David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies
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Café CSE
Posted: 28 Oct 2013 02:35 PM PDT
“Gothic Europe: Ghosts and National Heritage” will be presented by Scott Sprenger, associate dean of the College of Humanities and professor of French studies at BYU, and Paul Westover, assistant professor of English at BYU.
This Café CSE will be moderated by Carl Sederholm, an associate professor of humanities at BYU on Wednesday, 6 November at 4:00 p.m. in 238 HRCB.
Sprenger has been a professor of French literature and culture at BYU since 1993 and an associate dean in the College of Humanities since 2009. While his main research focus is on the problem of secularization in modern Europe, this topic often turns up in disguised form in French and English literature as haunted locales, curses, ghost stories, tales of zombies and madmen, and strange marital arrangements with zombies and the living dead. He recently taught a course called Gothic Marriage, which culminated in a student-led conference.
Westover joined BYU’s faculty in 2008 as an assistant professor of English and a specialist in British Romantic literature. He insists his gothic credentials are sketchy but does teach gothic novels on occasion, and his first book has a title that’s suitably ghoulish: Necromanticism: Traveling to Meet the Dead, 1750–1860 (2012). His work focuses on the history of the literary heritage industry in the nineteenth century, especially as it relates to readers’ attempts to encounter dead authors and access vanished pasts.
Sederholm is an associate professor of humanities at BYU and specializes in American literature, including gothic and horror literature and film. He is the co-editor of Adapting Poe: Re-Imaginings in Popular Culture and the co-author of Poe, the “House of Usher,” and the American Gothic. He has also published article on Jonathan Edwards, Nathanial Hawthorne, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King.
