‘The International Gothic Association annual conference is one of the largest and most prestigious dissemination opportunity for an early career researcher in the fields of Gothic and Horror studies. I attended this conference shortly after submitting my PhD thesis. As such, it presented a unique and timely opportunity to connect with an international selection of scholars in my field. As this was the first event of its kind that I was able to attend in person since the covid-19 pandemic, it was a cherished opportunity to see new research, network, and meet scholars and publishers in my field in person.

 The theme of “Gothic Interruptions” was particularly relevant to my research on horror representations of political and feminist consciousness after The Great Recession. With the CFP asking “How do these Gothic circumstances, terrifying as they may be, lead to change, looking toward new futures?” IGA2022 provided an exceptional intersection of my research interests and expertise. Participating in the conference permitted me to locate my own work on contemporary American horror cinema within that academic conversation.

My PhD research analysed American gender politics in the post-recession era as mobilised around the issue of sexual violence and as seen through selected demon-possession films produced in that time. My paper, “Demon Girls, Interrupted: Sexual Violence and Raised Feminist Consciousness in American Horror Cinema” used the case study of the 2011 film Lovely Molly (Sánchez) as an example of how contemporary demon-possession narratives relate to a reactionary, “popular” misogynist backlash to feminism’s fourth wave, particularly towards feminist theory and activism relating to sexual violence, harassment, and misconduct. I had a wonderful experience presenting my paper on a panel with researchers that were engaged in feminist and horror research and received thoughtful and supportive feedback and questions from the panel chair and attendees.’

Dr Máiréad Casey is an early career researcher with a PhD in Film and Digital Media from Ollscoil na Gaillimhe/University of Galway (formerly NUI Galway) under the supervision of Dr Conn Holohan. She currently teaches at Trinity College Dublin and can be reached at caseym4@tcd.ie

‘As a recipient of the Irish Association for American Studies (IAAS) Postgraduate Conference Bursary, I was able to attend “Making Modernism 1922: 100 Years”: the annual conference of Modernist Studies Association (MSA) in Portland, Oregon, USA from 27^th to 30^th October 2022. My paper is titled “Where a painter is a poet”: E. E. Cummings’ Modernist Response to Chinese Art.” It is about Cummings and his modernist engagement with Chinese art (as one of important sources for Pacific-Rim Modernism), especially the composite artistry of “three perfections” combining the roles of poet, painter, and calligrapher. Our panel “Modernist Orientalism: Verse and Visual Art (II)” has two papers: apart from mine on Cummings’ East Asian aesthetics, the other is about “T.S. Eliot and the Dao: Negotiating the Way in Four Quartets.” Based on the thematic connection in-between our papers, we had a fruitful discussion around the several key topics of Taoism, translation, and the transpacific influence on Euro-American modernism. Both presentations show how Chinese cultures helped modernist poets to integrate into a series of idiosyncratic avant-garde experiments by bringing new energies from both sides of word/image and West/East. Overall, it is of great value to my early career development in the Anglo-American modernist studies and the progress of the current PhD project going forward.’