cfp.english.upenn.edu

TV Fangdom: A Conference on Television Vampires
7-8 June 2013
The University of Northampton

Vampires have always made charismatic characters and with the rise of the VILF and the fangbanger they are more popular than ever. This conference aims to explore the vampire particularly in relation to its presence on television. From Barnabas Collins to the Count von Count, from Mona the Vampire to True Blood’s Pam, vampires appear everywhere on television schedules and in television history, whether in serials, made-for-TV movies, adaptations of gothic novels, adverts or children’s TV. How has the vampire mythos been tailored for TV? Does the vampire’s appearance on a domestic medium like television blunt its fangs and tame its hypersexuality? What kind of audience have TV vampires attracted and how has their popularity been exploited? In what ways has the vampire been remade for different eras of television, different TV genres, or different national contexts?

Keynote and featured speakers:
• Brigid Cherry, editor of True Blood: Investigating Vampires and Southern Gothic and author of Horror (Routledge Film Guidebook)
• Marcus Recht, author of Der Sympatische Vampir
• Catherine Spooner, author of Contemporary Gothic

Proposals are invited on (but not limited to) the following topics:
• TV’s development and appropriation of the reluctant vampire
• Vampire hunters on TV
• The vampire as allegory
• Issues of gender and sexuality
• Narrative and structure
• Different formats (miniseries, animation, made-for-TV movie)
• Adaptation
• Visual style
• Sound and music
• Special effects
• Scheduling
• Marketing and advertising
• New media, ancillary materials and extended narratives
• Intersection with other media (novels, films, comics, video games, music)
• Audience and consumption (including fandom)
• Genre hybridity
• The vampire and children’s television
• Inter/national variants
• Translation and dubbing
We will be particularly interested in proposals on older TV shows, on those that have rarely been considered as vampire fictions, and on analysis of international vampire TV. The conference organisers welcome contributions from scholars within and outside universities, including research students, and perspectives are invited from different disciplines.

Please send proposals (250 words) for 20 minute papers plus a brief biography (100 words) to all three organisers by 16th December 2012.
s.abbott@roehampton.ac.uk
lorna.jowett@northampton.ac.uk
mike.starr@northampton.ac.uk

Conference Website: http://tvfangdom.wordpress.com/

This conference is run in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Narrative and Cultural Theory at the University of Northampton and the Centre for Research in Film and Audiovisual Cultures at the University of Roehampton.