Shaun Kimber is organising the conference and film event The cultural mythology of the snuff movie to be held at BU in November. The event is partly funded by NRG and registration opens in October. More information can be found at http://snuffmovie.weebly.com/.
Shaun has recently signed a contract for a book on Writing Horror Screenplays, to be co-authored with former NRG and BU colleague, Craig Batty. He has resubmitted for review Transgressive Edge Play and Srpski Film/A Serbian Film (Spasojevic, 2010) to the journal Horror Studies, and is working on the chapter Merging fact/fiction: film, narrative and the Henry Lee Lucas ‘Story’ for the forthcoming book Real Lives, Celebrity Stories edited by Julia Round and Bronwen Thomas.
Rosie Cullen recently won the Charleston Short Story Festival. The challenge this year was to write a one page short story entitled The Final to be read aloud in under 3mins. Rosie received £100 and the story will be published on the Charleston website. Charleston House near Lewes is the former home of members of the Bloomsbury group and hosts both literary and arts events.
Jim Pope is organising the third New Media Writing Prize 2012 (http://www.newmediawritingprize.co.uk). For the awards event, speakers signed so far are Andy Campbell (digital artist/writer); Louise Rice (producer at digital publisher TouchPress) and Tim Wright (BU visiting fellow and all-round digital genius. He has also secured further funding to develop Genarrator, software designed for the creation of interactive narratives.
In June, Julia Round co-organised the Third International Comics Conference held here at Bournemouth University. The conference brought together industry professionals and academics and was attended by nearly 100 delegates across two days.
Julia presented some of her work at the Comic Arts Conference in San Diego (July 2012), where she was also able to conduct interviews with leading transmedia scholar Henry Jenkins and with comics artist Charlie Adlard (both to be published in the journal Studies in Comics in 2013).
Julia and Jim Pope will be presenting a paper at the Devils and Dolls conference at Bristol University in March 2013. The paper’s title is ‘Lost little girls (with scary powers): how do children respond to Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Roald Dahl’s Matilda?’).
Julia and Bronwen Thomas recently completed their six month AHRC funded project called Researching Readers Online. They presented a paper based on the work of the project at the Digital Humanities Conference in Sheffield in September and they are now seeking further funding for this research.
In July, Bronwen Thomas presented a paper on Talking About Television on Twitter at the Poetics and Linguistics Association Conference in Malta. Over the summer, she was commissioned to write a book on Narrative for the Basics series published by Routledge. Her article on ‘Kicking the Hornet’s Nest: The Rhetoric of Social Campaigning in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy’ was recently published in a special issue of Language and Literature on contemporary crime fiction.
Helen Jacey was awarded a Fusion Investment Fund Staff Networking and Mobility grant to support her investigation into the comedy genre. This first element of her project involved a trip to Australia where she participated in various events at RMIT in Melbourne. These included running a comedy workshop with screenwriting students, giving a paper entitled ‘Bridesmaids vs the Hangover’ to research staff, meeting the Practice-Led PhDs, visiting the Australian Film Institute Archive based at RMIT and working on a book proposal about screenwriting and the romantic comedy genre with Craig Batty, to be published by Kamera. She also attended the Words and Images Conference at UTS and Macquarie where she gave a paper ‘And the Screenwriter Created Man’ focusing on the writing of bromances. Helen’s chapter proposal on the work of Ida Lupino and Catherine Breillat as writer/directors has been accepted for inclusion in the forthcoming International Guide of Women Screenwriters.