Terminator @40: Origins and Legacies 

An academic conference hosted by The Centre for Film, Television and Screen Studies, Bangor University, Wales 

18 & 19 June 2024 

The Terminator franchise has left an indelible mark on popular culture. In 1984, James Cameron’s dark vision of the future created a cultural shock that continues to resonate to this day not only in cinema but also in literature, art, design, gaming, and critical theory and is even credited with having spawned several aesthetic trends, such as tech-noir. What started as a film has now become a multi-media universe consisting of sequels, a television series, web series, comics, video games, board games, novels and theme park rides. The franchise is also frequently cited in debates related to multinational corporations, robotics, biopolitics, post- and transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and nuclear apocalypse. 

Hosted by the Centre for Film, Television and Screen Studies at Bangor University in North Wales, this symposium proposes to bring together scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds – such as cultural and screen studies; the history of art, design, fashion and architecture; musicology; philosophy; political sciences; computer science and robotics; literature; urban and ecological studies; and race, gender, queer and sexuality studies – to explore The Terminator forty years after its release, explore its origins and legacies and consider its position within wider visual culture.  

We welcome contributions from any perspective such as (but not limited to) the following: 

  • Terminator and its origins, influences, production, publicity, reception and afterlife 
  • Terminator and aesthetics  
  • Terminator and biopolitics, posthumanism and urban planning. 
  • Terminator and capitalism, neoliberalism, post-industrialism and multinational corporations 
  • Terminator and design 
  • Terminator and ecological studies 
  • Terminator and fandom and ‘cult’ 
  • Terminator and gender 
  • Terminator and James Cameron 
  • Terminator’s multi-media franchise (sequels, television, web series, comic books, video games, board games, novels and theme park rides) 
  • Terminator and psychoanalysis 
  • Terminator and race, ethnicity and/or the “Other” 
  • Terminator and robotics, artificial intelligence, cybernetic organisms, the transhuman and post-human
  • Terminator and sci-fi
  • Terminator and sexuality
  • Terminator and stardom
  • Terminator and tech noir, retrofuturism, future noir, and cyberpunk.  

We are applying for funding to facilitate postgraduate and unwaged participation. 

Please submit an abstract here by 1 March 2024.  

 For further information, please contact the organisers Professor Nathan Abrams (Bangor University) and Dr Elizabeth Miller (Bangor University) at TerminatorConference@gmail.com