China Miéville
On 14th-15th September 2012 Tony Venezia and I co-organised a 2-day academic conference dedicated to the writing of China Miéville, called "Weird Council: An International Conference on the Writing of China Miéville." The conference was co-supported by the University of Lincoln's English Department, Birkbeck's School of Arts, the Institute of English Studies (IES) at Senate House, and Gylphi: Arts & Humanities Publisher.
Speakers and delegates included China Miéville, Professor Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside), Professor Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck), Professor Neil Easterbook (Texas Christian University), Professor John Rieder (University of Hawai'i at Manoa), Professor Farah Mendelsohn (Anglia Ruskin University), Dr Andrew M. Butler (Canterbury Christ Church University), Dr Paul March-Russell (University of Kent), Dr Joe Sutliff Sanders (Kansas State University) and Damien Walter (The Guardian).
In his Guardian article on the conference, Damien Walter wrote that "Weird Council was remarkable for many reasons," and offered "an excellent start" in rethinking the literary movement of the weird.
Tony Venezia and I will co-edit China Miéville: Critical Essays (forthcoming with Gylphi in 2015).
See here for the programme and conference webite. You can also download podcasts of some of the keynotes.
Here's a Storified version of the live-tweeting from the conference (with thanks to Iain Robert Smith).
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research and teaching specialisms are in 21st century literature and critical theory, science fiction and post-apocalyptic narratives, Marxist aesthetics, and utopianism.
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