This panel is being organized for the upcoming virtual undergraduate and graduate conference, hosted by Queen’s University’s ENGL859, on “Re-imaging and Re-engaging with the Victorians,” which takes place on April 18th from 9:30am-5:00pm EST. 

Acclaimed ecocritic Dr. Sue Edney writes in her chapter “At Home with Miniature Sea Monsters” in Gothic Animals (2019) of "the Victorian determination to control the terrifying vastness of nature to manage the fear of what rapidly developing evolutionary and geological theories might do to the hierarchy of human over non-human" (153). Victorian authors such as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells were fascinated by the developing zoological, botanical, and marine sciences of their day and explored the fantastic possibilities of the nonhuman world. Oftentimes, however, these possibilities manifested in horrific tales of alien invasion and animal experimentation gone awry. Thus, in relation to the conference’s focus on re-engaging with the Victorians, this panel, titled “(Re)engaging with the Nonhuman ‘Other’: Eco-horror and Ecophobia,” considers the ways in which neo-Victorian texts and multi-medias from the postwar era (1945-) present iterations of an anthropocentrically rooted anxiety of the natural world and nonhuman entities destroying humanity or threatening the divide between humans and nonhuman. 

Ultimately, this panel will consider how modern texts and multi-medias recenter the nonhuman as a voice that has been left out of Victorian histories. Specifically, we ask that papers consider various adaptations of Victorian literature and culture that focus on the nonhuman. 

Papers may consider (but are not limited to) the following topics:

• Theory of evolution
• Zoo culture 
• Natural history museums 
• Interest in animal “oddities” and “cabinets of curiosities” 
• Vivisection and animal experimentation 
• Circus culture 
• The Animal Rights movement
• Eco-horror (plant horror, fungal horror, marine horror, for instance)
• Alien fiction
• New materialist approaches to Victorian literature (object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, neovitalism, for example)
• Film adaptations of Victorian Science Fiction texts: for example, The War of the Worlds (1953), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977/1996), and The Time Machine (1960).

We welcome proposals for papers 10 minutes long on any of the topics above. Please send proposals of no more than 200-300 words, the title of the paper, and a brief (30-50 word) biography in a Word document to Liayana Jondy (18lj9@queensu.ca) and Noah Gallego (noahrgallego@gmail.com). Please put in the Subject Line: “SUBMISSION: Nonhuman Other Panel Proposal.”

If you have any questions about the panel, please feel free to reach out via email.

Deadline for proposals: February 27th, 2024