Angela Platt is Lecturer in Liberal Arts, Course Lead in English Literature and Subject Lead in Student Experience at St Mary’s University, Twickenham.
Angela’s research explores the intersection between emotions, religion, and the family in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is particularly interested in examining how belief and familial experience reciprocally influence one another. Whilst she has examined a variety of emotions, her research centres around love as a catalyst for numerous other emotions – such as pain, nostalgia, hope, happiness, belonging, fear, and desire. She currently has three publications on love – an article which examines love and discipline in Baptist religious practice, an article examining pain as an indicator of love for nineteenth century dissenters, and a forthcoming book chapter on love and the divine in the Cultural History of Love series.
Conference – Sex, Scandal and Sensation
Sex, Scandal, and Sensation
Tuesday 2 July 2024 to Thursday 4 July 2024
Falmouth University, UK, in partnership with City University, Hong Kong
Sex, Scandal, and Sensation is an interdisciplinary and global exploration of the role and impact of the sensational, the scandalous, and the sexual in literature, film, television, gaming, and other forms of cultural production. The conference is dedicated to the discussion of a broad range of genres and sub-genres, including Romance, Erotica, and Pornographies; Bestsellers, Blockbusters, and Bonkbusters; Sensation Fiction and the Sensational Press; Crime Fiction and True Crime narratives; Shilling Shockers, Penny Dreadfuls and the Pulps; the Gothic in both traditional and modern forms; Thrillers on both page and screen; Soap Operas and Shocking Theatre; RPG and Digital storytelling; and other genres and forms that both rely on the scandal, sensation, and sex for their effects, and explore its effects on us.
Taking place in the bicentenary of the birth of Wilkie Collins, the godfather of Sensation Fiction, and amidst Simon & Schuster’s ongoing reissue of the entire catalogue of the so-called ‘Queen of Trash’ and powerful feminist icon Jackie Collins, this conference celebrates, exposes, and interrogates the boundaries and depths of popular, and not so popular, culture and real-world events. We will be thinking and talking about affect and its effects, about public outrage and private shame, about censorship and permissiveness, about lawsuits and love affairs, about the market and its imperatives, about aesthetics and morality, and all of this across a wide range of disciplines, mediums, time periods, and texts.
We hope you will join us for the exciting event, which will bring together scholars, researchers, students, and enthusiasts to share their research, insights, and perspectives in an open and inclusive atmosphere. We welcome submissions for individual twenty-minute papers as well as for full panels exploring sex, scandal, and sensation. Subjects can include (but are not bound by):
• The portrayal and evolution of sex, scandal, and sensation across different periods and genres
• The role of sensation in bestsellers and popular literature
• The portrayal of desire, sex, and consent in global Romantic Fictions
• The ways in which scandal and sensation are used to challenge or reinforce social norms
• Creating the sensational on screen
• Navigating consent on screen
• Real world scandals and fictional sensation
• Landscape of sensation, the scandalous, and the traumatic
• Navigating sex and sexualities in traditional and digital forms
• Interactive digital romance in visual novels and dating simulators
• Simulating sex and romance: the rules of roleplaying
Submissions:
Proposals should include a title, an abstract of 250–300 words, a brief biographical note (up to 100 words), and contact details. Panel proposals are very welcome.
Please submit your proposals to sensationconference@gmail.com by 14th February 2024. We encourage submissions from scholars at all stages of their careers, including early career researchers and postgraduate students. Interdisciplinary approaches and innovative methodologies are welcome.
CFP: Sex, Scandal and Sensation (Deadline: 14 February, 2024) (victorianweb.org)
Please welcome our newest member Mark Vernon
Mark Vernon is a writer and psychotherapist based in London (UK).
Mark became academically interested in love when writing a PhD on the role of friendship in Plato’s philosophical practice. He then wrote a book on friendship, The Meaning of Friendship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), which was aimed at a general audience with the goal of asking what friendship is, how it has carried social weight at various points in history, and how it plays a role in contemporary contexts, from identity politics to social media. As a psychotherapist, Mark has an interest in love from the perspective both of developmental psychology and in terms of the role of love in the therapeutic relationship. Another book, Love: All That Matters (Hodder Education, 2013) provides an account of how love can develop through periods of crisis, both personal and social, and alongside psychology draws on philosophy, mythology and everyday experience. Another strand of interest in love relates to love in spiritual traditions. In particular, his book, Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Guide for the Spiritual Journey (Angelico Press, 2021), in part examines how love relates to the intellect and to guides, fostering a dialectic of unfolding and expansion. Mark’s current interest is focused on a design project, funded by the Fetzer Institute, which is looking at how love can be fostered in different environments through the aid of artefacts, practices and rituals. Working with designers, this project will produce practical outcomes that might make a difference in specific contexts. He is keen to work collaboratively and learn from as wide a range of experiences as possible.
New member: Jo Parsons
Jo Parsons is a Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Falmouth University.
