and graduate students in a variety of disciplines. His research interests are in critical theory, narratological analysis, and information design.
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