Keynote Speakers

DR. WILL TATTERSDILL

‘BREATHE DEEP, SEEK PEACE’: THE FANTASY/SCIENCE BOUNDARY, ESPECIALLY AS IT APPLIES TO DINOSAURS

Will Tattersdill (he/him) is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Fantasy at Glasgow University, and the author of Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press (Cambridge UP, 2016). He has taught and written on alternate history, museology, and animals in Star Trek, and is currently editing H. G. Wells for the Oxford World’s Classics series. His first children’s choose-your-own-adventure book (co-written with Sarah Crofton) will be published by Usborne this July.

In the 181 years since they were formally named, dinosaurs have become almost synonymous with genre fiction. To find one in a text is to understand that text as sci fi, fantasy, horror; so-called realist literature stays well away from them. This is curious because dinosaurs are real – ideas extracted from the Earth, impossible without the methods and institutions of modern science. In this lecture, I’ll talk about how dinosaurs can be used to trouble the notion that fantasy always escapes, presenting the boundary between science and the imagination as pliable and generative rather than staunch and forbidding. My focal text with be Dinotopia, James Gurney’s iconic 1992 vision of a world where humans and dinosaurs live in harmony.

NGHI VHO

‘A FANTASTIC CONVERSATION’

Nghi Vo became a writer because while there were alternatives, none of them suited her as well as a lifetime of endless research combined with simply making things up.

She is the author of Siren Queen, The Chosen and the Beautiful,and The Singing Hills Cycle, including The Empress of Salt and Fortune and When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain.

‘A Fantastic Conversation’

DR. SAMI SCHALK

‘REIMAGINING BODYMINDS AND LIBERATION IN PANDEMIC TIMES’

Dr. Sami Schalk (she/her) is an associate professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Duke 2018) and Black Disability Politics (Duke 2022). Dr. Schalk’s academic work focuses on race, disability, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture. She also writes for mainstream outlets, including a monthly column called “Pleasure Practices” in TONE Madison. Dr. Schalk identifies as a fat, Black, queer, disabled femme and a pleasure activist.

Drawn from the book Bodyminds Reimagined, this talk will explore how science and speculative media can challenge our understandings of social issues and how these new understandings can expand our imaginative potential and be applied to real world work for social change.

Call For Papers

Boundaries and Margins in Fantasy

The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic is pleased to announce a call for papers for Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFCon) 2023 (to be held online on 10-12 May 2023) with the theme of ‘Boundaries and Margins’.

Brian Attebery famously argued in Strategies of Fantasy that fantasy can be conceptualised as a ‘fuzzy set,’ with the edges of the genre mainly understood through the lens of what is placed at its centre. Given the subjectivity inherent to this definition, notions of boundaries (or lack there-of) have been a key concern to academic and critical discourse on fantasy and the fantastic, as well as a preoccupation of fictional texts, with fantastical occurrences often being germinated in liminal spaces and margins. As Rosemary Jackson claims in Fantasy: A Literature of Subversion, “The dismissal of the fantastic to the margins of literary culture is in itself an ideologically significant gesture, one which is not dissimilar to culture’s silencing of unreason.” However, while fantasy fandom has historically perceived itself as being on the margins, the genre and its presumed canon privileges a narrow selection of voices and texts, pushing alternate perspectives to the edges of the fuzzy set. Despite the conception of fantasy as the literature of the impossible, the delimitation of margins and boundaries can undermine the potential offered by multiplicity, eliding certain works and creative practitioners from genre, subcultural fan communities, and academic research.

Boundaries and their transgression have often been seen as inherent to textual encounters with fantasy. This thematic concern with the perceived limits of consensus reality arguably makes it uniquely suited for representing the lived experience of those marginalised by such definitions of realism. Examining the borders of both reality and the genre are central to contemporary fantasy studies, from negotiating the fantastical geographies of works such as Lud-in-the-Mist, Doctor Who, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to contested borders of genre in Gideon the Ninth, Star Wars, and Horizon: Zero Dawn. The genre is increasingly acknowledging the perspective of racially, culturally, and ethnically marginalised creative practitioners, such as in the works of Nalo Hopkinson, Guillermo del Torro, NK Jemisin, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Nghi Vho. Fantasy’s academic discourse is becoming less concerned with establishing a canonical ‘centre’ and more with examining those margins, as seen in the work of Sami Schalk, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Rukmini Pande, and Maria Sachiko Cecire. Marginality is the space where fantasy happens.

How do academics, creative practitioners, and fans create, enforce, or challenge boundaries in the production, distribution, and reception of fantasy texts? Fantasy and the fantastic have myriad capabilities for challenging hegemony, but how can that capacity be fully utilised?

