Sherlock Holmes - Past and Present

 21-22 June 2013

This conference brings together academics, enthusiasts, creative practitioners, and popular writers in a shared discussion about the cultural legacy of Sherlock Holmes. The Strand Magazine and the Sherlock Holmes stories contribute one of the most enduring paradigms for the production and consumption of popular culture in the twentieth- and the twenty-first centuries. The stories precipitated a burgeoning fan culture including various kinds of participation, wiki and crowd-sourcing, fan-fiction, virtual realities and role-play gaming. All of these had existed before but they were solidified, magnified and united by Sherlockians and Holmesians in entirely new ways and on scales never seen before. All popular culture phenomena that followed shared Holmes' viral pattern.

This project examines the historical intricacies of Holmesian fandom as well as offering a wide variety of perspectives upon its newest manifestations. The national and international relations that Holmes, his creator, and their contemporary readers witness and the permutations of these concepts in adaptations make Holmes as a case study particularly important and timely for our understanding of the historical and contemporary issues relating to Europe and the European Union. This forum encourages the participation of UCL students and scholars, and readers in London and abroad, with interests in late-Victorian and Edwardian writing, European history, comparative literature, and/or cultural studies. Our goals are to celebrate Conan Doyle's achievement, to explore some of the reasons behind Holmes' enduring popularity across different cultures, media, and geographical spaces, and to investigate new directions in Holmes' afterlife.

The principal organisers are Dr Jonathan Cranfield (Liverpool John Moores), Tom Ue (PhD Candidate, Department of English Language and Literature; Administrative Assistant, The Bentham Project, Faculty of Laws; Editor, Opticon1826), and Marlies Gabriele Prinzl (PhD Candidate, Centre for Intercultural Studies; Editor-in-Chief, Opticon1826), and the keynote speakers, Dr David Grylls (Oxford) and Professor Douglas Kerr (Hong Kong).

This conference precedes Holmes' 160th birthday in 2014, and it will launch a new volume of essays on Holmes co-edited by Dr Cranfield and Ue.

• The Ideal Holmes Challenge

This project is supported by UCL European Institute's call for proposals 2012-13