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Fear and Horror Series in the Romance World: Virtual Roundtable

Speaker: Sandra García Gutiérrez, Chloe M. Hill, Marco Malvestio, Sean Singh Matharoo; moderated by Irene Gómez-Castellano
Date: February 24, 2022
Time: 5:00PM

Have you ever wondered why ghosts, zombies, vampires, and other forms of monstrosity crowd the media? How do the public react to frightening stories?

We are excited to announce the opening event of Fear and Horror Series in the Romance World, a series of events featuring international scholars. On Thursday, February 24, 2022, please join a group of four scholars--Sandra, Chloe, Marco, and Sean--at different stages in their careers discussing how they understand fear and horror narratives, what they like about them, and how they dialogue with a variety of disciplines, such as cultural studies, women’s and gender studies, and ecocriticism.

“Fear and Horror Series in the Romance World” is a program that explores narratives of fear and horror in the Romance World, encompassing the Romance languages, literatures, and cultures within the transnational and regional contexts in which they have developed. Such narratives engage with social anxieties and fears, interrogating contemporary individuals' relationships to social justice and forging intersections with other disciplines. Through this series, we will consider how fear and horror narratives of the Romance World circulate in diverse linguistic spaces, how they relate to epistemologies of crisis, and how they might contribute to the ongoing project of constructing alternative futures.

Thursday, February 24, 5pm: Virtual roundtable on narratives in multilingual dialogue. Participants: Sandra García Gutiérrez, Chloe M. Hill, Marco Malvestio, Sean Singh Matharoo; moderated by Irene Gómez-Castellano

Sandra is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Romance Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. She specializes in Contemporary Iberian literature and Transatlantic studies, with a focus on Cultural Studies and Womens’ Studies. Her work explores Gothic aesthetics and social questions regarding the female self. She uses comparative approaches and methodologies from other disciplines in the humanities such as history, art, and psychology. She has published different articles such as: “Vestir al sujeto femenino: la moda goticuqui en Casa de Muñecas (2012) de Patricia Esteban Erlés” (2021), and “Las princesas de Agustín Pérez Zaragoza: un acto de autoría rebelde” (2020). She likes to read gothic stories and fairy tales in the company of her black cat, Luci Salem.

Chloe Hill is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Portuguese at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She holds a doctoral degree from Brown University in Portuguese & Brazilian Studies. Her research examines the relationship between globalization and literary production through the Brazilian novel of the twenty-first century. Her current work explores how contemporary apocalyptic narratives inform global configurations of power, knowledge, and migratory experiences, drawing from areas of study such world literature, translation theory, and ecocriticism. Her published works have appeared in Brasil/Brazil, Revista Diadorim, and Romance Notes. In her free time, she enjoys true crime podcasts, crossword puzzles, and Regency romance novels.

Marco Malvestio is EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Padua and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His project “EcoSF – The Ecology of Italian Science Fiction” explores the presence of ecological issues in Italian science fiction. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Padua, and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto. In 2021, he published The Conflict Revisited: The Second World War in Post-Postmodern Fiction (Peter Lang), based on his doctoral thesis, as well as Raccontare la fine del mondo: Fantascienza e Antropocene (nottetempo).

Sean Singh Matharoo is a transdisciplinary scholar of French- and English-language speculative literature, media, and philosophy, which he studies in the contexts of postcolonial studies, the energy humanities, and performance studies. As a part of the Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity, he is updating his thesis into a book. Matharoo’s research responds to the Anthropocenic energy crisis and the need to transition to alternative energy sources by studying how literature, media, and philosophy contribute to the decolonization of petroculture by impelling us to find, in language, the gift of solar-powered futures.

Irene Gómez Castellano is an Associate Professor of Spanish Literature at UNC. She is also the editor of the academic journal Romance Notes. She is the author of the book La cultura de las máscaras and the co-editor of Dissonances of Modernity: Music, Text and Performance in Modern Spain. She is the author of over 40 articles and book chapters, and her poetry book Natación (Swimming) was awarded the Premio Victoria Urbano de Creación. She is currently studying the cultural representations of hunger in Modern and Contemporary Spain.

Join Zoom Meeting

Meeting ID: 958 6539 4520
Passcode: ZrH2VV