Call for Papers:- The Mysterious Mrs Christie: Evidence, Elusion, Afterlives

 

The Mysterious Mrs Christie: 

Evidence, Elusion, Afterlives 

A 1.5-day international conference at the University of Exeter and Exeter Library 12-13 September 2023 

Keynote Speakers: Dr Mark Aldridge, Solent University and Prof. Michelle M. Kazmer, Florida State University 

2023 marks fifty years since the last novel Agatha Christie wrote, Postern of Fate, was published. By 1973, Christie was already established as the world’s bestselling novelist, and her popularity has only risen in subsequent years. In addition, a flame of scholarly interest has ignited and grown. The quintessential mystery writer, creator of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, is now also a legitimate figure in academic research. 

It is tempting to think that the there are no Agatha Christie mysteries left. Few writers have received such levels of popular scrutiny and her life and work have been approached from a range of angles. Millions of words have been written about this significant body of work. Recent or anticipated works such as Lucy Worsley’s Agatha Christie, Nina de Gramot’s The Christie Affair, and Mark Aldridge’s Agatha Christie’s Marple attest to the mainstream dissemination of detailed archival research and unconventional approaches. However, mysteries remain. As Worsley notes in her recent biography of Christie, she is ‘a very elusive woman’. 

For the seventh international Agatha Christie conference, we are seeking research and/or creative papers that consider underexplored aspects of Christie’s work, life, and legacies. These could be neglected topics/areas or reflections on critical conversations which could use a new perspective. 

Potential topics may include but are certainly not limited to: 

• Across and beyond genre 

• Afterlives and adaptations 

• Character studies 

• Christie and creative writing 

• Christie in an international context 

• Colonialism and racism 

• Continuations and tributes 

• Creative legacies 

• Ecology and the environment 

• Ethical considerations 

• Gender, sex, and sexuality 

• Gothic and the supernatural 

• Life writing and autobiography 

• Mary Westmacott 

• New theoretical frameworks 

• Place, space, and time 

• Plays and dramatisations 

• Religion and theology 

• Radio and the BBC 

• Short stories 

• Teaching and pedagogy 

  Please submit a short (up to 200 words) abstract for a 20-minute presentation and a brief biographical note to agathachristieconference@gmail.com no later than 1 May 2023. You may direct queries to the same address. 

  Please note that speakers will be expected to register for the conference at the 1.5-day rate of £115. 

  Conference organisers: Dr Mia Dormer, Dr J.C. Bernthal, Sarah Martin, and Dr Stefano Serafini. 

  
  

  
  

  
  

International conference – Crime Fiction and Democracy

International Conference – Crime Fiction and Democracy

Université Paris Nanterre 22-23 June 2023

Organized by the Centre de Recherches Anglophones (Université Paris Nanterre) 

and Queen’s University Belfast, 

in partnership with the Centre de recherches pluridisciplinaires multilingues (Université Paris Nanterre).

The proposed multidisciplinary conference intends to explore the complex, multifaceted relationship between crime fiction and democracy, from the late 19th century to the present.

Recent research has highlighted crime fiction’s relationship to democratic institutions and shown the productivity of reading the history of the genre against the development and consolidation of Western liberal States. This conference seeks to build on such approaches and extend them in two ways.

Firstly, it will focus on crime fiction’s relationship not only to state institutions but, more generally, to the transformative spirit of democracy – a spirit which, according to our working hypothesis, is one of the forces that has driven and is still driving the growth and success of the genre, in its various manifestations. The conference will therefore aim at linking crime fiction’s sociological and cultural history to the achievement or failure of democratic aspirations in different national and international settings and at different periods. It will, on the one hand, try to show how the genre may have represented a modernizing, democratic force within the literary field overall, particularly as its aesthetics often foregrounds vernacular linguistic practices and attitudes, thus subverting traditional scales of values and paving the way for a more egalitarian vision of literature. On the other hand, it may also highlight how crime fiction has, at times, harboured or promoted reactionary, authoritarian or ‘vigilante’ tendencies. These conflicting positions within the genre – sometimes within single works – reflect both crime fiction’s ideological diversity and the elusive nature of democracy, as an elusive concept whose understanding may shift considerably depending on time and place. But they also, overall, testify to the role of crime fiction as a literary testing-ground for democratic impulses and values.

