Renewal,
Revival,
and Renaissance

Conference topics:

The idea of “Renewal, Revival, and Renaissance” touches not only on recently reopened conversations on civil rights in movements such as Black Lives Matters, but also on the current fascination with remakes of sometimes even problematic intellectual property such as the Lovecraftian universe or the digital amalgamation of existing images and literatures into AI art. New scholarship on these phenomena can be seen in, for example Victorian literature scholar Jamil Mustafa’s book The Blaxploitation Horror Film: Adaptation, Appropriation and the Gothic (University of Wales Press, 2023) which sheds new light on how this film genre revived Gothic fiction. Historian Susan Stryker has mapped developments in transgender history from early movements to its most recent renaissance in Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (2017). Even the concept of rebooting and renewing has seen its own revivals with, for example, literary theorist Julie Sanders redefining debates about adaptation in the last decade since her book Adaptation and Appropriation (first published in 2005). Even long-past works stand to be reread, as argued by Chris Murray and Kevin Corstorphine in their study “Co(s)mic Horror” (2013), which show how mediums such as comics and graphic novels can reread, re-examine, and renew older source materials.

This colloquium welcomes scholars at all levels, from the professorial desk to graduate students, in the fields of American literature, culture, history, and philology in general to contribute their original research. There is also a place for those working with New Media, digital cultures, and the frontiers of intermediality, who will find a home in the discussion of how our current era recycles or reifies the past. The aim of this colloquium is also to generate deeper reflection on how renewal and revival happen in the modern world, especially with issues like migration, racial justice, and technology.

Possible topics can include, but are not limited to: 

• The Harlem Renaissance revisited
• Rebooting American classics
• Social media posts as renewal of creative writing
• Fin-de-Siècle and Inter-War Supernatural and Weird Fiction: Medial Migrations and Revivals
• Revival of Marginalized Voices in American Culture
• Cultural Changes in Post-COVID America
• The Role of Technology in Modern American Art and Literature
• Trans-mediality as a venue of revival
• Revival – A Good or A Bad Word?
• Recreating Historical Events Through Digital Media
• Simulating Prehistory/History in a Contemporary Context
• Recycling in culture and the culture of recycling
• Reclaiming “the old”

The organizing committee also welcomes other interpretations and proposals on the theme. Proposals for panels, individual papers, or posters are invited. This colloquium will take place in person at Palacky University, Olomouc, and offers both traditional conference sessions as well as networking, mentoring, and socializing opportunities. This colloquium will offer special activities specifically for the benefit of graduate students and PhD candidates. We are not able to offer hybrid or virtual hosting options at this time.

The conference is supported by The Fulbright Commission Czech Republic’s. This support for the International Colloquium of American Studies is part of celebrating the 35th anniversary of the establishment of the Fulbright program in the Czech Republic and the 80th anniversary of the Fulbright program’s existence globally.

Keynote speaker: Prof. Jeffrey Weinstock

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is a professor of English at Central Michigan University, where he teaches a range of courses on American literature and popular culture. He is the founder and president of the Society for the Study of the American Gothic, the founder and general editor of the peer-reviewed journal American Gothic Studies, and the co-founder and past chair of the Modern Language Association’s Gothic Studies Forum. He is also the associate editor in charge of horror for the Los Angeles Review of Books and am currently the general editor for Bloomsbury’s six-volume Cultural History of Monsters series.

He has authored or edited 33 books and more than 100 essays and book chapters on the Gothic, American literature, cult film, and pop culture.

Born in Washington, DC and raised in Maryland, he earned my BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania, his MA in American literature from the George Washington University, and his PhD from the interdisciplinary Program in the Human Sciences at the George Washington University. He has taught at Central Michigan University since 2001.

His research focuses on the “cultural work” performed by the Gothic in its various manifestations—the ways in which Gothic texts and practices give shape to culturally specific anxieties and desires. This interest has led him from considering, for example, how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American women made use of Gothic conventions as a strategy to express discontentment with their circumscribed roles to thinking about the ways contemporary monsters reflect shifting American fears and aspirations.