Bram Stoker Centenary Conference 2012: Bram Stoker: Life and Writing
Date: 5th-6th July 2012
Location: The Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin
Keynote Lecture: Professor Roy Foster
Plenary Speakers: Professor Christopher Frayling, Professor William Hughes and Professor Carol Senf
Panel Discussion: The Facts and the Fictions: Interpreting Stoker. Featuring Paul Murray (author of From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker).
‘Bram Stoker is as fluent and witty a speaker as he is eloquent as a writer. Impulsive, quick-tempered, generous, and moody, like most complex personalities, he is liable to be misunderstood by the mere outsider…’ (press cutting, 1905)
Bram Stoker loved Trinity College, and spent some of his happiest years here. He was Auditor of the Historical Society and President of the Philosophical Society, and a member of very many College sporting societies. However, despite his vampire creation, Dracula, being world-famous, and in spite of a host of academic studies of the novel in which this vampire first appeared, Stoker himself remains a figure shrouded in some darkness and his other writings are virtually unknown and ignored. This two day public conference, organised by the School of English, in association with the Long Room Hub, and the National Library of Ireland, and sponsored by the Trinity Association & Trust, and the Arts and Social Sciences Benefaction Fund, to be held in Stoker’s alma mater in Dublin, where he was born and grew up, will attempt to address this large gap. The main aim of the conference will be to try to read Stoker in the round, expanding the critical focus away from an exclusive obsession with Dracula and taking account of the full extent of Stoker’s writing, from his other Gothic novels, The Lair of the White Worm and The Snake’s Pass, to his short stories and journalism. It will also consider Stoker’s relationship to late nineteenth-century Ireland and especially Dublin, and address his status as an ‘Irish’ writer of substance. The conference will be held in a year of activities to mark the centenary of Stoker’s death and is the centerpiece of a week-long Dublin celebration of Stoker (other activities include lectures in the National Library and the Little Museum of Dublin; a screening of Tod Browning’s Dracula in the IFI; and an evening of readings in St Patrick’s Cathedral).
Provisional Schedule
Thursday 5 July 2012
5.45pm: Opening by Dr. Darryl Jones, Head of the School of English, Trinity College Dublin.
6pm:
Chair: Professor Darryl Jones.
Plenary Address: Professor Roy Foster (Oxford): '"Transylvania Is Not England": Locating Bram Stoker.'
7pm: Reception
8pm: Conference dinner (for participants)
Friday 6 July 2012
9.30am:
Chair: Dr. Elizabeth McCarthy (Trinity College Dublin)
Speaker: Professor Carol Senf (Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta GA): ‘Bram Stoker: Ireland and Beyond’.
10.45-11: Coffee
11am: Panel:
Chair: Dr. Sorcha Ni Fhlainn (Trinity College Dublin)
- Andrew Garavel (Santa Clara University, CA) – ‘The Shoulder of Shasta: Bram Stoker’s California Romance’
- William Floyd (Charleston Southern University) – ' "The Sport of Opposite Forces": Stoker's Metaphorical Orphans'
- Valeria Cavelli (Trinity College Dublin)– ‘See how the bog can preserve’: One Nation Under A Stereotype - The Snake’s Pass’
1pm: Lunch
2pm:
Chair: Dr. Christina Morin (Trinity College Dublin)
Professor William Hughes (Bath Spa University).
3. 15pm: Roundtable discussion: Bram Stoker: The Facts and the Fictions.
Chair: Professor Sir Christopher Frayling.
Featuring: Paul Murray (author of From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker [Jonathan Cape, 2004]); David J. Skal (author of Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen [Norton, 1990]; The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror [Faber and Faber, 1993])
4.15pm: Coffee
4.45pm: Professor Sir Christopher Frayling: ‘Mister Stoker’s Holiday’.
6pm. Closing remarks
Saturday, 7 July 2012:
The National Library of Ireland, in association with Trinity College Dublin, presents a lecture by Professor Elizabeth Miller and Dacre Stoker:
‘Bram Stoker’s Dublin Journal’ (illustrated).
This lecture will take place at 2pm in the National Library.
For further information contact:
Dr. Jarlath Killeen
School of English
Trinity College Dublin
killeej@tcd.ie
Supported by the Trinity Long Room Hub