Secondly, the conference aims at a wide historical and geographical scale, in order to account for the evolutions and manifestations of crime fiction in various cultural areas. It will welcome papers looking at the cultural and political history of the genre both in regions where it has long been established (as in the US and Western Europe) and in others where it has only more recently been recognized, as in Eastern Europe and Russia, Africa, Asia, the Arab world, the Caribbean or Latin America. In such regions, too, the conference will aim at correlating the rise of crime fiction with the emergence, affirmation, rejection or breakdown of democratic aspirations.

In order to explore these theoretical perspectives, this conference invites 20-minute papers, either in English or French, focusing on the multiple connections between democracy and crime fiction throughout the world, and seeking, if possible, a broad analytical approach rather than the analysis of single works.

Suggested bibliography

Bloom, Clive, Cult Fiction: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996

Boltanski, Luc, Mysteries and Conspiracies Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies, Translated by Catherine Porter, Cambridge: Polity, 2014

Boucher, Anthony, “The Ethics of the Mystery Novel,” in Howard Haycraft, ed., The Art of the Mystery Story (1946), New York: Carroll & Graf, 1983

Broe, Dennis, Class, Crime and International Film Noir, Globalizing America’s Dark Art, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014

Corcuff, Philippe, Polars, philosophie et critique sociale, Paris: éditions Textuel, coll. Petite Encyclopédie critique », 2013

Damrosch, David; Haen, Theo d’, Nilsson, Louise (ed)  Crime Fiction as World Literature, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017

Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan, New York: Pantheon Books, 1977

Hardt, Michael & Negri, Antonio, Empire, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000

Haycraft, Howard, Murder for Pleasure, The Life and Times of the Detective Story, New York: Appleton, 1941

Jay, Paul, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010

Koselleck, Reinhart, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, translated by Todd Samuel Presner & al., Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002

Manchette, Jean-Patrick, Chroniques, Paris: Payot, Rivages, 1996

Mandel, Ernest, Meurtres exquis: une histoire sociale du roman policier, Montreuil: PEC, 1984

McCann, Sean, Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism, Durham: Duke UP, 2001

Miller, D.A, The Novel and the Police, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988.

Müller Elfriede & et Rueff, Alexandre, Le Polar français. Crime et histoire, Paris: La Fabrique éditions, 2002.

Oliver, Kelly & Trigo, Benigno, Noir Anxiety, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003

Pepper, Andrew & Schmid, David, Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction: A World of Crime, London: Palgrave, 2016

Pepper, Andrew, Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018. 

Rabinowitz, Paula, Black & White & Noir : America’s Pulp Modernism, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002

Selim, Samah, Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Tadié, Benoît, Front criminel : une histoire du polar américain de 1919 à nos jours, Paris: PUF, 2018

Wald, Alan, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007

Žižek, Slavoj, Living in the End Times, London: Verso, 2010

Please submit proposals of up to 250 words, together with a bio of approximately 100 words, by January 15, 2023 to Dominique Jeannerod, Andrew Pepper and Benoît Tadié:

d.jeannerod@qub.ac.uk; a.pepper@qub.ac.uk; benoit.tadie@parisnanterre.fr

Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by February 15, 2023. The conference is planned as an in-person event.

Scientific committee:

Margaret Atack (University of Leeds)

Katia Ghosn (Université Paris 8)

Brooks E. Hefner (James Madison University)

Alice Jacquelin (Université Paris Nanterre)

Dominique Jeannerod (Queen’s University Belfast)

Matthieu Letourneux (Université Paris Nanterre)

Andrew Pepper (Queen’s University Belfast)

David Platten (University of Leeds)

Lucia Quaquarelli (Université Paris Nanterre)

Benoît Tadié (Université Paris Nanterre)

Call for Papers: Murder, She Tweeted: Crime Narratives and the Digital Age

Murder, She Tweeted: Crime Narratives and the Digital Age

August 23-24, 2018

University of Tampere, Finland

Keynote speakers: Andrew Pepper (Queen's University Belfast) & Fiona Peters (Bath Spa University) First Call for Papers

The advent of new technologies and digital media have transformed society and influenced cultural narratives. The changes brought about by technological innovations, digitalisation, and globalisation have affected not only the subject matter and themes of contemporary crime narratives but also the production, distribution, and consumption of crime fiction on the global market, as well as the analytical tools, techniques, research methods, and theories available to scholars. 

