[ecrea] Spying on Spies: Popular Representations of Spies and Espionage CfP

Spying on Spies: Popular Representations of Spies and Espionage



3-5 September 2015, Warwick Business School at The Shard, London



Confirmed keynote speakers: Professor Phyllis Lassner (Northwestern 
University) and Dr Rosie White (Northumbria University)



2015 will mark the 100th anniversary of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine 
Steps, one of the spy genre’s most influential novels. With its roots in 
the 19th century, the genre evolved and diversified throughout the 20th 
century, providing, as Michael Denning writes, a ‘cover story’ that has 
rendered ‘the political and cultural transformations of the twentieth 
century into the intrigues of a shadow world of secret agents’. 
Capturing the ever-evolving zeitgeist of cultural and political 
anxieties, the genre has encompassed (and exploited) ‘hot’ wars and 
‘cold’, and most recently a global War on Terror.



In the same year that Buchan introduced Richard Hannay to the world, 
writers from William le Queux to Henry Aumonier were also fine-tuning an 
already-established tradition. Over the last hundred years, the heroic 
spy has undergone a series of re-inventions as an action-adventure hero 
for the modern age across all forms of popular media. While in the 30s 
and 40s, Graham Greene and Eric Ambler reintroduced literary realism, 
‘Sapper’ maintained the heroic tradition; in radio, Dick Barton: Special 
Agent thrilled over 20 million daily BBC listeners with stories of 
international derring-do. Amid the existential paranoia of the 1960s, 
the secret agent became one of the dominant pop culture icons of the 
1960s, from books (John le Carre´; Len Deighton) to television (The 
Avengers; The Man from UNCLE) and film (Dr No; The Quiller Memorandum) 
combining terror and absurdity. Since 9/11, the ‘War on Terror’ has 
introduced a new range of explosive anxieties, from 24 to Bourne to 
Homeland. But recently these too have given way to a more psychological 
and reflective tone. Moreover, as the strictures of the Official Secrets 
Act begin to wane, scholars are increasingly able to explore the degree 
to which fact merges with fiction in these texts.



This conference aims to provide a timely forum for a retrospective 
discussion of the genre’s development and evolution across multiple 
media, exploring neglected and under-discussed areas of its long 
history, along with a consideration of where it is today and potential 
future developments.



Proposals for 20-minute papers are invited from scholars in fields such 
as literature, film studies, television studies, history, politics and 
international relations, and security and intelligence studies, on any 
of the following (or related) topics:



* Genre origins and definitions
* Romance’ and ‘realism’: Relevant distinctions?
* Pre-Edwardian espionage romance
* Surveillance, civil liberties and voyeurism
* Single white, male? Deconstructing expectations
* Spy hero/spy villain: Beyond cliche´ and caricature
* History and politics
* World Wars, Cold War, War on Terror – generic continuity and change
* Politics and propaganda
* National identity and the espionage genre
* Psychoanalytical approaches: Spying on the self/spying on the other
* Disguise, pretence, deception
* Conspiracy and dystopian genres – alternative forms of spy fiction?
* Marginalised authors
* Stage representations
* Aesthetics of espionage – visuals, music, locations, pop, noir, 
‘reality effects’
* The infiltrations of espionage into non-genre contexts (Charles 
Dickens, Ian McEwan, Mary Braddon, etc.)



Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words by 15 February 2015, 
along with your name, university, contact information, plus a brief 
biographical paragraph about your academic interests. Submissions and 
enquiries can be sent to



(SOSConference2015 /at/ gmail.com)



Organisers: Toby Manning (Open University), Joseph Oldham (University of 
Warwick) and Emma Grundy Haigh (independent)



The conference blog can be found at:

http://sosconference2015.wordpress.com/



This event is sponsored by the Humanities Research Centre at the 
University of Warwick.





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