Global Weirding Guest Lecture #2 - Alison Sperling (TU Berlin)

“Weirding as Disrupting a Literary History: From the Old Weird to the New Weird”
Alison Sperling (TU Berlin)
December 8, 6:30pm CET, Zoom

Global Weirding Lectures #2

Abstract
This talk tracks a literary history of the Weird, a genre most associated with Modernist American writer of supernatural horror H.P. Lovecraft, from the Modernist period into the contemporary cultural moment. Departing somewhat from the majority of scholarship on the Weird which largely claims there is a kind of break between the Old and the New cultural iterations, the latter of which is often revisionary of Lovecraft and the Old Weird's racism and nativism, this talk will try to think differently about their relation and about the role of race in the long arc of weird cultural production in the U.S. context.

Alison Sperling is an IPODI Postdoctoral Fellow at the Technical University Berlin and an Affiliate Research Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin. She researches the Weird and science fictional in literature and visual culture, feminist and queer theory, and the Anthropocene. She has published in Rhizomes, Girlhood Studies, and Paradoxa, with forthcoming work in Science Fiction Studies and The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. She is also the editor of a recent issue of Paradoxa on "Climate Fictions." She is currently at work on her first book project, Weird Modernisms.