Every year we feature a slate of talks about geek culture by professionals as well as SU staff and students.
This year we have three great panels on very different, exciting topics in fandom.
All the panel talks will be in Schine 128, which is down the hall from Goldstein Auditorium.
The schedule is:
| 12:00-1:00 | An Archive of Our Own: Crafting Original Poetry & Prose Through Fan Work |
| 1:15-2:15 | A Perfect Night for Mystery and Horror: Queer Creatures, Feminist Sleuths, and Monster Model-Kits |
| 2:30-3:30 | Comics in a Time of Crisis |
An Archive of Our Own: Crafting Original Poetry & Prose Through Fan Work
A reading & open talk from graduate students at Syracuse University’s Creative Writing MFA Program, featuring J.C. Rodriguez, Lily Holloway, Janie Le, and Elena Asofsky. Featuring poems & short stories that invoke & reference our fandoms, interests, & assorted geekery. Come enter a world where pop culture references can be plot devices & fictional characters can serve as metaphors for our very existence.
BIOs
Lily Holloway is a powerlifting enthusiast and third-year MFA candidate from Aotearoa (a.k.a. New Zealand). They are a 2024 winner of the Griffith Review Emerging Voices competition, a 2024 CNZ grant recipient, as well as a pain in the neck. You can find their work published or forthcoming in various places including Black Warrior Review, Sundog Lit, Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Peach Mag, and Hobart After Dark. Their chapbook was published in 2021 as a part of Auckland University Press’ AUP New Poets 8. Find them on Twitter and Instagram @milfs4minecraft or through their website lilyholloway.co.nz.
J.C. Rodriguez is a poet & cartoonist from Long Island. His work has appeared in places like Waxwing, Meow Meow Pow Pow, Phoebe, and Brooklyn Poets. He exists online at brownmoon.rip, where he sometimes blogs about his misadventures through the realms of food & soda. He runs a zine about subculture called FOLLOW THE SEA. Former lives include a clinical social worker, a puka shell necklace salesman, and a Hot Topic employee of the month for April 2012. He is NOT the TikTok finance guy. That guy doesn’t put periods in his name.
Janie Le is a writer from sunny SoCal. Her writing obsessions are mostly about magic, animals, family, trauma, and love. Her hobbies include hanging out with her cats and reading. She has been previously published in the Fabulist and is currently working on a collection of short stories and a novelette.
Elena Asofsky is a writer, poet, and second-year M.F.A. candidate in fiction at Syracuse University. They graduated with a B.A. and honors in English from Bryn Mawr College in 2021, where they were awarded the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize. Elena grew up in Maryland, where they learned to paint and raise tadpoles. Their writing is concerned with otherness, humanity’s relationship to violence, and the many forms of love.
A Perfect Night for Mystery and Horror: Queer Creatures, Feminist Sleuths, and Monster Model-Kits
This panel of talks features Jaynelle D. Nixon (Syracuse University), Corrie Shoemaker (Thompson Rivers University), and Will Scheibel (Syracuse University).
Jaynelle D. Nixon’s talk will be “Queer Life/Queer Futures: Gender, Race, Disability, and Class with Frankenstein’s Monster and the Bride.”
Dr. Jaynelle D. Nixon will employ a queer of color critique to discuss Frankenstein’s Monster, the Bride, and their many iterations throughout horror films. She argues that these gender nonconforming, multiply raced, disabled, and queer monsters appear in surprising and unsurprising films whether we recognize them or not. The common thread that links them is the Monster’s rejection by the creator and the Bride’s designation as an object who exists for another.
Corrie Shoemaker’s talk is “How Sherlock Holmes and the First Victorian Female Detective Laid the Foundation for Nancy Drew Video Games.”
Her paper examines how elements of the gothic and the Victorian, coupled with the birth of the fandom, originating with Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Stories, paved the way for future teen detective Nancy Drew and her niche but popular video game series. The logical analysis that was displayed by early detectives like Poe’s Dupin, and grew to fruition in Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, was easily adopted by female authors Catherine Louisa Pirkis (Miss Loveday Brooke Lady Detective) and Baroness Orczy (Lady Molly of Scotland Yard). Key elements of detective fiction were adapted and updated as texts modernized, eventually leading to the Stratemeyer Syndicate’s beloved Nancy Drew. By continually re-inventing Nancy the series was able to stay relevant, and by tapping into the fanbase and a Victorian detective aesthetic, the video games succeeded in connecting history with the future.
Will Scheibel’s talk is titled, “Monster Kids and Model-Kits; or, The Plasticity of Horror.”
