Thursday, September 21, 2023

9.30 – 10.00 Conference Opening

Tim Lanzendörfer (Goethe-University Frankfurt) and Marlon Lieber (Goethe-University Frankfurt)

10.00 – 11.00 Panel 1: Zombie Studies and the Academy

Tim Lanzendörfer (Goethe-University Frankfurt): “Deanimating Zombie Studies”

Sarah Juliet Lauro (University of Tampa): “Who’s Afraid of Zombie Studies?”

Coffee Break

11.30 – 12.30 Panel 2: Zombie Meaning

Kyle Bishop (Southern Utah University): “Empty Head, Empty Signifiers: The Zombie as the Ultimate Floating Signifier”

Scott Hamilton (Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo): “A Walking [Dead] Contradiction: Zombiism as Problem and Solution in the Neoliberal Era”

Lunch Break

1.30 – 2.30 Panel 3: Capitalism, Labor, Zombie

Sami Khatib (HfG Karlsruhe): “Undead Labor: Monsters, Vampires, and Zombies” (online)

Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich (CAU zu Kiel): “Zombies and Riots Everywhere: On Dead Labor and Surplus Humanity”

Coffee Break

3.00 – 4.00 Panel 4: Zombie Genres, Generic Zombies

Cory James Rushton (St. Francis Xavier University): “What the Life Cycle of the Western Can Tell Us About the Future of the Zombie”

Johannes Fehrle (Humboldt-University Berlin): “‘I was a zombie before it was cool’: Looking back at Hollywood’s Early Zombie Movies”

6.00 Film Screening at Deutsches Filmmuseum

Return of the Living Dead (dir. Dan O’Bannon, 1985), introduction by Kyle Bishop

Friday, September 22, 2023

10.00 – 11.00 Panel 5: The Zombie as Metaphor

Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck, University of London): “Undead Syndromes”

Sandra Aline Wagner (Independent Scholar): “Undead Lovers—Romantic Zombies and Millenial Identity”

Coffee Break

11.30 – 1.00 Panel 6: Zombies in the Anthropocene

Lawrence May (University of Auckland): “Undead Ecosystems: The Videogame Zombie in the Anthropocene” (online)

Anya Heise-von der Lippe (University of Tübingen): “Sustainable Zombies? Thinking Through Critical Posthumanism and the Climate Catastrophe with the Undead”

Lea Espinoza Garrido (University of Wuppertal): “Memory, Space, and the Agency of Matter in (Contemporary) Zombie Narratives”

Lunch Break

2.00 – 3.00 Zombie Ideology

Stephen Shapiro (University of Warwick): “The Zombi World-System: Going Beyond the Anthropology and the Decolonial Cultural Studies Divide”

Marlon Lieber (Goethe-University Frankfurt): “Monstrous Mobility: The Living Dead in the Longue Durée“

Coffee Break

3.30 – 5.00 Wrap Up

8.00 Art Project / Discussion at Synnika

The Last of Us in the Bahnhofsviertel, introduction by Sarah Juliet Lauro