FEAR AND HORROR SERIES IN THE ROMANCE WORLD

Please join us for the next event in “Fear and Horror Series in the Romance World,” which will be held on the afternoon of this Thursday, August 25, from 3-5pm EST. “French Horror: Baudelaire, Rachilde, and Ducournau” is a hybrid event that will be conducted both online via Zoom and in-person in Toy Lounge in Dey Hall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We will have three 20-30-minute presentations, followed by an open, informal Q&A and discussion. Please see the attached flyer, and feel free to share widely!

French Horror: Baudelaire, Rachilde, and Ducournau

In-person & virtual event
Room: Toy Lounge, Dey Hall, UNC-Chapel Hill
Zoom ID: 987 0088 0248
Passcode: 700158

Presentations:

“Reading a Condemned Poem under the Sign of Anthropocenic Climate Crisis: (Non)Correspondances in Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Les Métamorphoses du vampire’,” by Sean Singh Matharoo

“Rachilde’s Queer Lighthouse: The Fear of the Feminine in La Tour d’amour (1899),” by Jordan Bessette

“You Are What You Eat: Vegetarianism in Julia Ducournau’s Raw,” by Iliana Cuellar

Presenter bios:

Jordan Bessette has recently completed his PhD in French at UNC Chapel Hill. His dissertation, entitled “novel masculinities: making queer space in late nineteenth-century French fiction” looks at the role of novels in making spaces for their readers to imagine alternative relationships to masculinity beyond normative discourses of gender during the early Third Republic.

Iliana Cuellar is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at UC Riverside. Her research focuses on national identity narratives in horror films of Latin America and France.

Sean Singh Matharoo is Jacques Hardré Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Romance Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he studies and teaches classes about race, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic studies, postcolonialism, and the fantastic in French and francophone literature, media, and philosophy.

Series information:

“Fear and Horror Series in the Romance World” is a program organized by Sandra García, Chloe M. Hill, Marco Malvestio and Sean Singh Matharoo, that explores narratives of fear and horror in the Romance World, encompassing the Romance languages, literatures, and cultures within the transnational and regional contexts in which they have developed. Such narratives engage with social anxieties and fears, interrogating contemporary individuals’ relationships to social justice and forging intersections with other disciplines. Through this series, we will consider how fear and horror narratives of the Romance World circulate in diverse linguistic spaces, how they relate to epistemologies of crisis, and how they might contribute to the ongoing project of constructing alternative futures.

The next events are:

Thursday, September 22, 3-5pm EST, Toy Lounge, Dey Hall, UNC-Chapel Hill
“Green Traces: Vegetal Imagination in Italian Science Fiction, from Gilda Musa to Solarpunk”
Lecture by Enrico Cesaretti (University of Virginia)
Discussant: Marco Malvestio (Università di Padova/UNC-Chapel Hill)

Thursday, October 20
Talk on Speculative Fiction from the Portuguese-Speaking World
Chloe M. Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill)

We want to give special thanks to our sponsors, which include:

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:

The Department of Romance Studies
The Graduate Romance Association
Women’s & Gender Studies
The Institute for the Study of the Americas
The Center for European Studies

& the European Union
The European Research Council