March 7 - 9, 2018
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. Partly as a result of this technical gap, and partly as a result of many other features of the novel, 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 may include but are not limited to:
- 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
Submit abstracts of 300 words and brief CV by 15 October 2017 to Michael Geselowitz (mgeselowitz@ieee.org) and Robin Hammerman (rhammerm@stevens.edu).
Contact Info: Michael N. Geselowitz, Ph.D., Senior Director, IEEE History Center at Stevens Institute of Technology, Castle Point on Hudson
Website: http://frankenstein2018.org/