Technologies of Frankenstein: 1818-2018

7-9 March 2018, Stevens Institute of Technology (Hoboken, New Jersey, USA)

Co-hosted by IEEE History Center and Stevens Institute of Technology, College of Arts and Letters

The 200th anniversary year of the first edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus has drawn worldwide interest in revisiting the novel's themes. What were those themes and what is their value to us in the early twenty-first century? Mary Shelley was rather vague as to how Victor, a young medical student, managed to reanimate a person cobbled together from parts of corpses. The imagination of the novel's readership outfitted Victor's laboratory with the chemical and electrical technologies that brought the creature to life. Subsequent theatrical and cinematic versions of Frankenstein have been, like the creature, patched together from the novel and from contemporary popular press as well as public demonstrations of medical, chemical, and electrical research. Mary Shelley's contemporaries arguably exploited her novel to their own purposes, including George Canning (leader of the British House of Commons in 1824) who drew an analogy between the prospect of freeing West Indian slaves and Victor's “monster” who is left in the world with no master to curtail his criminal instincts. Some of Mary Shelley's biographers characterize the story of Victor Frankenstein's reanimation experiment as a cautionary tale against techno-science run amok while others emphasize Victor's irresponsible behavior toward his subject. In what ways might our tools of science and communication serve as an “elixir of life” since the age of Frankenstein?

Plenary Event: The Charles E. Robinson Memorial Lecture
Susan Wolfson (Princeton University)

Susan Wolfson is Professor of English at Princeton University, and with Ron Levao, edited the Harvard Annotated Frankenstein. She also edited, on her own, Frankenstein: A Longman Cultural Edition, and the Harvard Annotated Northanger Abbey. She has published widely in the field of Romantic-period studies. Her academic monographs include, most recently: Borderlines: The Shapings of Gender in British Romanticism
(2007), Romantic Interactions (2010), Reading John Keats (2015), and forthcoming, Romantic Shades and Shadows. She has been the recipient of awards or grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the
Guggenheim Foundation, the Association of Literary Critics and Scholars, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. She enjoys teaching in the "Long Romantic" period, and when her territorial colleagues are not looking, Shakespeare and Milton, too--as honorary Romantics.

Call for Papers

Frankenstein continues to inspire discourse in scholarly, popular, and creative culture about the Monstrous, the Outsider, the Other, and scientific ethics. This conference will examine such connections in our thinking about humanism and techno-science from the novel's publication to the present. We construe broadly the intersecting themes of humanism, technology, and science and we welcome proposals from all fields of study for presentations that add a twenty-first century perspective to Frankenstein. Topic areas and questions may include but are not limited to:

Topic areas:

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Branding “Frankenstein” (Food, Comics, Gaming, Music, Theater, Film)

Computational and Naval Technology (Mapping, Navigation, The Idea of the Journey)

Digital Humanities and GeoHumanities (Applications, Pedagogy, Library/Information Technology)

Engineering Technologies: Past/Present/Future (Chemical, Electrical, Biomedical)

Future Technologies and Labor Concerns

Questions:

How might industrialized nations develop low-cost solutions to provide maternal and pediatric care in regions with limited medical facilities?

How are our ideas of the “Monstrous” or “Other” changing since the publication of Frankenstein?

Is the pharmaceutical industry using human consumers as experiments for profit?

What ethical and legal issues will emerge in the age of advanced or “aware” artificial intelligence?

What does it mean to be human?

What is the responsibility of government in world-wide health care?

Who is responsible for the outcomes of techno-science?

Who should have access to advanced human enhancement technologies and why?

Submit abstracts of 300 words and brief cv by 15 October 2017 to Michael Geselowitz (m.geselowitz@ieee.org) and Robin Hammerman (rhammerm@stevens.edu).

We are dedicated to a harassment-free conference experience for everyone.

Visit our conference webpage: http://frankenstein2018.org