[ecrea] CFP Death and Celebrity Symposium

*Call for Papers: Death and Celebrity*

*Wednesday 6^th June 2018, University of Portsmouth*

Keynote Speakers:

Dr Ruth Penfold-Mounce, University of York

Dr Samantha Matthews, University of Bristol

‘Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil’ (John Milton)

‘Fame is a food that dead men eat’ (Henry Austin Dobson)

This one-day symposium seeks to interrogate the role of death in the 
construction, negotiation and perpetuation of celebrity identity. For 
the ancients, true fame was necessarily posthumous, but in modernity, 
too, there remains an enduring fascination with what Andrew Bennett 
terms ‘the immortality effect’. Following the death of a celebrity, a 
variety of agents – friends, family, fans, professional associates, arts 
and heritage bodies – may interact to frame his/her legacy for 
posterity; moreover, celebrities themselves may take an active role in 
choreographing their cultural afterlives while still alive. Yet, while 
cementing, augmenting or rehabilitating the celebrity’s public profile, 
death can also prompt a reputational re-evaluation, with scandalous or 
unsavoury posthumous revelations resulting in the desecration, rather 
than the enhancement, of celebrity identity.

This symposium asks how death changes our relationship to famous 
figures: how are dead celebrities memorialised or forgotten, 
appropriated or overlooked in the interests of specific 
historical/cultural values? What kinds of media apparatus are involved 
in the curation, maintenance and reassessment of posthumous fame? What 
impact does the celebrity’s death have on the material objects, spaces 
and places with which s/he is associated?

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

·death-bed scenes and last words

·funerals, memorials and obituaries

·tragic or premature deaths

·contested/shifting legacies

·hagiography

·sites of pilgrimage, celebrity relics and possessions

·celebrity suicides/scandalous deaths

·celebrity self-fashioning of posthumous identity

·the role of the media (print and digital), fan networks, heritage 
industries and other agents in mourning/remembering dead celebrities

The organisers welcome proposals for 20 minute papers, or panels, which 
consider ‘celebrity’ in its many forms, and from a variety of historical 
and disciplinary perspectives.

Please send 200-word abstracts, with a 50-word biography to 
(ccs /at/ port.ac.uk) <mailto:(ccs /at/ port.ac.uk)> by 30^th April.


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