A Postcard from the Festival of Monsters

In October 2025, humanistic scholars of things spine-tingling, sinister, and spectacular descended on seaside Santa Cruz for the Festival of Monsters, an academic conference presented by the Center for Monster Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.¹ In addition to the academic proceedings, the Festival connected with local monster enthusiasts through public events featuring horror writers and visual artists.

“We take monsters seriously,” the Center declares. Indeed, academic consideration of the monstrous is not some sensational diversion. The sincere study of category breakers — from folkloric vampires, to “prodigious” people, to witches (who exist both in legend and in life) — offers insight into how societies define, regard, and discipline difference. To study the monster is to study how humans have drawn boundaries around legitimate forms of existence; to study the monster is to study examples of resistance, survival, and possibility.

In the weeks preceding the festival, I noticed monstrous event posters taking over the UC Santa Cruz campus. The stance of the poster’s central creature (designed by a student!) reminds me of the Emcee from Cabaret. “Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome!” it seems to say. “Come to the Festival of Monsters. Learn something of the world… and you might learn something about yourself too.”

My journey to the Festival was shorter than most because I am an adjunct at UC Santa Cruz. And yet, still rather green on this campus, I managed to take a wrong turn on my way to the event and (in spite of my phone’s GPS) found myself wandering through a redwood grove. It was an appropriately otherworldly beginning to the proceedings.²

I wasn’t entirely lost, but I wasn’t on the right path either. The redwoods that tower over the UC Santa Cruz campus are second or third-growth groves that have grown after clear-cut logging of the forest in the 19th century. Perhaps because of the conference theme and perhaps because I had not yet had my coffee, I was wary of the sign that urged me to “KEEP RIGHT.” Could a wolf or a witch or a vengeful redwood scion be leading me astray? But, oh, the scent of Sequoia sempervirens! There are far worse places to lose one’s way.

This was my first foray into monster studies. I was excited to present some of my own historical research (on dinosaurs, naturally), but my higher objective was to learn more about this profoundly cross-disciplinary community. I sat in on talks by medievalists, art historians, philosophers, and literature scholars. I heard from researchers who work in critical race and ethnic studies, disability studies, and performance studies.

Left: A helpful sign directing participants to one of only three session rooms. While the Center for Monster Studies takes monsters seriously, monster scholars do not take themselves too seriously; Right: I gave a talk about how fossil animals fuel oil culture. Dinosaurs, I suggest, are monstrous in part because they are matter out of place — and time. I borrow the phrase from Mary Douglas (who borrowed it from William James). Dinosaurs are not taboo, like the “dirt” of Purity & Danger, but dinosaurs’ material (re)presentation challenges what Douglas describes as “a set of ordered relations.” Like all monsters, dinosaurs are category breakers.

Many of the talks were simultaneously enthralling and distressing. In the “Creature Features” panel, scholars compared the appetites of man-eating sharks, brain-hungry azhdahā (snake-men) of Persian mythology, a hybrid human-praying mantis, and the pervasive louse. In the session on “Medieval and Early Modern Monsters,” I learned about the “possession” of Ursuline nuns in 17th-century France and how the archival record (created and preserved through the perspective of heteropatriarchal power structures) conceals what the women authentically experienced. In the “The Chicanx Nuclear Gothic” panel, I heard about the legacy of nuclear testing for “downwinders” in New Mexico and Indigenous-led resistance to ongoing uranium mining.³ 

Monsters always speak of power — sometimes they speak for it, other times they speak against it.

A glance at the session titles reveals the diversity of topics. The vast disciplinary diversity is, perhaps, harder to perceive. Find the full program and other information about the Festival of Monsters here.

According to Kim Lau, it’s not uncommon for monsters nowadays to be represented as desirable or sympathetic — exemplified here by Tom Ellis in Lucifer, Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Dracula, and Rory Kinnear as Frankenstein’s Creature in Penny Dreadful. Yet there is cause to reintroduce fear of the monster in order to counteract the rise of the monstrous manosphere.

Through the plenary sessions, I came to understand an important distinction in how monster studies scholars approach the topic. In the first plenary, philosopher David Livingstone Smith spoke about how people turn other people into monsters. He argued that racialization often precedes dehumanization and those in power exploit such strategies to set the stage for atrocities.⁴ In the second plenary, scholar of literature and folklore Kimberly J. Lau theorized “monstrosity” as opposed to the monster. Monstrosity is “a manifestation of white heteropatriarchal masculinism,” Lau explained. Violent and fragile at once, monstrosity is rooted in ideology rather than individuals.⁵ Together, the first two plenaries thus emphasized the monstrous — as in horrific — things that ordinary people do.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen noted that Monster Theory was rather like an attempt to build that “bigger boat” mentioned in Jaws. Now, monster studies is a capacious field that welcomes what doesn’t conform to established categories.

