New York Tolkien Conference, July 31

If you’re in New York this Thursday, you might like to attend the NY Tolkien conference, to be held on Thursday, July 31 at Baruch College.

For details on the event, the speakers, and abstracts, take a look at the NY Tolkien Conference webpage. The program may be small, but the cast of speakers is stellar! Check it out:

	Room 7-155	7-150
10am	Kristine Larsen: Immeasurable Halls and Dreamlike Forms: Tracing the Caves of Cheddar Gorge Throughout Tolkien’s Legendarium
10:55	Thomas Hillman: Mighty in the tale of the World: the Death and Afterlife of Turin Turambar
11:45	Nicholas Birns: The Little Kingdom and the Shire: Farmer Giles of Ham and the Legendarium
12:35-1:15	Lunch break
1:15	Anthony Burdge/Jessica Burke/Russell Palmieri: The Hobbit Stage Play	Ross Nunamaker: A Brief History of Dragons
2:10	Constance Wagner: Understanding the Call: Lothlórien  and Its Lady	Alexander Retakh: Ioreth, the Wise-woman of Gondor: Heard but not Seen
3:00	Jeff LaSala: Making The Silmarillion User-Friendly—Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let Gondolin Fall
4:00	Artist Guest of Honor Donato Giancola

Online Midsummer Seminar, Mythopoeic Society, August 2-3

The Mythopoeic Society’s Online Midsummer Seminar (OMS) is being held in honour of the ten-year anniversary of the publication of Perilous and Fair: Women in the Life and Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Lesley Donovan, who will be guests of honor at the event. The theme of the seminar is women and gender in mythopoeic works. A track dedicated to Tolkien’s works will run on both days of the weekend. Other presentations will deal with intersectional feminist approaches to various mythopoeic works. That’s the track that I’ll be presenting in, talking about contemporary women’s rewritings of the Beowulf story of Grendel’s Mother.

Registration is a very reasonable $20-$25 US. More details can be found on the conference website.

Here is the list of speakers from the OMS conference information page:

• KEYNOTE PRESENTATION: Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan: Still Perilous, Still Fair: Perspectives on the Legacy, or How (not)Éowyn and (not)Galadriel Made the Magic Work
• Megan Abrahamson: Revisiting Ambiguous Aredhel
• Megan Abrahamson, Dusty Brooks, Ashley Flanagan, Cassidy Percoco: Our Flag Means Gender: Gender “Fuckery” in Our Flag Means Death
• Supriya Baijal: Witches, Prophets, and Outcasts: Liminal Women in Mythopoeic Fantasy
• Jane Beal: The Influence of the Pearl-Maiden on the Imagination of J.R.R. Tolkien
• Lelie Brémont: The Lay(er)s of the Corrigan
• Marie Bretagnolle: Painting “the most beautiful of all the Children of Ilúvatar”: Aesthetic Beauty in The Silmarillion and its Illustrations
• Sara Brown: “Her hair was held a marvel unmatched”: The Significance of Long, Blonde Hair in Tolkien’s Imagination
• Liz Busby: Belief After the Death of King Arthur: Lev Grossman’s Postsecular Portrayal of Nimue in The Bright Sword
• Nicole duPlessis: The Tragedy of Arwen Evenstar in “The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen” and in Her Legacy on Film
• Alexandra Filonenko: “Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans”: Melian’s and Lúthien’s Numinosity
• Alicia Fox-Lenz, Leah Hagan, Grace Moone: She Chose Her Fate: The Genderqueer Women of Tolkien and Freedom Beyond the Patriarchal Binary
• Akshitha Javahar: Reimagining Human-Nonhuman Friendships through Feminist Animal Studies: An Exploration of Sunny and Della’s Cross-Species Friendship in Nnedi Okorafor’s The Nsibidi Scripts Series
• Erin McBrien: Sex, the Body, and Learning Gender: Demons in the World of the Five Gods
• Kristine Larsen: “The gift which was withheld I take”: The Rape of the Sun Maiden in Tolkien’s Legendarium
• Jonathan Sexton (Eitan Runyan): I’d Rather (S)He Was Dead: Resurrection & Gender Transition in Superhero Comics
• Anna Smol: Grendel’s Mother Talks Back: Contemporary Women’s Mythopoeic Revisions
• Robert Tally: Bolg’s Mother: Orc Women in Tolkien’s Legendarium
• Michael A. Torregrossa: From Once to Future Queen: Revitalizing Guinevere in Recent Arthuriana
• Christopher Vaccaro: From Haleth to Hére: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shieldmaidens and Kenji Kamiyama’s War of the Rohirrim
• Lyra Keran Zhang: ‘Desirable Lady’ or ‘She who desires’: Examining Aredhel’s Agency in Tolkien’s Legendarium

See you online!