For the 2023-2024 academic year, we are hosting a series of events about monsters and religion, co-organized with the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University.
Few things are better at teaching us about our own world than monsters. Lurking at the edges, deforming desecrations of the human, they also paradoxically enable insight for transformation. This new series investigates the power, appeal, and fear of monsters across a wide array of contexts, cultures, and registers — from monsters in America, to the monstrosity of AI. Join us as we contemplate the monstrously invisible that is all around us.
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Event 1
Monsters Inside Out: American and Other Horrors
October 25, 2023
5:30 – 7:00pm
Virtual event
Transcript of opening remarks by Angela Zito (we regret that technical difficulties kept us from recording):
“Welcome to Monsters Inside out American and Other Horrors. I’m Angela Zito, co-founder and co-director of the center for Religion and Media at NYU, where I teach in Anthropology and Religious Studies.
My conversation today with Professors Scott Poole and Rachel Wagner opens a yearlong series on MONSTERS which we thought we’d kick off just before Halloween. We’re collaborating with the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University. So, thanks go to its director Matthew Engelke and its Associate Director Justine Ellis. Thanks for our side of organizing goes to CRM’s Assistant director, Brett Krutzsch and Augusta Thomson.
Monsters have been with humans since we have records of humans. Biblical chaos monsters, dragons at the edges of medieval maps, marking the end of known worlds. Werewolves that stalk, vampires that bite, zombies that overwhelm, and aliens that probe helpless bodies. But monsters also paradoxically can enable insight for transformation.
And as I have discovered in teaching, few things are better at helping us understand ourselves in the world around us than monsters. They should be, we do create them. This series, and our conversation today, puts us at the nexus of monster studies, religious studies, anthropology and history.
One question that vexes scholarly studies of Monsters is: Why take them so seriously? Aren’t they just a wildly entertaining form of catharsis? Without mounting the 20th century defense of popular culture again–I hope we are past that—trying to figure out how the monstrous operates upon our social lives opens up a drawerful of powerful questions:
One of my favorites named this event: Do monsters come from inside us? Are they a universal phenomenon of psychic anxiety and can we know them as that? Or do they have an external origin in the horrors of the world? Are they both? What are the stakes of taking one side or the other?
In other words— Is Dracula the abjection of desire to eat whatever we want forever? Or the manifestation of collective British colonial guilt as he infiltrates London? Is the zombie a projection of the death wish? Or, given its origins among slaves in Haiti in early plantation capitalism, now the whitewashed “slave” of capitalist consumerism?
Even if monsters are simply the materialized projections of our personal fears and anxieties, and our worst impulses, they do tend to take on a life of their own. We may now scoff at the persecution to death of witches in Europe in the later 16th, early 17th century. What a massive error of judgement. But the (mostly) women marked as monsters really died.
Our fictions are important but how they work their ways into our lives to prompt us to act remains fundamentally quite mysterious. All to say, the monstrous is serious business.
I’d like to introduce to you now my guests, two writers who have done a great deal to convince me of that seriousness. Then each of them will briefly introduce their work. I’ll start off our conversation, and in the final half hour of our time together they will field questions from you in the audience.
Scott Poole is Professor of History at the College of Charleston where he teaches, among other delectable things: Histories of Death: The Gothic and Social Revolution, 18thc. and Horror: Narratives of Fear and Violence in American History. Of his many books, my favorites include: Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (2011) and most recently Dark Carnivals: Modern horror and the origins of American Empire (2023).
Rachel Wagner, is Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Religion at Ithaca College. Her work centers on the study of religion and culture, especially religion and film and religion and virtual reality. Her first book, a pathbreaking classic of the field, is Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality. Her newest book, Cowboy Apocalypse: Religion, Media, Guns will be out in 2024 from NYU Press, a brilliant analysis of the gun as major prop in the mythos of the ongoing Cowboy Apocalypse.”
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Event 2
Monstrous AI
December 6, 2023
5:30 – 7:00pm
Virtual event
“AI is the Scariest Beast Ever Created.” And “The AI Monster Awakens.” These are just two recent headlines (in Newsweek and the Seattle Times, respectively) following on the heels of Chat GPT. But the monster imaginary, and monster theory, has long informed our perceptions of artificial intelligence. As part of the IRCPL/CRM series on “Monsters,” this panel explores the changing role of artificial intelligence in relation to its human creators.
Speakers: Lydia Chilton (Columbia University); Philip Butler (Iliff School of Theology); Timothy Beal (Case Western Reserve University)
Moderator: Lydia Liu (Columbia University)
Watch a full-length recording of the Zoom event here.
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Event 3
Keep Your Zombies Close: How I Stopped Shuddering & learned to Love Ideological Critique
February 28, 2024
5:30 – 7:00pm
Virtual event
Have you noticed that our monsters are creeping closer to us? That vampires attend high school (constantly), that werewolves seduce us with their moral anguish (as much as their glamorous hunky good looks)? But what about zombies? Does narrowing the gap, as TV series IZombie does, humanize zombies or recognize our own monstrosity? Should we be forgiving or horrified? This panel will investigate the politics and passions of zombie creep today.
Speakers: Sarah Lauro (University of Tampa), author of The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion, and Living Death (2015) in conversation with Angela Zito, co-Director of the Center for Religion & Media.
Watch a full-length recording of the Zoom event here.
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Event 4
Facing Monsters: an Evening with horror makeup master Josh Turi
March 28, 2024
6:00 – 8:00pm
8 Washington Mews
What happens when the mask melds to the face? Why do we love becoming monstrous? How is that done in horror films? Come watch Emmy-award winning artist Josh Turi work in real time to build a character for us. Bring your questions and be ready to face a terrifying makeover!
Joshua Turi is a 3-time Emmy award winning make-up artist and prosthetic designer. He and his company, Designs to Deceive, have been supplying specialty services to the entertainment industry for over 3 decades. His work can be seen in, “Jules” (Bleecker street), “Knock at the Cabin” (M. Night Shyamalan), “Dr. Death”, Season 1 and 2 (Peacock), “White House Plumbers” (HBO), “Mr. Robot” (USA), and much more. Josh spent 15 years as the Make Up Key and Lab Supervisor for Saturday Night Live (NBC), and 6 years as the Prosthetic Make up Dept. Head for Marvel TV (Netflix). These shows included “Punisher,” “Daredevil,” “Iron Fist,” “Luke Cage,” “Jessica Jones,” and “The Defenders.” His work can also be seen on Broadway. His prosthetics are used in the shows, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “Lion King” and various shows at Lincoln Center.
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Event 5
The Meaning of Monsters, Modern and Premodern
April 18, 2024
6:15 – 7:45pm
The Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary
Monsters have always overflowed with meaning, crying out for interpretation. But some periods become obsessed with monsters: early modern Europe was one such monster moment, and the contemporary United States seems to be another. In the early modern period monsters could be individuals—people or animals with congenital anomalies—or self-reproducing species. In both cases their differences from their non-monstrous counterparts were easily visible, evoking emotions ranging from horror or terror to wonder, and the frameworks for interpreting them were primarily religious; they could be signs of divine disapproval or emblems of God’s power and creativity. In contrast, modern monsters are almost always species: humanoid ones like zombies and vampires, who may not be immediately recognizable and who evoke emotions of fear or horror, and non-human species, who can be benign. Moralized interpretations have largely replaced theological ones. These premodern/ modern contrasts and connections are the starting point for thinking about how monsters magnetize attention and what the current monster moment says about who we are now.