Mythological Patterns, Themes and Narratives in Modern Literature and Cinema
Description
The persistence of classical mythological patterns, themes, and narratives in modern and contemporary works of literature and cinema invites and even compels us to examine these works to determine what they assert about human nature and civilization and about the apparent necessity of repeating the behavior of the past, even across cultural and chronological boundaries. This panel invites presentations that analyze or discuss such works of the 20th and 21st century by excavating their mythic sources and exploring the parallels in these modern works and the departures of the modern versions from their underlying originals. What are the aesthetic, psychological, and sociological implications inherent in the remaking of these myths? How do they constitute a statement about the relation of the past and the present? And what, if anything, do they have to say about the future of the modern culture they depict, or about the fate of universal humanity?
Schedule
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Speaker Bio
Glen Robert Gill is Associate Professor of Classics and Humanities at Montclair State University. He is the author of Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth and the editor of Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Literature. He has also published essays on Frye, C.G. Jung, T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and J.R.R. Tolkien. He is currently editing A Cultural History of Myth in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury) and The Routledge Companion to Myth and Literature.
Speaker Bio
Craig Smith is currently a Writing Support Specialist at Northwestern Polytechnic, where he previously spent eleven years as an English instructor. His scholarly interests include postcolonial literatures and Holocaust studies. Recently, he has developed an interest in adaptation studies, with a particular interest in 21st-century retellings of Greek myth.
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Neil H. Wright is Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Eastern Kentucky University. He has published scholarship on Shakespeare, Western and Asian literature and film, and modern fiction and drama.
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Bingli Liu is a PhD student in Transnational and Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on how the mythological and artistic traditions of ancient China and Mesoamerican civilizations (Aztec, Maya, Inca) are reimagined through modern narratives of gender, identity, and decolonial thought. She is particularly interested in how fantasy and speculative fiction transform ancient myths or symbolism into living frameworks for cultural memory and collective futures.
Speaker Bio
I am a graduate student of the Department of Comparative Literature and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, where I conduct research that operates at the intersection of African oral performance, gender, and decolonial thought, with a focus on how artistic expressions challenge and confront historical erasure, political hegemony, and patriarchal systems by investigating the adaptation of traditional performances from orality to literary and digital forms.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Claire Rodan earned her phd in Comparative Literature at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research includes Comparative Literature, Asian Studies, American Studies, and Film Theory.
Dr. Rodan has authored book chapters featured in distinguished academic presses such as Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Routledge, Brill, and Lexington Books. She is currently an adjunct faculty member in the English Department at Community College of Baltimore County.
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Lily Li, PhD in Comparative Literature, is currently Adjunct Professor teaching Chinese and Humanities at Eastern Kentucky University. She has published extensively on Chinese literature and film, theater, and comparative literature. She is co-editor of Chinese Diasporic Writer and Artists: Reimagining the Self Beyond and Without China (Routledge, Sept 2025).
Speaker Bio
Kaby Wing-Sze Kung is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Director of the Research Institute for Digital Culture and Humanities at Hong Kong Metropolitan University. Her research interests include Chinese Feminism, Chinese-Western Comparative Literature, Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature and Film, Chinese Diasporic Writing and Film, and Digital Humanities.
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Fei Shi is full-time faculty and professor of English Literature at Douglas College and visiting professor of English Literature at Dawson College. His major academic interests are comparative drama studies, modern Chinese theatre and film, and gender and sexuality studies.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Vasiliki Kotini is an Assistant Professor in the Language Studies Dept. at Zayed University. She holds a Ph.D. in Classics from King’s College London. Before joining ZU, she was a Lecturer in the Cultural Heritage & Modern Technologies Dept. at Univ. of Ioannina (Greece) and Assistant Professor in the English & Comparative Literature Dept. at the American Univ. in Cairo (Egypt). Her research centers on classical/modern drama, the reception of the classical world, and Mediterranean literatures.
Speaker Bio
Vanessa Yee-kwan Wong is a PhD candidate in the East Asian Studies department at University of California, Irvine. Her articles on Hong Kong literature have appeared on Writing Chinese: a Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature and an edited volume, Entangled Waterscapes in Asia (edited by Kwai-Cheung Lo and Hung-chiung Li). She is currently completing her dissertation, “Racial Ambiguity in Modern Chinese Literature.”