This has been a particularly busy year for me, as Emily Alder and I ramped up our activities with The Age of Frankenstein during May 2017 with a full programme of screenings and talks. In June, I gave papers at two very different conferences. The first was Adaptation and Nation, held at Queen Margaret University. This was a wonderful, small conference put together by my former colleague Michael Stewart and it was great to be able to meet up people I hadn’t seen in a while. I gave a paper entitled ‘Why We Do Not Adapt Jean Rhys’, an author who has been close to my heart ever since I read Wide Sargasso Sea as an undergraduate. This piece will be included in an edited collection that will be coming out of the conference, which included participants from Europe, the UK, and South America. The conference also afforded the opportunity to see this remarkable short film, which also screened at Edinburgh International Film Festival: 1745 (Directed by Gordon Napier, Written by and Starring Morayo Akandé) See more about the film on their indiegogo page here
My second conference was the spectacular NECS (Network for European Cinema Studies) in Paris, where I gave a paper on echoes of Frankenstein in Black Mirror and Penny Dreadful. This paper was part of a larger piece of research that feeds into a journal article I’ve been working on. With over 600 delegates, NECS was one of the largest conferences I’ve ever attended, and with scholars from all over the world it was wonderful to hear so many different languages being spoken during the breaks and at the reception, held in the stunning old Sorbonne. 
Finally, my last conference of the summer was a panel on Feminist Pedagogies, Feminist Classrooms with my colleagues Tara Thomson and Laura Joyce, at the first English: Shared Futures conference held in Newcastle. This panel grew out of the many conversations the three of us had had over the last couple of years about what informed our own classroom practices. We were able to make an audio recording of this session, and hope to be able to make it available online in the near future. As a result of this panel and the audience’s enthusiasm, Tara, Laura and myself will be taking forward our plans to create an online tool for discussing and gathering together intersectional, feminist resources.
–Sarah Artt