Join us for a two-day academic event focused on the literary representations of (female) body horror. Researchers from institutions worldwide will present on themes including gender, corporeality and the aesthetics of horror. The conference will also host the renowned Chilean author Carolina Brown, who will reflect on the presence of this motif in her most recent work.
Friday, 21rst November 2025
13.30 Inauguration speech from Dr. Florencia Sannders
Panel 1: Horror around the Reproductive Body: Motherhood – Menopause
14.00 – 14.30 Anastasiia Danyliuk “Monstrous Corporeality of Maternal Bodies in Sophie White’s Where I End (2022)”
14.30 – 15.00 Bárbara Aranda “Becoming Monstrous: Menopause as Body Horror in Mariana Enríquez?s ‘Metamorphosis’ (2024)”
15.00 – 15.30 Amanda B?hm “‘Worms in the Body’: Environmental Body Horror in Samanta Schweblin?s Fever Dream (2015)”
15.30 – 16.00 Coffee Break
Panel 2: (Female) Body-Politics
16.00 – 16.30 Marina Gamba “Writing Excess: Abjection and Bodily Vulnerability in Fernanda Melchor?s Hurricane Season (2017)”
16.30 – 17.00 Simon Prahl “Queer Body Horror in Monique Wittig’s Le Corps lesbien (1973)”
17.00 – 17.30 Coffee Break
18.00 – 19.00 Conversation with the Chilean writer Carolina Brown
20.00 Dinner at Markthalle Acht
Saturday, 22nd November 2025
Panel 3: Horror in other Genres: Female Body in Science Fiction and Dystopias
10.00 – 10.30 Florencia Sannders “Dystopian Imaginaries of Surrogate Motherhood in Contemporary Latin American Novels”
10.30 – 11.00 Cordelia Winters “Monstrosities, Mutations, Motherhood. Female Body Horror as Resistant Narrative in Katherine Dunn's Geek Love (1989)”
11.00 – 11.30 Coffee Break
Panel 4: Metamorphosis: Body Horror as Motif
11.30 – 12.00 Franziska Müller “Beauty and the Beast vs. the Single Female Monster: Female Body Horror as a (Conscious) Resistance to the Male Gaze”
12.00 – 12.30 Marie Krebs “Beyond the Physical and the Metaphorical: How Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt (2022) Reconfigures Women’s Embodiment”
12.30 – 13.30 Lunch
13.30 – 14.00 Manjima Sarkar “No Body to Call Her Own: Horror, Erasure and Embodiment in The Substance (2024) and The Vegetarian (2007)” (online)
14.00 – 14.30 Stephanie Kunzemann “Tracing Horror through Hidden Reading Guides: Linguistic Cues of Fascination and Fear in Eugen Egner’s ‘Katharina’”
14.30 – 15.00 Closing Remarks
