OGOM & Supernatural Cities present: The
Urban Weird
University of Hertfordshire, 6-7 April, 2018
The OGOM Project is known for its imaginative events and symposia, which are often accompanied by a media frenzy. We were the first to invite vampires into the academy back in 2010. Our most recent endeavour, Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Shapeshifters and Feral Humans enjoyed extensive coverage globally and saw us congratulated in the THES for our ambitious 3 day programme which included actual wolves, ‘a first for a UK academy’. Our fourth conference will be an exciting collaboration with the Supernatural Cities: Narrated Geographies and Spectral Histories project at the University of Portsmouth. Supernatural Cities will enjoy its third regeneration, having previously convened in Portsmouth and Limerick.
The Open Graves, Open Minds Project unearthed depictions of the vampire and the undead in literature, art, and other media, before embracing shapeshifting creatures (most recently, the werewolf) and other supernatural beings and their worlds. It opens up questions concerning genre, gender, hybridity, cultural change, and other realms. It extends to all narratives of the fantastic, the folkloric, the fabulous, and the magical. Supernatural Cities encourages conversation between disciplines (e.g. history, cultural geography, folklore, social psychology, anthropology, sociology and literature). It explores the representation of urban heterotopias, otherness, haunting, estranging, the uncanny, enchantment, affective geographies, communal memory, and the urban fantastical.
Fees
Full delegate rate: £110.00 (2 days, inclusive of lunch and refreshments on both days, tour, and boggart workshop).
Postgraduate/unwaged rate: £68.00 (2 days, inclusive of lunch and refreshments on both days, tour, and boggart workshop).
Undergraduate attendees: £25.00 (capped at 20 places).
Click here to go to the booking page.
Keynote speakers and events
* You can see more about our keynote speakers and special events here.
Prof. Owen Davies (University of Hertfordshire), historian of witchcraft and magic, on ‘Supernatural beliefs in nineteenth-century asylums’
Dr Sam George (University of Hertfordshire), Convenor of the Open Graves, Open Minds Project, ‘City Demons: urban manifestations of the Pied Piper and Nosferatu Myths’
Dr Karl Bell (University of Portsmouth), Convenor of Supernatural Cities, ‘Dark City, Daemonic Architectures: Towards a Cartography of the Urban Weird’
Dr Mikel Koven (University of Worcester), President of the International Society of Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR) and folklore and film specialist will introduce a special urban weird screening
Delegates will engage with our Spectral Cities Tour and accompany us on a magical and weird journey around St Albans and its environs. They will also be invited to participate in a special workshop on a Mancunian Boggart, led by Ceri Houlbrook (ECR, University of Hertfordshire). Using a wide range of material – from the pens of antiquarians to local ballads and oral histories – this workshop will trace the history and folklore of Boggart Hole Clough, where today, still, ‘there lurks that strange elf’.
You can now see the full list of speakers, with abstracts of their papers here.
There’s also a list of the papers as they have been grouped into panels.
And we have now posted the timetable here; an expanded version, showing all the panels with papers within the parallel sessions, can be downloaded from this page as a PDF.
Advice on Travel and Accommodation can be found here.
Look out for our booking site coming shortly and an opportunity to accompany us on our journey into the urban weird!