Wednesday 5 April, 4-6pm in Keynes Lecture Theatre 2

Zombyism and the Post-human Global Imaginary

Dr Adriana Neagu, Associate Lecturer, Babes-Bolyai University, Romania

The paper examines post-humanist representations in Anglo-American film productions from a perspective informed by global and hypermodern cultural theory. It is an enquiry into aspects of dystopian sensibility in global cinema seen as manifest in the prolific zombie genre of the post-apocalyptic strand. It is premised on the assumption that global society is endemically one marred by a catastrophic horizon of expectation, whose most congenial form of expression is dystopia, a genre on the rise worldwide, especially productive in Anglo-American cinematic practice. Drawing on global cultural theory, I seek to bring the zombie dominant to bear on what I construe as globality’s post-apocalyptic imagination.

Adriana Neagu is Associate Professor of Anglo-American Studies at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Department of Applied Modern Languages. She is the author of two reference works in postmodern critical theory and of numerous literary and cultural theory articles. Her teaching areas are diverse, combining translation, interpretation, and cultural studies disciplines. Her main specialism is in the poetics of modernism and postmodernism, postcolonial theory and the literatures of identity, and translation theory and practice. At present her research centres on global theory and multiculturalism in post 9/11 context.

Tuesday 4 April, 12-2pm in Cornwallis North-West, Seminar Room 9

The Dream for a New (Disney) World; The idea, the plans and the creation of the Orlando, Florida Walt Disney Resort.

Konstantinos Karatzas, Associate Lecturer, University of Zaragoza, Spain

This lecture will focus on the first stages of the creation of Disney World in Orlando, Florida. The lecture will chronicle and describe the selection process of the site, purchases of land and the creation of the Reedy Creek Improvement District that encompasses the property. The lecture will analyse the tax assessor’s plats that used to identify and evaluate alternative World’s sites and also present feasibility studies, news releases and the early stages of the advertising campaign of the ‘New Disney World’.

Konstantinos D. Karatzas is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Zaragoza, Spain, specializing in African American history. His work focuses on the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma Race War, the Civil Rights Movement, the interpretation of violence and race in the United States along with the examination of collective memory. During the summer of 2017, Konstantinos was a visiting research scholar at the Universities of South Florida, Florida-Gainesville and Central Florida where he explored the modern history of Florida.