This paper offers a brief history of the monster model-kits produced in the 1960s and 1970s by the styrene-plastic assembly-kit company Aurora. Based on popular horror-film characters, preeminently the monsters of Universal Pictures, such as the Frankenstein Monster, Dracula, and The Wolf Man, these collectibles were aimed at a postwar generation of adolescent “monster kids.” In conjunction with popular magazines such as Famous Monsters of Filmland and “hosted horror” programs broadcast on late-night television, this new market created the conditions for the modern horror fan culture we recognize today
BIOs
Corrie Shoemaker, Ph.D. (University of Waterloo, TRU), specialised in Shakespeare in her M.A. and Ph.D. She is currently a University Instructor at Thompson Rivers University where she teaches English literature, specifically Victorian detective fiction, classic texts and empathic literature. Her current research involves Canadian adaptations of Shakespeare, Studio Ghibli’s interpretations of children’s literature, Victorian detective fiction and narrative videogame design. She was thrilled to work with the Stratford Festival of Canada and Bard on the Beach when researching Canadian identity on the Shakespeare stage for her PhD. Her book “Speaking of Shakespeare: Conversations with Canadian Artists” will be published with Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2025) and she is revising her dissertation for publication. She contributes to the Stratford Festival Reviews website and had an article on Bard on the Beach published in Palgrave’s Global Shakespeare.
Jaynelle D. Nixon has a PhD in Global Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University at Buffalo. She is a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University, and one of the managing editors for Gatherings: an interdisciplinary, intersectional feminist journal. She is currently editing a special issue on academic gatekeeping, and she recently published an article on Black queer feminist placemaking. Her research focuses on representations of gender, race, disability, and class in media, specifically Gothic literature and Gothic horror films. She most often employs the lenses of Black feminism and queer of color critique. Dr. Nixon has taught a variety of horror classes including Queer Futures/Monstrous Past: Women in Contemporary SciFi-Horror Films, Mothers, Lovers, and Monsters: Women’s Archetypes in Contemporary Horror Films, African American Women in Horror Films, American Gothic, Major Authors: Angela Carter, and Major Authors: Edgar Allan Poe.
Will Scheibel chairs the Department of English at Syracuse University, where he is Professor of Film and Screen Studies. His work on popular culture includes the edited collection Penny Dreadful and Adaptation(2023) and the “TV Milestones” monograph Twin Peaks (2020), both in collaboration with Julie Grossman. He is also the author of Gene Tierney: Star of Hollywood’s Home Front (2022) and American Stranger: Modernisms, Hollywood, and the Cinema of Nicholas Ray (2017). His new book project is on the classic monster movies of Universal Pictures.
Comics in a Time of Crisis
A discussion panel about the value of comics and comic-making in times like these, featuring indie cartoonists MadyG, Noah Fischer, and MariNaomi.
Mads ‘Mady’ G. is a cartoonist, illustrator, animator, and designer currently based in New York’s Hudson Valley. Mady has been actively freelancing for over a decade and has received their BFA in Illustration from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY with high honors. They have worked with high-profile clients including Scholastic, Oni Press, and MARS Candy/Skittles.
They also are passionate about LGBT and human rights, especially the rights of transgender and gender non-conforming people, and have trained and volunteered as a crisis counselor for queer youth. This has informed both their work and their worldview.
MariNaomi (they/them) is the author and illustrator of the SPACE Award-winning graphic memoir Kiss & Tell: A Romantic Resume, Ages 0 to 22 (Harper Perennial, 2011), the Eisner-nominated Dragon’s Breath and Other True Stories (2dcloud/Uncivilized Books, 2014), Turning Japanese (2dcloud, 2016; Extended edition Oni Press, 2023), I Thought YOU Hated ME (Retrofit Comics, 2016), the Life on Earth trilogy (Graphic Universe, 2018-2020), Dirty Produce (Workman Publishing, 2021), and I Thought You Loved Me (Fieldmouse Press, 2023). Their work has appeared in nearly 100 print publications and has been featured on websites such as The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, The Washington Post, LA Times, The Rumpus, LA Review of Books, Midnight Breakfast, SF Examiner, and BuzzFeed.
MariNaomi’s comics and paintings have been featured in the Smithsonian, the de Young Museum, the Cartoon Art Museum, the Asian Art Museum, and the Japanese American National Museum. They are the founder and administrator of the Cartoonists of Color Database, the Queer Cartoonists Database, and the Disabled Cartoonists Database. They are a California Chapter Leader of Authors Against Book Bans.
Noah Fischer is a news junkie who grew up on Zen Monastery in California but has been in NYC since 2002. His work has been seen in the gallery and on the streets; from installations to stage design and performance, organizing, and writing and perhaps most of all, drawing. Noah has contributed to public discourse over the role cultural institutions play within capitalism and the debts that affect creative communities. He has exhibited in museums internationally from the Berlin Biennale, documenta, Whitney Biennial, and the Venice Biennale with and without permission. As a founding member of Occupy Museums, a member of Gulf Labor Coalition, and a longtime collaborator with Berlin-based theater group andcompany&Co, he balances collective and solo practice. Fischer is a unionized adjunct art teacher at Parsons and NYU.
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Past speakers have included A. Andrews (A Quick and Easy Guide to Sex & Disability), Alexandre Tefenkgi (The Good Asian), Atagun Ilhan (Poison Ivy), Ben Marra (Jesusfreak), C. Spike Trotman (Iron Circus Comics), Dani Pendergast (Demon in the Wood), Jeff Trexler (Comic Book Legal Defense Fund), JoAnn Purcell (Comics, Caregiving, and Crip Time), Maya McKibbin (The Song That Called Them Home), Natalie Riess (Power Within), Tyler Boss (What’s the Furthest Place from Here?), and Valentine De Landro (Silver Surfer: Ghost Light).
Geek/Art CONfluence 