Program

Light Breakfast, Registration, Mingling

Welcome Address

Charles Exley, Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures, Associate Director of the Film and Media Studies Program

The Most Fun You’ll Ever Have Being Scared: The Undead on TV

Moderator: Neepa Majumdar, Department of English

• Pat Bonner (Concordia University), “Re-Animating Youth and Commercialism: William Fruet, Goosebumps, and Canadian Children’s Horror Television”
• Heather Myers (West Virginia University), “Dealing with the Dead: Subversion and Sexuality in Lost Girl”
• Miles Taylor (Concordia University), “Scary Monsters and Super Creeps: The Revival of the Soap Opera in Twin Peaks: The Return”

The Dead Have Waited: Race and the Body

Moderator: Nancy Condee, Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures

• Aanchal Saraf (Yale University), “Zombies of the Pacific: Racialized Abjection, Nuclear Ruin, and the Interiority of the Walking Dead in the Marshall Islands”
• Jazmine R. Hudson (Georgia State University), “Phantom Blackness”

Why Are the Good People Dying?: Genre, Identity, and the Family

Moderator: Kun Qian, Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures

• Tamas Molnar (Concordia University), “Life Defined Through Death: Subjectivity, Identity Politics and Self-Actualization in Santa Clarita Diet”
• Geneveive Newman (University of Pittsburgh), “Fungal Zombies, Tentacular Thinking: Reclaiming the Chthonic Archaic Mother in The Last of Us”
• Lauren Milici (West Virginia University), “Sometimes Dead is Better: The Terror of Grief in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary”

A Conversation with Monika Estrella Negra

Inspired by Romero: A Shorts Block

Light Breakfast, Mingling

They Won’t Stay Dead!:Reanimation/Remediation

Moderator: Adam Hart, Film and Media Studies Program

• Kelsey Cummings (University of Pittsburgh), “#1BillionForThriller: Revival of ‘Dead’ Content on YouTube”
• Jordan Z. Adler (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), “Death, Truth, and Videotape: Ghostly Reveries and Family Memories in Stand By For Tape Back-Up”
• Kate J. Russell (University of Toronto), “The GIF That Keeps on Giving: Corporeal Excess and Reanimation in GIFs”

A New Vision of Terror: Undead Aesthetics

Moderator: Farbod Honarpisheh, Film and Media Studies Program

• Shuyi Xiong (Columbia University), “‘For the Beauty of the Gesture’ in Holy Motors: Zombielike Nihilism, Performativity, and Virtuality in the Age of the ‘Regime of the Invisible’”
• Preston Wittwer (North Carolina State University), “Life After Deaths in The Leftovers”
• Zack Shaw (University of Florida), “The Rise of the Animated Undead”

Heir to the Blood Lust: Recontextualizing the Living Dead

Moderator: Adam Lowenstein, Department of English

• Denis Saltykov (University of Pittsburgh), “Zombies for the Educated: Romero’s Films on the Living Dead in Post-Soviet Cultural Consumption”
• Ting-Hao Zhou (Columbia University), “Apichatpong’s Undead Spaces: Journeys to Cemetery of Splendor”
• Daniel Sacco (Ryerson University), “‘Gates of Hell’: The Living Dead as Religious Motif in European Horror”

Keynote Address – A Timeline of the Living Dead: From the Haitian Zombie to Jordan Peele’s Get Out

Sarah Juliet Lauro, University of Tampa

Catered Reception