Speakers

Rebecca Williams, Keynote Speaker
'Immortal Fandom?; The Post-Object Afterlives of Joss Whedon's Television Shows'
Friday July 8, 9.45-11.00

Rebecca Williams is Lecturer in Communication, Cultural, and Media Studies at the University of South Wales. She is the author of Post-object Fandom: Television, Identity, and Self-Narrative (Bloomsbury, 2015) and editor of Transitions, Endings, and Resurrections in Fandom (University of Iowa Press, forthcoming). She has published in the areas of media audiences and fandom, television horror, and celebrity in publications including Popular Communication, Continuum, Popular Music & Society, Critical Studies in Television, Celebrity Studies, Cinema Journal, Journal of British Cinema and Television, and Gothic Studies.

Marcus Ray Recht, Keynote Speaker
'Undead Masculinities: Visual Gender Constructions of Angel and Spike'
Saturday July 9, 9.30-11.00

Marcus Ray Recht received his PhD and MA in art education, philosophy, and psychoanalysis at the Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. He is an Associate Professor of Didactics at the Institute for Art Education in Gießen and is currently at the department of art education/new media at the University of Frankfurt. Research interests include image science, philosophy of arts, visual gender, Whedon Studies, computational fashion, visual culture, cultural studies, and television studies. He is the author of Der sympathische Vampir. Visualisierungen von Männlichkeiten in der TV-Serie Buffy (Campus-Verlag, 2011).

Lewis Call, Featured Speaker
'I Adore You . . . But I Need the Other Guy': Black Widow/Hulk as a Whedonesque Relationship of Dominance and Submission
Sunday July 10, 9.30-10.45

Lewis Call is Associate Professor and Chair of History at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He has been writing about representations of alternative sexualities in the Whedonverses since 2007, when his article "'Sounds Like Kinky Business to Me': Subtextual and Textual Representations of Erotic Power in the Buffyverse" won the Short Mr. Pointy Award. An expanded version of that article appeared in his book BDSM in American Science Fiction and Fantasy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), along with a chapter on Dollhouse. He has written about portrayals of alternative sexualities in Joss Whedon's comic books, including Buffy Season Eight and, most recently, Astonishing X-Men. He also writes about anarchist themes in popular culture; his essay "Buffy the Postanarchist Vampire Slayer" appeared in Post-Anarchism: A Reader (Pluto Press, 2011).  His paper "'A Very Specific Skill Set': Joss Whedon's Black Widow as Radical Icon of Third Wave Feminism" won the 2014 Mr. Pointy Award for best paper at the sixth Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses at California State University, Sacramento (in a tie with Stephanie Graves). He lives in San Luis Obispo with his two favorite Slayers: his wife Michelle and their daughter Rachel.

Stephanie Graves, Featured Speaker
'"What Other Choice Do We Have?": Agency and Autonomy in the Whedonverses'
​Sunday July 10, 9.30-10.45

Stephanie Graves is an adjunct professor of English at the University of North Alabama. She completed her MA at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, TN, where her concentration was film and television studies. In 2014 she was co-recipient (with Lewis Call) of the Mr. Pointy Award for best paper at the biennial Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses for her presentation “’You Really Think I’m Pretty?’: The Problem of Gender Representation in The Avengers.” Stephanie’s research interests include the grotesque, the Southern Gothic, postmodernism, and gender and queer studies. In her life outside academia, she works as a lighting designer for the entertainment industry and spends much time literally herding her three cats. Watching the premiere episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as it debuted in 1997 still ranks as one of her most formative experiences.