CfP: “Technologies of Frankenstein”, 7 - 9 March 2018, Hoboken, NJ
The 200th anniversary year of the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus has
drawn worldwide interest in revisiting the novel’s themes. What were
those themes and what is their value to us in the early twenty-first
century?
Mary Shelley was rather vague as to how Victor, a
young medical student, managed to reanimate a person cobbled together
from parts of corpses. Partly as a result of this technical gap, and
partly as a result of many other features of the novel, Frankenstein
continues to inspire discourse in scholarly, popular, and creative
culture about the Monstrous, the Outsider, the Other, and scientific
ethics. This conference will examine such connections in our thinking
about humanism and techno-science from the novel’s publication to the
present. We construe broadly the intersecting themes of humanism,
technology, and science and we welcome proposals from all fields of
study for presentations that add a twenty-first century perspective to Frankenstein. Topic areas may include but are not limited to:
- Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
- Branding “Frankenstein” (Food, Comics, Gaming, Music, Theater, Film)
- Computational and Naval Technology (Mapping, Navigation, The Idea of the Journey)
- Digital Humanities and GeoHumanities (Applications, Pedagogy, Library/Information Technology)
- Engineering Technologies: Past/Present/Future (Chemical, Electrical, Biomedical)
- Future Technologies and Labor Concerns
Submit abstracts of 300 words and brief CV by 15 October 2017 to Michael Geselowitz (mgeselowitz@ieee.org) and Robin Hammerman (rhammerm@stevens.edu).