Since 1910, when Thomas Edison’s movie studio released a Frankenstein, doing so at a moment when film technology was barely a decade old, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel has haunted the screen.  It has been adapted again and again over the last two centuries, likely because it models for movie-makers their own dream of an animating power that can bring dead matter to life. Commemorating the bicentennial of the novel’s publication, and held in conjunction with the HFA film program, this day-long symposium investigates how and why Shelley’s monster retains this grip on the cinematic imagination. The speakers and their audience will investigate together what the monster’s many afterlives can teach us about the power of the image, about technologies of artificial reproduction, and about cultures’ shifting understandings of the boundaries between life and death. Free and open to the public. Register here.

Featuring speakers:

Homi Bhabha (Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English, Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard)
James Chandler (Richard J. Franke Professor of English, University of Chicago)
Thomas Gunning (Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, Media and Cinema Studies, University of Chicago.)
Adam Hart (Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies, University of Pittsburgh)
Jill Lepore (David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, Harvard)
Deidre Lynch (Ernest Bernbaum Professor of English Literature, Harvard)
Moira Weigel (Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows)
Sponsors: Networked Events of the Romantic Bicentennials Initiative; the Keats-Shelley Association of America; the Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard; Houghton Library, Harvard; the Provostial Fund for Arts and Humanities, Harvard; the Department of English, Harvard.

In Memoriam: David Pendleton, Film Programmer, Harvard Film Archive