Elisabeth Bronfen
Elisabeth Bronfen is currently Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich and also holds a Global Distinguished Chair at New York University. Her work moves between the fields of literature, film studies, cultural theory, psychoanalysis and feminism. Prof Bronfen came to international prominence with the publication in 1992 of Over Her Dead Body (MUP). This work has been followed by monographs on Dorothy Richardson (Dorothy Richardson's Art of Memory) and Sylvia Plath, as well as discussions of hysteria (The Knotted Subject) and film (Home in Hollywood). She has also co-edited volumes on death and representation (Femininity and the Aesthetic) and feminist theory (Feminist Consequences). Her works in German include Die Diva, and her acclaimed cultural history of the night, Tiefer als der Tag gedacht, which is currently being translated into English.
Christoph Grunenberg
Christoph Grunenberg was appointed Director of Tate Liverpool in March 2001.
His previous appointment was as a Curator in the Collections Division of Tate, which he joined in August 1999. He was born and educated in Germany, but came to London to complete a masters degree and then a Ph.D. at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He has subsequently worked at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Kunsthalle in Basel and at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where he was Curator from 1995 to 1999, as well as acting Director during 1997 and 1998.
He has curated a number of important exhibitions. During his period in Basel these included Rachel Whiteread and in Boston Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late 20th Century Art 1997; Enterprise: Venture and Process in Contemporary Art 1997; and FRIEZE: Wall Paintings by Franz Ackermann, John Armleder, Margaret Kilgallen, Sarah Morris, and Alexander Scott 1999. At Tate Liverpool these include Marc Quinn; Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture; Mike Kelley: The Uncanny; Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era, Jake and Dinos Chapman: Bad Art for Bad People, Peter Blake: A Retrospective. He was also the co-Curator of Gustav Klimt: Painting and Modern Life in Vienna 1900 exhibition held at Tate Liverpool this summer (the most successful exhibition in the Gallery's twenty year history). Christoph was also the Chair of the 2007 Turner Prize Jury.
Tanya Krzywinska
Tanya Krzywinska is Professor in Screen Studies at Brunel University. She is the author of several books and many articles on different aspects of videogames, horror and fantasy and is particularly interested in occult fiction and fantasy worlds. She is the co-author of Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogames Forms and Meanings (IB Tauris, 2006), and Science Fiction Cinema (Wallflower, 2002) and author of Sex and the Cinema (Wallflower, 2006), A Skin For Dancing In: Witchcraft, Possession and Voodoo in Film (2001), and co-editor of ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces (Wallflower Press, 2002) and videogame/player/text (MUP, 2007). She convenes a Masters programme in Digital Games: Theory and Design at Brunel University, London, and is President of the Digital Games Research Association.
Invited Speakers
Sarah Kember
Sarah Kember is Reader in New Technologies of Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her research focuses on feminist science and technology studies, especially debates between artificial life and other aspects of the convergence between biology and computer science. She also works on imaging technologies and the relationship between photography and the digital. She is currently developing an innovative approach to the question of remediation and the 'fusion' of science and fiction. Her publications include Virtual Anxiety: Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity (1998), Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life (2003), and, with Mariam Fraser and Celia Lury, Inventive Life: Towards the New Vitalism (2006). She is the co-editor of the journal Photographies and has recently completed a novel, The Optical Effects of Lightning.
Jo Baker
Jo Baker is Lecturer in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. She has published three novels to date, Offcomer (2001), The Mermaid's Child (2004) and The Telling (2008), a ghost story set in rural Lancashire in the 1840s and the present day. She is currently working on her fourth novel and an adaptation for television of Charlotte Bronte's novel Shirley.
Daragh Carville
Daragh Carville is a playwright and screenwriter. His plays, which include Observatory (1999), Convictions (2000), Family Plot (2005), and an adaptation of M. R. James's The Disappearance (2006) have been widely produced in Britain and Ireland, and in France, Germany, Holland and the US. His adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula aired on Radio 4 in 2003. Middletown, a Night of the Hunter-like tale of an over-zealous Irish preacher, starring Matthew McFadyen, was released in 2006. His latest film, Cherrybomb starring Rupert Grint, is to be released later this year.
Paul Magrs
Paul Magrs is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of twenty novels and volumes of short stories, including the Brenda series: Never the Bride (2006), Something Borrowed (2007) and Conjugal Rites (2008), which follow the adventures of the Bride of Frankenstein when she opens up a B&B in Whitby, and were described by the Independent as displaying 'the combined talents of Alan Bennett, Angela Carter and The League of Gentlemen'. He also writes radio drama and has adapted Never the Bride for Radio 4 and Radio 7. The fourth novel in the series, Hell's Belles, is published later this year.
Marina Warner is Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, and a prize-winning writer of fiction, criticism and history. Since the publication in 1972 of The Dragon Empress, her biography of nineteenth-century Chinese ruler Tz'u-hsi, she has published nine novels and short story collections, thirteen non-fiction works and countless uncollected short stories and essays. Her best-known critical and historical works include Alone of All her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985), Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time (1994), From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994), No Go the Bogeyman: On Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (1998), Signs and Wonders (2003), Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (2004), and Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century (2006). In 2008 she was awarded a CBE for Services to Literature.