Salford's "Extremity and Excess" conference --- pics

(Click on each to enlarge)

Lydia Brammer (Oxford Brookes), Richard Whitby (London Consortium), Hiu M Chan, with watermelon (University College London) and Laura Wilson (University of Manchester): Visual Extremity panel --- torture porn and tentacle sex, reading auteur theory pace Kenneth Anger, watermelons and/as genitalia, and new lexicons of extremity and excess

Salford's Professor Erik Knudsen chairs post-keynote discussion with Dr Xavier Mendik (director of Cine-Excess Film Festival), who presented his new documentary on Dario Argento ("Fear at 400 Degrees"): knowledge transfer, DVD extras, and the ideological contexts of Suspiria

Salford PGR Elinor Taylor, one of the conference's convenors

Benjamin J Raymond (Villanova University) and Daisy Garofalo (The Shakespeare Institute), with Multiples panel chair, Salford's Dr Yu-Wei Lin --- phallic uncertainty in Wilde, and the changing idea of twins from Shakespeare to the early modern era; cloning as reproducing ancient fears of the evil other?

Patrick Wright (Manchester Met): "Critical Intimacy: Lowry's Seascapes and the Art of Ekphrasis" -- the painting as psychoanalysing the viewer

Prof Joanna Hodge's keynote - "Varieties of Excess": Intruders and heart operations

Salford PGR and conference co-convenor Joseph Darlington (right). Greg Bevan and Daniel Cookney also co-convened.

On the REF and the variety of outputs possible: research, documentary, critical writing...

Poster contribution, and the artist Marc Boward (University of Derby) in person. (With apologies to Barthes and Foucault...)