FRANKEN-CINEMA ROUNDTABLE IN SEATTLE
At this year's SCMS conference, Dr. Scahill joined a panel of scholars on the near-bicentennial of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to celebrate the many film adaptations of her groundbreaking work. In "Frankenstein Across Time, Genres, and Culture," Prof. Khan presented on the rhetoric of "agri-horror" documentaries like Food, Inc which employ the Frankensteinian as means of framing the debate over GMOs. Scholar Subha Das Mollick discussed the unique features of Bengali science fiction as a mode of colonial resistance. Prof. Benshoff examined the place of female creators in post-war American horror films.
Prof. Scahill presented on the 1985 John Hughes film Weird Science, an amalgum of Frankenstein, Pygmalion, the genie myth, and Mary Poppins, which portrays young men as Frankensteinian collages of competing modes of masculinity. The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) is the largest professional organization for media studies professors, and their annual meeting hosts nearly 3,000 film scholars every year.
