On April 29 2024, SBL committee members James, Amber and Rose hosted the University of Suffolk’s English department’s first ever postgraduate conference: ‘Phantasmagoria: In Conversation with Ghosts’. This event had been many months in the planning, working with Dr Lindsey Scott and PhD student Molly-Kate Britton, but a spooktacular day was had by all. Today I am going to be sharing with you a flavour of the spectral conversations and papers that filled the day.
Conference delegates had the difficult decision throughout the day of which panel to attend, with 8 sessions filling the programme. The first panel, ‘Haunted Places, Haunted People’ was chaired by our secretary, James, and featured papers from three postgraduate researchers from the University. The first paper was delivered by fellow conference co-organiser Molly and explored two Mike Flangan Netflix adaptations and the concurrent theme of trauma as architecture. The second paper then explored writing as a therapy for grief and the panel was closed with an excellent exploration of the spaces that inspired Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Meanwhile the second panel, ‘Draw Death: Playing with Ghosts’ explored the ways in which ghosts and games are intertwined, from video games to chess.
The third panel, ‘Haunt me, then: Victorian Uncanny and Beyond’ was opened by myself, exploring touchstones of grief in the writing of Branwell and Charlotte Brontë (if you want to find out more check out my PhD diaries in previous editions of BookTalk) and followed by a paper on the rebirths of folk horror cinema. Across the hall in panel four, ‘To see, to hear, to taste: Consuming Ghosts’, a range of papers were presented exploring all forms of the uncanny from Charles Dickens to Kazuo Ishiguro.
Throughout the day, attendees were provided with refreshments and during their breaks were able to browse our conference shop featuring merchandise from the day as well as our wonderful Suffolk anthologies of creative writing by undergraduates and graduates. Suffolk Archives also put together an amazing archive rummage for our perusal, featuring spooky objects from our county’s history and some special M. R. James editions too!
Both panels five and six comprised the amazing research conducted by postgraduates studying at the University of Suffolk. All of these MA and PhD students explored their individual research projects through their papers, encompassing their own creative writing practices alongside the lives of writers like Agatha Christie and Hilary Mantel.
The penultimate panel of the day ‘Do they exist? Writing and illustrating ghosts’, featured some fantastic papers exploring the relationship between stories and the spectral including one from a previous SBL guest, Sophie Green. Then, the final panel of the day explored spectral doppelgängers from page to screen in a series of fascinating papers to end a haunting day.
A huge thank you to fellow committee members Tricia and Dee for joining us at ‘Phantasmagoria’ and thank you to my fellow ghost gang and SBL members, James and Amber, for such a brilliant day filled with all things ghostly! And if you missed ‘Phantasmagoria’ but are looking for new ghost stories then check out the latest anthology by English at UoS students: Suffolk Haunts. Available in all good bookshops now.
Rose Gant
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