GIFCon 2023 is a three-day virtual conference that seeks to examine boundaries and margins within fantasy, be they textual, linguistic, geographical, embodied, or imposed. We welcome proposals for papers relating to this theme from researchers and practitioners working in the field of fantasy and the fantastic across all media, whether within the academy or beyond it. We are particularly interested in submissions from postgraduate and early career researchers, and researchers whose work focuses on fantasy from the margins. We also invite ideas for creative workshops for those interested in exploring how the creative processes of fantastic storytelling and worldbuilding can engage with boundaries and margins from a practice-based perspective.

We ask for abstracts for 20-minute papers. See our Suggested Topics list below for further inspiration. Please submit a 300-word abstract and a 100-word bionote via this form by January 6^th 2023 at midnight GMT.

We also ask for workshop descriptions for 75-minute creative workshops. Please submit a 100-word description and a 100-word bionote via this form by January 6^th 2023 at midnight GMT.

If you have any questions regarding our event or our CfP, please contact us at GIFCon@glasgow.ac.uk. Please also read through our Code of Conduct. We look forward to your submissions!

Submission Guidelines

Please use our online forms for paper and workshop submissions. We aim to review all submissions within a month of the deadline.

Submissions will be accepted based on the following critia:

1) Fit to the Theme
2) Providing an Argument Overview
3) Scope for the Time
4) Demonstrating the Ability for Completion

If you have any further questions on submissions please reach out to GIFCon@glasgow.ac.uk.

How to attend GIFCon 2023

GIFCon 2023 Boundaries and Margins will take place online.

Registration can be found here.

GIFCon 2023 Committee

Chair: Dr Dimitra Fimi

Deputy Chair: Katarina O'Dette

Social Media officer: Emma French

Events officer: Grace Worm

Communications officer: Rev. Tom Emanuel

Fantasy MLitt Liaison: Hannah Mimiec

GIFCon Committee Bios

Katarina O’Dette (she/her) is a Film and Television Studies PhD candidate at the University of Nottingham whose research centres on fantasy television, genre studies, and media industry studies. She received a BFA in screenwriting from the University of Southern California and an MLitt in Fantasy from the University of Glasgow. She serves as a general editor on Mapping the Impossible: Journal for Fantasy Research. Her research can be found in Fantastika Journal, Slayage, A Shadow Within: Evil in Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Extrapolation.

Dr Dimitra Fimi (she/her) is Senior Lecturer in Fantasy and Children’s Literature and co-Director of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow. She has published two award-winning monographs on J.R.R. Tolkien and on Celtic-inspired children’s fantasy, and she has co-edited original manuscripts by Tolkien on linguistic invention. She blogs at: http://dimitrafimi.com/

Emma French (she/her) is a 3rd year SGSAH-funded PhD student at the University of Glasgow, researching how Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) consolidates our notions of fantasy, while enabling players to subvert established genre conventions. Her work addresses D&D’s treatment of race, gender, and sexual orientation; and looks at how players are using the game to address and repair the problematic legacies present within fantasy genre-culture. She graduated from Oriel College, University of Oxford, in 2015, and from the University of Glasgow with an MLitt in Fantasy in 2019. Her favourite fantasy authors include R.F Kuang, S.A. Chakraborty, and Silvia Moreno Garcia.

Grace Ann Thomas Worm (she/they) is a 3rd year PhD researcher on Female Fantasy in Tamora Pierce's fantasy world of Tortall at the University of Glasgow where she runs the Intersectional Fantastika reading group, is Vice Editor for the student journal Mapping the Impossible, and the Headquarters Officer for the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic and moderator of its Discord server. Grace is an English Literature International Bachelorette accredited secondary teacher who has taught across the U.S. This is her third GIFCon. Her teaching experience and research interests and publications cover fantasy, gender, race, class, ecology, YA, comics, video games, worldbuilding, neo-medievalism, poetry, theatre, and speculative fiction.

The Rev. Tom Emanuel (he/him) was born and raised on sacred Lakota land in the Black Hills of South Dakota, USA and trained as a minister in the United Church of Christ at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA (MDiv 2018). He is currently a PhD student in English Literature at the University of Glasgow, where his research brings together fan studies, sociology of religion, and Tolkien scholarship to explore how non-religious fans make spiritual meaning with J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. He lives in Glasgow with his fantasy-nerd spouse and their two budding fantasy-nerd children.

Hannah Mimiec (they/ she) graduated in 2022 from the University of Glasgow with a joint honours degree in Scots Law and English Literature and is currently completing an MLitt in Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow. Their current research interests lie within the interaction between fantasy and economics, specifically political economy and feminist theories of work, as well as tabletop roleplaying games.

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