Michael Wood returns fresh from his lecture on pseudo-archaeology for our course on H.P. Lovecraft to take on one of HPL’s contemporaries and most frequent correspondents, Robert E. Howard. Despite his enormous influence on popular culture, Howard’s name is barely recognizable as the creator of Conan the Barbarian, and master of the sword and sorcery genre. But the troubled author also produced a significant body of work that was an inventive blend of dark fantasy and horror in tales like Red Nails (first serialized in 1936 in Weird Tales) and “Pigeons from Hell,” the latter tale adapted for an episode of the Boris Karloff-hosted 60s horror TV series, Thriller. Howard also created horror-adventurer, Solomon Kane, in a series of tales that inspired a recent film adaptation, and he produced (upon Lovecraft’s encouragement) numerous tales inspired by Lovecraft’s fictional topography, which helped to generate an intertextual body of fiction that is now dubbed the “Cthulhu Mythos.”
A graduate of the McGill Institute of Islamic Studies (2004), where he focused on the history and politics of Indonesia, Dr. Michael Wood is a full time faculty member in the Department of Humanities, Dawson College. His current research interests include the use and misuse of historical themes and symbols for purposes of nation building, regime legitimization and national branding in Indonesia and the Balkans. Additionally, he has a background in archaeology, having been involved in the excavations of a Roman bathhouse at Tel Dor, Israel, a Mayan palace at Cahel Pech, Belize and the Iron Age fortifications of Tell Jawa, Jordan. He has been interested in pseudo-archaeology, popular misconceptions of the past involving lost civilizations and ancient aliens, since the original broadcasts of the show In Search of in the late 1970’s. He has also held a long interest in the fantasy and horror works of Robert E, Howard, the creator of Conan and has presented on both of these subjects at the Miskatonic Institute. His publications include Official History in Modern Indonesia: New Order Perceptions and Counterviews (2005) and “Indonesian Nationalism” In Nations and Nationalism in Global Perspective: An Encyclopedia of Origins, Development and Contemporary Transitions (2008) and “Archaeology, National Histories and National Borders in Southeast Asia.” In The Borderlands of Southeast Asia: Geopolitics, Terrorism and Globalization (2011).