In the third plenary, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen — whose “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” was invoked in just about every session — affirmed the importance of studying human monstrosity but offered a contrasting view.⁶ He reflected on the circumstances in which he edited Monster Theory: Reading Culture thirty years ago. Monsters (like the giants he was writing about at the time) weren’t taken seriously by the academy. Cohen described the edited collection as “a cry for company.” The power of monsters is to imagine new worlds, to reconsider categories, to bring people together. He warned against tarnishing “the possibilities of monsters” by designating abominable people (fascists, eugenicists, serial killers, etc…) as monsters. Their deeds are indeed monstrous, but those who commit them are utterly and predictably human.

This was the first in-person conference I’d attended since 2019, for reasons viral and financial.⁷ The Festival offered free registration to UC Santa Cruz affiliates, for which this adjunct was grateful. Because cost wasn’t a barrier, some undergraduate students sat in on panels! While there was a registration cost for external participants ($275 for tenure-track faculty; $225 for contingent, independent, and graduate student scholars) the Center for Monster Studies ultimately makes the scholarly proceedings available to the public after the fact by publishing the talks on its YouTube channel.⁸

The Festival of Monsters was an intellectually invigorating gathering. It was spiritually nourishing, too. On the first morning, when a graduate student mentioned she was giving her very first conference presentation, the whole room applauded in earnest support. I, an adjunct historian, shared a happy lunch hour with a tenured philosopher and a literature student, neither of whom I’d known before that day. An emerita bioethicist pulled me aside after my presentation to talk more about research and precarity. We spent the golden hour on a bench, deep in conversation about making a life within (or despite) the academy.

“Monsters are good humanists,” Cohen said during his plenary talk. They challenge us to be curious, to learn about other ways of life, to come together in community. Though I am new to monster studies, the sentiment felt true to my conference experience. Even the creatures of the redwoods were compelled to come out and regard the marvelous gathering.

Wildlife is a common sight at UC Santa Cruz. Daily, I see wild turkeys patrolling my corner of campus. Sometimes, I see a doe or two. But I’d never before seen a buck wandering about.

1. I am grateful to the Center for Monster Studies faculty — including Michael Chemers (Founding Director and Professor of Dramatic Literature), Renée Fox (Co-Director and Associate Professor of Literature), and Elizabeth Swensen (Co-Director and Assistant Professor of Art and Design) — as well as the incredible staff and student volunteers who coordinated the event so effectively.
2. I’d go so far as to argue that getting lost is an essential component of an academic conference experience, whether on public transit to or from the airport, in the sprawling conference center, or amidst the disorienting tables of a book exhibit.
3. Consult the conference schedule for further details on these and other sessions.
4. David Livingstone Smith, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (Oxford University Press, 2020).
5. Kimberly J. Lau, Specters of the Marvelous: Race and the Development of the European Fairy Tale (Wayne State University Press, 2024). Two items of note: Lau’s most recent book, Specters of the Marvelous, is distinct from her theorization of monstrosity and the manosphere, which is work in progress; and, as Provost of College Nine and John R. Lewis College at UC Santa Cruz, she is my supervisor.
6. In a 1996 essay, Cohen offered a framework for reading a culture through the monsters it makes. His theses were “grand gestures” that scholars across a wide range of disciplines might use to interpret monsters of any kind. For instance, “the monster always escapes” and “the monster dwells at the gates of difference.” For more, see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3-25. The essay, also available here, has circulated widely over the last three decades.
7. As an adjunct, I don’t have access to reliable or substantial conference funds. Often, conference applications are due many months before the event takes place. Scholars on short-term contracts may not know if they will have funding (or even a contract) in the coming academic year, which makes submitting to conferences a bit of a gamble and sometimes a waste of time. Thanks to the bargaining work of UC-AFT, I am eligible to apply for a grant from a professional development fund, though it is intended “to support professional development activities that contribute to pedagogical expertise in the subjects [I] teach at UCSC.” Unfortunately, what I teach is rather unrelated to what I research — though I welcome the persuasive writing challenge!
8. Check back for the 2025 recordings! Or, as the content creators say, like and subscribe to get notifications when new videos are posted.