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Journal of Historical Sociology, 2019

Monsters Conference, 2022

Limina Journal in collaboration with the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions and the Classics Department at the University of Reading host a four-half day conference on the theme of 'Monsters'. Papers will be presented both in-person and virtually (via Microsoft Teams) with the first two days based at the University of Reading, UK and the latter two days based at the University of Western Australia, Perth. The conference papers cover a wide range of topics themed around the concept of Monsters and Monstrosity from monsters' presence and construction (or deconstruction) in various media and genres, including mythology, literature, and film to the concept of monstrous 'othering', especially around women and female bodies. The conference papers cover monsters from antiquity to contemporary times and representations of monsters from across the globe. This conference also features a poster session, a special exhibition at the Ure Museum in Reading (which can be seen virtually as well as in-person), and three fantastic and exciting workshops on: The GLAM Sector and Academic Engagement, Australian Gothic Literature, and The Monstrous Witch - A Manifesto. The conference will feature three keynote speakers: • Prof Marguerite Johnson (Newcastle) speaking on 'Making a Monster, or Justifying Hunting Women' • Dr Ionat Zurr (UWA/SymbioticA) speaking on 'The Monstrous Act of Caring and Curating' • Dr Victoria Flood (Birmingham) speaking on '"I Want to Believe": Medieval Monsters and the Limits of Credibility'

The Journal of Gods and Monsters is a double blind, peer-reviewed, open access journal that seeks to explore the connections between the sacred and the monstrous. We encourage a wide variety of methodologies and approaches, and are open to analyses of monstrosity as it relates to all religious traditions. We are published by the Department of Philosophy at Texas State University. We encourage readers to sign up for the publishing notification service for this journal. Use the Register link at the top of the home page for the journal. This registration will result in the reader receiving the Table of Contents by email for each new issue of the journal. This list also allows the journal to claim a certain level of support or readership. See the journal's Privacy Statement, which assures readers that their name and email address will not be used for other purposes.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, 2012

The field of monster studies has grown significantly over the past few years and this companion provides a comprehensive guide to the study of monsters and the monstrous from historical, regional and thematic perspectives. The collection reflects the truly multi-disciplinary nature of monster studies, bringing in scholars from literature, art history, religious studies, history, classics, and cultural and media studies. The companion will offer scholars and graduate students the first comprehensive and authoritative review of this emergent field. Contents: Foreword, John Block Friedman; Introduction: the impact of monsters and monster studies, Asa Simon Mittman; Part I History of Monstrosity: The monstrous Caribbean, Persephone Braham; The unlucky, the bad and the ugly: categories of monstrosity from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, Surekha Davies; Beauteous beast: the water deity Mami Wata in Africa, Henry John Drewal; Rejecting and embracing the monstrous in Ancient Greece and Rome, D. Felton; Early modern past to postmodern future: changing discourses of Japanese monsters, Michael Dylan Foster; On the monstrous in the Islamic visual tradition, Francesca Leoni; Human of the heart: pitiful oni in medieval Japan, Michelle Osterfield Li; The Maya 'cosmic monster' as a political; and religious symbol, Matthew Looper; Monsters lift the veil: Chinese animal hybrids and processes of transformation, Karin Myhre; From hideous to hedonist: the changing face of the 19th-century monster, Abigail Lee Six and Hannah Thompson; Centaurs, satyrs, and cynocephali: medieval scholarly teratology and the question of the human, Karl Steel; Invisible monsters: vision, horror, and contemporary culture, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Part II Critical Approaches to Monstrosity: Posthuman teratology, Patricia MacCormack; Monstrous sexuality: variations on the vagina dentata, Sarah Alison Miller; Postcolonial monsters: a conversation with Partha Mitter, Partha Mitter with Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle; Monstrous gender: geographies of ambiguity, Dana Oswald; Monstrosity and race in the late Middle Ages, Debra Higgs Strickland; Hic sunt dracones: the geography and cartography of monsters, Chet van Duzer; Conclusion: monsters in the 21st century: the preternatural in an age of scientific consensus, Peter J. Dendle; Postscript: the promise of monsters, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen; Bibliography; Index.

This article attempts to delineate the history of the monstruos by recognizing inside it the manifestation of severance between the contingent and the trascendent world. The monster embodies the boundary of the everlasting paradox of human existence, in the balance between the desire of knowing and the impossibility of drawing completely on knowledge.

The Journal of Gods and Monsters, 2021

Welcome to another issue of The Journal of Gods and Monsters. We trust that you’ll find plenty in this issue to unsettle the boundaries between the sacred and the monstrous. As editors, one of the things that drew us to this topic was the wide variety of ways in which deities and monsters intersect, overlap, and help define each other, all while complicating any sense of stable boundaries or identities. As most who have studied religion know, the things we worship and the things we are afraid of are often difficult to distinguish from one another. This means that questions of Gods and Monsters can be found in a wide range of disciplines, over an abundance of texts, and in times both ancient and modern. Not only do these explorations question the boundaries between Gods and Monsters, but they also destabilize boundaries between academic disciplines, literary genres, and even so-called high and low culture. But in the midst of this bewildering range of diverse topics, there are also fascinating thematic connections that keep bubbling to the surface. The three articles in this issue come from very different corners of the scholarly world: Matthew Goff’s essay on the Enochic traditions, Steven Engler’s study of the Brazilian religion Umbanda, and Gerardo Rodríguez-Galarza’s exploration of how close attention to monsters can help unravel what the author refers to as “the colonialism of time.” Even though they might seem to belong in very different journals – perhaps journals on the topics of Second Temple Jewish literature, religious studies, and postcolonial theory - these articles are brought together through the lens of monsters, and through the attention to what we can learn by analyzing the figure of the monster (and the narrative in which it appears) through a variety of lenses. Perhaps most importantly, these articles pay attention to the myriad ways in which the figure of the monster announces a rupture in conventional thought, an anxiety which cannot be captured through traditional semantics – and which escape confinement by traditional modes of theological thinking. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has noted, the monster always escapes; in these three essays, that escape is something akin to Ricouer’s “surplus of meaning,” an escape from an interpretation that can be exhausted through explanatory modes of thought. In essence, the monster calls to the places where intellectual understandings – of texts, of historical events, of religious practices, of the oppressive forces of colonialism – fall short. The monster begs us to interpret it, and through this act to come at least a few steps closer towards understanding the system that the monster inhabits. --The Editors

2022

This is a draft of a teacher's resources that is a work in progress

University of Toronto Quarterly