The Monster Network

The Monster Network connects those with an interest in monsters and the monstrous. The aim of the Network is to spark international collaborations such as conferences, workshops, publications and symposiums as well as create a space for discussions and information on all things monstrous.

We have previously arranged workshops as well as an international conference, Promises of Monsters (Stavanger, April 2016). We are currently preparing a special issue of Somatechnics based on the conference. You can find the call for articles and art here.

For more information about the area of Monster Studies, see Donna McCormack‘s The Future of Monster Studies and Asa Simon Mittman‘s The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies.

You can join us on Facebook as well as follow us on Twitter. You are also welcome to contact us at promisesofmonsters [at] gmail [dot] com.

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We are always looking for creative and critical engagements with the figure of the monster and the concept of the monstrous. Want to do a blog-post? Or add a monster in the form of a poem, a short-story, an article, images or something completely different to our archive? Then you are more than welcome to contact us at promisesofmonsters [at] gmail [dot] com. Please write either BLOG or ARCHIVE in the subject-line when sending us a query or submission.

The main editor of the blog and archive is Line Henriksen, but all submissions must be approved by the founding members of the Monster Network.

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The founding members of the Monster Network:

Ingvil Hellstrand is a lecturer and researcher at the Network for Gender Research at the University of Stavanger, Norway. Her research interests are science fiction, posthuman bodies, bioethics, biopolitics and feminist theory. Recent publications include articles in the journals NORA – Nordic Journal for feminist and gender research and Feminist Theory, and chapters in the edited volumes Being Together: New cultural conditions for intimacy and Ill-disciplined Gender (forthcoming)

 

Line Henriksen has a PhD from The Unit of Gender Studies at Linköping University, Sweden. Her research interests include hauntology, monster theory, ethics, creative writing, feminist theory and creepypasta/internet urban legends. Her work has previously been published in Somatechnics, Women & Performance and The Ashgate Research Companion to Paranormal Cultures. Her fiction has appeared in the EEEL, freeze frame fiction and The Unlikely Coulrophobia Remix, among others.

 

Aino-Kaisa Koistinen is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research interests include media culture and popular culture (especially television), science fiction, gender studies and feminist posthumanism. She defended her doctoral dissertation The Human Question in Science Fiction Television: (Re)Imagining Humanity in Battlestar Galactica, Bionic Woman and V at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, in 2015. She is a board member of FINFAR –The Finnish Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research and one of the editors-in-chief of Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research. She has been published, for example, in NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research and Science Fiction Film and Television.

 

Donna McCormack is a Lecturer at the University of Surrey, UK, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research (SKOK) at the University of Bergen, Norway. She is working on a monograph entitled Recycling Global Life: Human Organ Transplantation in Contemporary Visual and Literary Texts, and recently published her first monograph entitled Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2015). She has published and forthcoming articles in journals such as the European Journal of Cultural Studies and The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, as well as in the edited collections Giving, Selling, Sharing and Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature. She is also the coordinator of the Nordic Network for Gender, Body, Health.

 

Sara Orning is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Research at the University of Oslo. She works on extraordinary bodies, monsters, humanimals and feminist theory, and has published and forthcoming articles in Excursions: An Interdisciplinary Journal and in the anthology Animalities: Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human (Edinburgh University Press).

 

The Blob. Performance by Anna Efraimsson and Tove Salmgren at the Promises of Monsters conference, April 2016.

Photo by Aino-Kaisa Koistinen.