From Monstrosities to Wonders: Ecohorror and Transcorporeality Panel at ASLE 2019, UC Davis, June 26-29, 2019 Organizers: Christine Peffer, Michigan State University & Nadhia Grewal, University of London Goldsmiths This roundtable seeks to explore the body as a productive site for interfacing with the nonhuman in the context of ASLE’s conference theme, Paradise on Fire….
Author: christinepeffer
I am currently a PhD candidate in the English Department at Michigan State University. My research interests include postmodern and contemporary fiction, specifically at the intersection of weird fiction, ecology, and theology. I hold a BA and MA from Gannon University, where I taught freshman composition and served as the assistant director of the university’s Writing Center. My current dissertation project, tentatively titled "Fungal Sacraments: Weird Fiction and Apophatic Ecology," explores a long 2oth century of ecologically-inclined weird fictions. I argue that, through fungi, weird fiction has been integral in shaping a chthonically tangled conversation about re-spiritualizing ecological discourse. Drawing from the long history of apophatic theology, I argue that writers of the weird have developed what I am calling an apophatic ecology by considering fungi as both privileged subjects and as theoretical framework for thinking differently about human relations with the more-than-human world. At MSU, I have taught courses in IAH, WRAC, and the English department, and am currently teaching an online summer course titled Monstrous Natures: Horror, the Supernatural, and the Environment.
MLA Seattle 2020
Panel: Botanophilia, Botanophobia Abstract: “A biologist’s nightmare”: Fungal Consciousness and the New Weird Fungi are unusual organisms. Because they are fundamentally dependent upon intra-actions with other creatures, mycologists have struggled to determine their ontological status, and to pin down a “complete” taxonomy of fungal forms. We might say that a fungus, as such, does not…