3-5 September 2015, Warwick Business School at The Shard, London

Deadline Extension:  1 March 2015

Keynote speakers: Professor Phyllis Lassner (Northwestern University), Professor James Chapman (University of Leicester) and Dr Rosie White (Northumbria University).

2015 will mark the 100th anniversary of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, one of the spy genre’s most influential novels. With its roots in the 19th century, the genre evolved and diversified throughout the 20th century, providing, as Michael Denning writes, a ‘cover story’ that has rendered ‘the political and cultural transformations of the twentieth century into the intrigues of a shadow world of secret agents’. Capturing the ever-evolving zeitgeist of cultural and political anxieties, the genre has encompassed (and exploited) ‘hot’ wars and ‘cold’, and most recently a global War on Terror.

In the same year that Buchan introduced Richard Hannay to the world, writers from William le Queux to Henry Aumonier were also fine-tuning an already-established tradition. Over the last hundred years, the heroic spy has undergone a series of re-inventions as an action-adventure hero for the modern age across all forms of popular media. While in the 30s and 40s, Graham Greene and Eric Ambler reintroduced literary realism, ‘Sapper’ maintained the heroic tradition; in radio, Dick Barton: Special Agent thrilled over 20 million daily BBC listeners with stories of international derring-do. Amid the existential paranoia of the 1960s, the secret agent became one of the dominant pop culture icons of the 1960s, from books (John le Carré; Len Deighton) to television (The Avengers; The Man from UNCLE) and film (Dr No; The Quiller Memorandum) combining terror and absurdity. Since 9/11, the ‘War on Terror’ has introduced a new range of explosive anxieties, from 24 to Bourne to Homeland. But recently these too have given way to a more psychological and reflective tone. Moreover, as the strictures of the Official Secrets Act begin to wane, scholars are increasingly able to explore the degree to which fact merges with fiction in these texts.

This conference aims to provide a timely forum for a retrospective discussion of the genre’s development and evolution across multiple media, exploring neglected and under-discussed areas of its long history, along with a consideration of where it is today and potential future developments.

Proposals for 20-minute papers are invited from scholars in fields such as literature, film studies, television studies, history, politics and international relations, and security and intelligence studies, on any of the following (or related) topics:

* Genre origins and definitions
* Romance’ and ‘realism’: Relevant distinctions?
* Pre-Edwardian espionage romance
* Surveillance, civil liberties and voyeurism
* Single white, male? Deconstructing expectations
* Spy hero/spy villain: Beyond cliché and caricature
* History and politics
* World Wars, Cold War, War on Terror – generic continuity and change
* Politics and propaganda
* National identity and the espionage genre
* Psychoanalytical approaches: Spying on the self/spying on the other
* Disguise, pretence, deception
* Conspiracy and dystopian genres – alternative forms of spy fiction?
* Marginalised authors
* Stage representations
* Aesthetics of espionage – visuals, music, locations, pop, noir, ‘reality effects’
* The infiltrations of espionage into non-genre contexts (Charles Dickens, Ian McEwan, Mary Braddon, etc.)

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words by 1 March 2015, along with a cover sheet stating your name, university, contact information, plus a brief biographical paragraph about your academic interests. Submissions and enquiries can be sent to

SOSConference2015@gmail.com

Organisers: Toby Manning (Open University), Joseph Oldham (University of Warwick) and Emma Grundy Haigh (independent)