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• Arts & literature: the future of arts; literatures of terror; artistic (literary) modes (genres) of terror; the terrific/horrific sublime; (limits of) self-fashioning and self-expression; anxiety of influence in the age of parody, travesty and appropriation
• Civilisation & technology: fear of modernisation & of acceleration; clashes of civilisations; the fearful interplay between culture and nature; man vis-à-vis machine (e.g., threats to humanness, simulacra of the human as source of anxiety, “new” humanity)
• Politics & ideology: enslavement, subjection, subordination through discourses; the “fearful asymmetry”: discourses & practices of the modern state (intersections of the political and the personal); democracy, liberty(ies), religion: from orthodoxy to fundamentalism and back, the self of ideology
• Discourses: thanatophobia and the postmodern condition; religious studies as a necessary/contingent by-product of recent traumas; fear and/of metaphysics; power and its institutions as forces prescribing discourses of the self
• Identity / the self: phobias of exposure to fear and trauma; the threatened/shifting selfhood & competing models of subjectivity; the sub/un/conscious; the Lacanian Real
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