Over the weekend of 3rd-4th July, the Society hosted its Summer Seminar on the theme of Tolkien and Diversity. Hosted online on Zoom, we welcomed 16 speakers and over 700 audience members to what was a spectacular event.
The individual paper recordings are now available for free on the Tolkien Society’s YouTube channel. Please note that a recording of Christopher Vaccaro’s paper – ‘Pardoning Saruman?: The Queer in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings‘ – is not available, owing to a legal issue concerning unpublished archive material.
Individual links to the YouTube video of each paper can be found below. The order of the videos is in the order as presented over the weekend. To find out more about our seminar series, visit the Seminar page. You can also check out some of the proceedings of our previous seminars by visiting our store.
Videos
- Cordeliah Logsdon – ‘Gondor in Transition: A Brief Introduction to Transgender Realities in The Lord of the Rings‘
- Clare Moore – ‘The Problem of Pain: Portraying Physical Disability in the Fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien’
- V. Elizabeth King – ‘”The Burnt Hand Teaches Most About Fire”: Applying Traumatic Stress and Ecological Frameworks to Narratives of Displacement and Resettlement Across Cultures in Tolkien’s Middle-earth’
- Sara Brown – ‘The Invisible Other: Tolkien’s Dwarf-Women and the “Feminine Lack”‘
- Sultana Raza – ‘Projecting Indian Myths, Culture and History onto Tolkien’s Worlds’
- Nicholas Birns – ‘The Lossoth: Indigeneity, Identity, and Antiracism’
- Kristine Larsen – ‘The Problematic Perimeters of Elrond Half-elven and Ronald English-Catholic’
- Cami Agan – ‘Hearkening to the Other: Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth’
- Sonali Chunodkar – ‘Desire of the Ring: An Indian Academic’s Adventures in her Quest for the Perilous Realm’
- Robin Reid – ‘Queer Atheists, Agnostics, and Animists, Oh, My!’
- Joel Merriner – ‘Hidden Visions: Iconographies of Alterity in Soviet Bloc Illustrations for The Lord of the Rings‘
- Eric Reinders – ‘Questions of Caste in The Lord of the Rings and its Multiple Chinese Translations’
- Dawn Walls-Thumma – ‘Stars Less Strange: An Analysis of Fanfiction and Representation within the Tolkien Fan Community’
- Danna Petersen-Deeprose – ‘”Something Mighty Queer”: Destabilizing Cishetero Amatonormativity in the Works of Tolkien’
- Martha Celis-Menzoda – ‘Translation as a means of representation and diversity in Tolkien’s scholarship and fandom’
