Announcing the Sideways in Time Schedule!
Click on the panel links below to access abstracts for the panels.
And just a reminder that registration is still open here.
Sunday, March 29
5.00pm Free Pre-Conference Social: Stephen Baxter and Adam Roberts discuss their fiction at Waterstones Liverpool One
Monday, March 30
8:30am – 9:30am Registration
9:30am – 10:30am Keynote: Karen Hellekson, “Agency and Contingency in Televisual Alternate History Texts”
10:30am – 12:00pm Panel 1 – Examining Female Perspectives of Alternate History
12:00pm – 1:00pm Panel 2 – Responses to the Enlightenment
1:00pm – 1:45pm Lunch
1:45pm – 2:45pm Keynote: Stephen Baxter, “Alternate Cosmologies”
2:45pm – 4:15pm Panel 3 – Moments and People of Power
4:15pm – 4:30pm Break
4:30pm – 6:00pm Panel 4 – Alternate History in Europe
Tuesday, March 31
8:30am – 9:00am Registration
9:00am – 10:30am Panel 5 – Examining the Place of Alternate History
10:30am – 12:00pm Panel 6 – Blurring the Boundaries of Alternate History
12:00pm – 1:00pm Keynote: Adam Roberts, “Geoffroy, Tolstoy and the Fragile Solidity of History”
1:00pm – 1:45pm Lunch
1:45pm – 2:45pm Panel 7 – Different Landscapes
2:45pm – 3:45pm Panel 8 – Alternate History after 9/11
3:45pm – 4:00pm Break
4:00pm – 5:30pm Panel 9 – How Do We Know?
5:30pm – 6:30pm Wine Reception
The wine reception will be followed by a post-conference meal, details tbc.
Day 1
Panel 1 – Examining Female Perspectives of Alternate History
- Amanda Dillon, University of East Anglia (UK), “Speaking Unspoken Timelines: Feminist Time Travel and Alternate Histories in Kage Baker’s The Company”
- Rosie M. Lewis, Durham University (UK), “Re-envisioning Female Subjectivity, Aesthetics and Collective Resistance in Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames”
- Sarah Lohmann, Durham University (UK), “On the Edge of Time: Feminist Utopias, Complexity Theory and Parallel Future Histories”
Panel 2 – Responses to the Enlightenment
- Alex Broadhead, University of Liverpool (UK), “The Romantics in Alternate History from Hawthorne to Card: Beyond Enlightenment Historiography”
- Jim Clarke, Coventry University (UK), “Unwriting the Reformation: Anti-Catholic uchronias in Science Fiction”
Panel 3 – Moments and People of Power
- Francis Gene-Rowe, Birkbeck College (UK), “Blasting Open the Historical Continuum: Antihistoricism in Benjamin, Dick & Le Guin”
- Fred Smoler, Sarah Lawrence College (USA), “Refiguring the Heroic in Two Alternate Histories: Stephen Vincent Benét and Harry Turtledove”
- Jonathan Rayner, University of Sheffield (UK), “‘Forever being Yamato’: Alternative Pacific War Histories in Japanese Film and Anime”
Panel 4 – Alternate History in Europe
- Mikhaylo Nazarenko, Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University (Ukraine), “Post-colonial alternate history: the case of Ukrainian literature”
- Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż, University of Warsaw (Poland) “Ideological (Mis)Uses of Genre: Dystopian Visions of the ‘Past-Present’ in Daniel Quinn’s and Stephen Fry’s Alternate Histories”
- Chris Pak, Lancaster University, (UK), “‘It Is One Story’: Writing a Global Alternative History in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt”
Day 2
Panel 5 – Examining the Place of Alternate History
- Daniel Dohrn, Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany), “Counterfactuals in Historiography – A Philosophical Assessment”
- Matt Mitrovich, (USA), “Warping History: An Overview of Fans and Creators of Alternate History in the Internet Age”
- Ursula Troche, (UK), “Alternate History as re-imagining/re-writing: with particular reference to Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ and Evaristo’s ‘Blonde Routes’”
Panel 6 – Blurring the Boundaries of Alternate History
- Pascal Lemaire (Belgium), “Our world, really ? Techno Thrillers and Alternate History”
- Andrew M. Butler, Canterbury Christ Church University (UK), “Quest for Love: A Cosy Uchronia?”
- Leimar Garcia-Siino, University of Liverpool (UK), “Alternate [un]Realities: The Possibility and Impossibility of the Fantasy Alternate History”
Panel 7 – Different Landscapes
- Alan Gregory and Dawn Stobart, Lancaster University (UK), “The Survival of a President: Rewritten American Histories and the Failed Assassination of John F. Kennedy in Stephen King’s 11/22/63”
- Laura Ettenfield, Leeds Beckett University (UK), “‘The alternate reality of aquatic space in Victor Hugo’s fiction”
Panel 8 – Alternate History after 9/11
- Anna McFarlane, University of St. Andrews (UK), “Lavie Tidhar’s Osama (2011) and Alternate History After 9/11”
- Rachel Mizsei Ward (UK), “Impotent in the face of history – How superhero narratives (didn’t) engage with 9/11”
Panel 9 – How Do We Know?: Subjective Epistemologies
- Chloe Alexandra Germaine Buckley, Lancaster University (UK), “Cthulhu versus Sherlock Holmes: Shadows over Baker Street, epistemological disruption and the ‘willing surrender of disbelief’ in postmillennial alternative-history Weird fiction”
- Hellen Giblin-Jowett, (UK), “A ‘whiff of printer’s shrapnel’: HG Wells and the nostrils of divergence”
- Molly Cobb, University of Liverpool (UK), “‘Time is a private matter’: Identity and the subjective nature of time in Alfred Bester’s ‘The Men Who Murdered Mohammed'”
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