Jo is originally a Victorian Literature specialist with interests in masculinity, the body, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Sensation Fiction, but now she is now leading Falmouth University’s move into the area of Erotica and Romantic Fictions and is currently working on a new project on popular women’s writing from 1950–the present day, with a particular focus on the Bonkbuster. Her research, both Victorian and contemporary, is grounded in gender and cultural studies. Jo is a co-editor (with Ruth Heholt) of both the Gender and the Body in Literature and Culture and Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures book series with Edinburgh University Press, as well as assistant editor of Revenant. Jo is currently editing a new collection entitled:Bonkbuster! Sex and Popular Romance from the 1950s to the Present Day
Please welcome our newest member/
Tatiana Chemi, Ph.D., is Associate Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark, Chair of Educational Innovation, where she works in the field of artistic/aesthetic learning and creative processes. She started her career as scholar investigating theatre, comedy and Absurdism (In the Beginning Was the Pun: Comedy and Humour in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre, 2013). From there she moved into post-dramatic, physical theatre and the intersection between theatre and education. She looked at creative partnerships in schools (The Art of Arts Integration, 2014), artistic creativity (with Borup and Hersted, Behind the Scenes of Artistic Creativity, 2015) and at artist-led learning in higher education (with Neilson, The Pedagogy of the Moment: Building Artistic Time-Spaces for critical-creative learning, 2022). More recently, she has been looking at theatre laboratories as material and affective places of/for education (A Theatre Laboratory Approach to Pedagogy and Creativity: Odin Teatret and Group Learning, 2018), study that led to the interest on the pedagogy of love and care (with Brattico, E., Fjorback, L. O., & Harmat, L. (Eds.) Arts and Mindfulness Education for Human Flourishing, 2022). In 2013, Aalborg University Press named her Author of the Year and in 2021 she was nominated Teacher of the Year. She is currently involved in a research project exploring theatre laboratories in nurse education (Holistic Learning of Lived and Imagined Experiences – HoLLIE Lab). She is founder and leader of the researchers’ group Arts-Based Methods and Performativity in Educational Research (AMPERE), with focus on the arts and/in social justice and communities. She is Visiting Associate Professor at University of Chester, UK (2021-2024) and visiting researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
New network member
Victor Karandashev is Professor of Psychology at Aquinas College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
He is a scholar with extensive international and cross-cultural experience and interests. He has conducted research on international psychology in several European countries, including universities in Germany, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA. His major area of research interests is the studies of love and culture, a topic about which he has published several articles, chapters, and monographs. His recent books are Romantic Love in Cultural Contexts (2017), Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Experience and Expression of Love (2019), Cultural Models of Emotions (2021), and Cultural Typologies of Love (2022
Please welcome our newest member
Enrico Palma is a Ph.D. Candidate in the University of Catania in Sciences of Interpretation
His research is dedicated to a philosophical project on À la recherche du temps perdu. He aims to show the Proustian conception of writing, seen as an existential activity by which human life can be redeemed from thewaste of time and trasformed into the pure form of literature. A large part of his activityis also focused on the phenomenology of love in Proustian thought. For the French writer, the dynamic of love is an idealisation of the object and a product of lover’s imagination. Thetopic is treated in his paper The Elevation of Love. An Analogy in Proust and Caravaggio between imagination and philosophy. The theme of love was also discussed in other authors,such as Oscar Wilde (with two essays on De Profundis and the tragic consequences oflove’s power) and the Italian poet Mario Luzi (an essay dedicated to the poem Lungo il fiume). Hisresearch fields are theoretical philosophy,hermeneutics and literature, with interests in Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cesare Pavese, Pierre Hadot and Emil Cioran.
NBA – Love and the Politics of Intimacy
Love and the Politics of Intimacy
Bodies, Boundaries, Liberation
Stanislava Dikova (Anthology Editor), Wendy McMahon (Anthology Editor), Jordan Savage (Anthology Editor)
Description
Love and the Politics of Intimacy articulates the concept of love within the relationship between the intimate and the social, rethinking how intimacy is conceived and experienced in the context of 21st-century neoliberalism. Reflecting on experiences of intimate, romantic and sexual love, and the role of individual identity, these essays explore historical trajectories that have culminated in particular, contemporary experiences of intimate love. Politically, this work links identity and articulation of the self to liberatory practices in the arenas of friendship, romance and sex.
This interdisciplinary exploration of what love means in the 21st century incorporates academic writing and original creative work from established and emerging scholars around the globe. Essays from across the humanities and social sciences – including literary studies, sociology, psychology, philosophy and gender studies – interrogate the role of relational intimacy on topics of ‘Love and Romance’, ‘Love and Liberation’ and ‘Love and Technologies of Intimacy’. The volume looks at the past, present and future in search of inspiration for transforming and re-charting the pathways of love, seeking a more diverse and emancipatory model of social life and what it would take to restore love to social and institutional spaces.
NBA Love and Revolution
NBA
Matt York, Love and Revolution. A Politics for the Deep Commons
(Free download or via Manchester UP).
New network member
Please welcome our newest member:
Ana J. Cuevas is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Literature and Communication at University of Colima, Mexico. Ana’s research focuses on the place of love in the formation of couples, the reasons for which people decide to split and how love imaginaries change after couple breakdown. Her latest research compares, from a three-generation approach, the love experiences of heterosexual men and women in two Mexican regions. Among the most important findings of this research are that love language used by most men and women is very consistent, that the main differences between them are in the cultural practices of love and the identification of emergent love cultural changes among the youngest and most educated men and women. She is currently co-editing with Sampson Blair the book Conjugal Trajectories: Relationship Beginnings, Change, and Dissolutions which forms part of the book series Contemporary Perspectives in Family Research published by Emerald Publishing. She is also to publish her book La Formación de Parejas: emociones, cercanía de atributos y brechas de edad (The formation of couples: emotions, homogamy and age-discrepancy) edited by the University of Guadalajara. Her latest publications include: 1) Age homogamy and heterogamy in three generation of men and women in Mexico where she analyses the gender inequalities and weak role of love in the formation of couples. 2) The reasons for which young and medium adults use Tinder. The study sheds light on users’ longing for romantic partners and the use of the application to make friends, have casual sex and leisure. 3) Conjugality and intimacy in Latin America where she offers a thorough revision of the literature of conjugality and intimacy in this region. 4) Intimacy and couple relationships where she and a group of colleagues propose a theoretical discussion on intimacy and its links to conjugality, gender roles, care, sexuality and use of digital technology.
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