These changes are readily visible in detectives' digital investigations or in how criminals employ digital technology in committing cybercrimes such as online stalking or theft. Moreover, the potential of digitalisation in modifying crime narratives nowadays ranges from podcasts such as "Serial" to Sherlock Holmes fan fiction to transmedia narration in "Sherlock" and the Twitter adaptation of Agatha Christie's The Body in the Library.

We invite proposals for paper presentations on crime narratives and the digital age from different language and cultural spheres. The conference's approach to crime and the digital context is wide and covers a variety of contemporary crime narratives (e.g. novels, films, TV series, adaptations, true crime, fan fiction, vlogs, blogs and other social media) that can be examined in a number of ways.

We would like to welcome proposals which address one or several of the following topics (please note that the list is by no means exhaustive):

- production and the global market of crime narratives

- crime narratives, participatory production and fan practices

- new modes of narration and serialised storytelling in crime narratives

- multimodality and transmedia crime narratives

- remakes and social media adaptations of crime narratives

- social media and mobile technologies in or about crime narratives

- crimes and criminal agency

- criminal networks and transnational crime

- crime and thriller narratives and digital geopolitics

- policing, detective agency and (digital) methods of detection

- true crime narratives and cold case archives

- digital humanities and the study of crime narratives

- crime and digital culture in the postcolonial world

- virtual crime

- ecology, crime and digital technologies

Participants may contribute with individual presentations (20 min) or panel proposals (three presenters).

Please submit your proposal (max 300 words for individual presentations; for panels, please submit titles and abstracts of each paper) and a short biographical statement (including name, email address, institutional affiliation) to t.helen.mantymaki@jyu.fi and maarit.piipponen@uta.fi as attachments in rtf or doc format by March 20, 2018.

Conference fee: there is a conference fee of 70 euros (coffee, lunches, reception) and participants are expected to cover all costs for travel, accommodation, and subsistence themselves.

Organising committee:

Dr Helen Mäntymäki, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

Dr Maarit Piipponen, University of Tampere, Finland.

Dr Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

Dr Andrea Hynynen, University of Turku Finland​

St Hilda's 2017

So, this morning I have left a rather wet but bright London on my way to one of my favourite Crime and Mystery Conferences. St Hilda's weekend.

This time last year I drove and had the delightful company of the wonderful Sarah Weinman (who was giving her first ever paper) and my friend Kirstie Long.

This year I have reverted back to what I normally do and that is catch the coach.  Specifically the Oxford Tube!  It is in my opinion one of the most convenient ways to get to Oxford from London and to St Hilda's specifically as the coach drops you less than 10 minutes walk (by my calculations anyway) from St Hilda's.

View from my room

St Hilda's (as it is fondly known) is one of the few crime and mystery conferences that I try and not miss. It is also the oldest.  I have forgotten when I started attending but I can say it must be at least 15 years ago and I don't think I have missed one.  The closest I came to missing St Hilda's was the year there was a significant birthday in the family and I ended up doing a mad dash back to London from Oxford and returning again so that I could take part in the family festivities.  It is also the only conference that I organise my leave around.  That is the power of St Hilda's.

This year there is so much to look forward to.  The theme is Another Crime, Another Place: the role of location in crime fiction. Lots of new authors giving papers such as Stella Duffy who is presently finishing a Ngaio Marsh novel,  Yrsa Sigurðardóttir who will be giving the main Conference lecture, Abir Mukerjee whose novels are set in India, Lin Anderson, Mark Billingham (to name a few) and a mystery themed play/ quiz as well. 

It is going to be lots of fun and I shall be tweeting, taking photographs and hopefully blogging as much as possible over the weekend.  So do come long for the ride. The only thing you may wish is that you were here in person.

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Call for Papers - The Ageless Agatha Christie

The Ageless Agatha Christie: Adaptations and Afterlives

A One-Day Conference at the University of Exeter, Monday 20^th June 2016

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

Sophie Hannah, author of Hercule Poirot mysteries

Dr Mark Aldridge, Southampton Solent University

When Agatha Christie died in 1976, she was the acknowledged Queen of Crime. The bestselling novelist and most successful playwright of the twentieth century, she created the immortal detectives Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple. Forty years after her death, her play The Mousetrap is in its seventh decade in London’s West End, while the BBC’s And Then There Were None was the most viewed television drama on Boxing Day 2015. With continuation novels, apps and video games, and big screen adaptations forthcoming, the Christie brand continues to adapt and evolve.

