Come visit the Upper Arlington Public Library for an Ohio Humanities’ Speakers Bureau event with Linda Mizejewski!

Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein towers over Western literature as one of the most influential novels ever written and science’s most enduring myth.  Technologies of artificial intelligence, laboratory fertilization, cloning, and titanium body parts make Shelley’s monster more relevant with each passing decade. Frankenstein also launched the horror and science fiction genres that have dominated popular culture for two centuries, developing into the monster-in-the-house tradition of Psycho and serial-killer movies. This presentation explores the richness of the Frankenstein tradition in film and literature, the gendered implications of the motherless monster, and the social and psychological meanings of the monster who will not die.

Linda Mizejewski is a Distinguished Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Ohio State University. She has published six books on women in popular culture, including a book about the romantic comedy It Happened One Night. In her 2002 book Hardboiled and High Heeled: the Woman Detective in Popular Culture,she analyzes the female investigator character in cinema, television, and best-selling novels.  Her most recent two books are Hysterical! Women in American Comedy (2017) and Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics (2014).  Linda has been a Fulbright Lecturer in Slovakia and Romania, and her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2004 she was a winner of Ohio State University’s Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award.