This conference will consider Agatha Christie in the context of adaptations and afterlives. We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers relating to this theme in any way. Suggested topics include but are not limited to:

Christie in the 21^st century

Continuation and tribute novels

Fandom, fanfiction, and fan studies

Stage, Screen, or Radio legacy

The art of adapting

Christie as a fictional character

Graphic novels

New strategies, new readers

Politics and globality

LGBTQ+ readings and appropriations

Detective fiction today

Translation

National identity and heritage

Rediscovery and re-evaluation

Please email abstracts of around 200 words to the organisers Dr Jamie Bernthal and Mia Dormer, at agathachristieconference@gmail.com no later than Monday 29^th February 2016. We also invite unorthodox or creative approaches to the theme.

#Agatha2016

James Ellroy: Visions of Noir

‘James Ellroy: Visions of Noir’ 1-3 July 2015, will be held at the University of Liverpool and sponsored by the School of English. This conference will examine Ellroy’s influence on the genre, his inspirations as a writer and his achievements in forging an idiosyncratic and unique style. We seek to foster an interdisciplinary approach in order to explore subjects such as Ellroy’s reinterpretation of the history of Los Angeles and the United States, as well as the connections between genre fiction and cinema through film noir. Our keynote speaker is journalist and critic Woody Haut, who has written on how Ellroy’s work has led to a reassessment of crime fiction as ‘at its most subversive not when it retreats into the confines of the genre, but when it stretches its narrative boundaries and rules regarding subject, style and plot.’ His works include Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction (1999) and Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War (2014).

Panels at the conference may include, but are not restricted to:

• Historical Crime Fiction: Ellroy’s manipulation of history, comparisons to other authors such as Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal
• True Crime:  the writer’s place in solving crimes; Ellroy’s relationship with police and true crime writers
• Mapping Los Angeles:  The history and geography of Ellroy’s LA
• Pulp and Porn: The voyeurism of tabloids and film in Ellroy’s work
• Film Noir: Ellroy’s adaptation of film and film’s adaptation of Ellroy
• Femme fatales: Exploring the genre’s gender lines
• Ellroy and after: Ellroy’s influence on a younger generation of crime writers

Please send proposals of 400 words to Dr Steven Powell (s.p.powell@liv.ac.uk) and Dr Diana Powell (diana.powell@liv.ac.uk) by 30 April 2015. The abstract should include a title, name and affiliation of the speaker, and a contact email address. Postgraduate students and independent scholars are welcome. Papers will be a maximum of 20 minutes in length. Proposals for suggested panels are also welcome. We plan to publish a selection of papers after the conference.

Conference Webpage: https://www.liv.ac.uk/english/our-events/ellroy/

Agatha Christie: Crime, Culture, Celebrity

A one-day symposium at the University of Exeter, Monday 14 April 2014

 

Presented in collaboration with the Crime Studies Network. Confirmed keynote speakers:

• Professor Sarah Street, University of Bristol
• Dr Merja Makinen, Middlesex University

Author of over eighty mystery novels, Agatha Christie was the best-selling writer of the twentieth century. Her detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple are iconic and her play The Mousetrap is the longest-running in history.This one-day conference is the first in Britain to engage with Christie’s life, work, and popularity. An interdisciplinary event, Agatha Christie: Crime, Celebrity, Culture seeks to unite researchers across the humanities with an interest in this writer’s work, life, and her afterlife in TV, film, and, popular culture.

 

In addition to research presentations, the day will feature an exhibition of material from the archives in Exeter’s Special Collections and from the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum revealing the fascinating story of Agatha Christie’s relationships with publishers, fans, and film-makers.

 

The conference organisers invite proposals for twenty-minute papers. Possible themes include, but are by no means limited to:

• Film, television, theatre, or radio adaptations
• ‘Middlebrow’ perspectives on Christie
• Portrayals of Agatha Christie in films, TV, and fiction
• Christie in the twenty-first century
• Christie and feminism
• Gendered, sexed, and queer readings
• Genre and identity
• Translation

Please email an abstract of 250 words with a short biographical note to agathachristie@exeter.ac.uk, no later than Friday 29 November 2013. Please direct any queries to the same address.