CFP Otherness: Essays and Studies - Spring 2026 (2/15/2026)

Otherness: Essays and Studies - Spring 2026

deadline for submissions:
February 15, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Centre for Studies in Otherness

contact email:
otherness.research@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/12/05/otherness-essays-and-studies-spring-2026

The peer-reviewed e-journal Otherness: Essays and Studies is now accepting submissions for its 2026 general issue.

Otherness: Essays and Studies publishes research articles from and across different scholarly disciplines that examine, in as many ways as possible, the concepts of otherness and alterity. We particularly appreciate dynamic cross-disciplinary study.

“To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But it also means: to be taught.”
― Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority

Otherness is complex and multivalent term. Otherness is defined by difference, both via outside markers and internal characteristics. Otherness is also a means by which we define ourselves. Thus the concept is inevitably bound with conceptions of selfhood, making it fundamental for discussions of subjectivity, social, cultural and national identity, and larger discussions of ontology. In light of more recent theory and criticism, the assumed line between the self and the other, the defining boundary of identity construction, is blurred, and as such the entire concept of otherness has become intricate and problematic.

In recent years, the concept has become even more salient, as boundaries become increasingly tested, identities challenged, and difference ever more powerfully promoted. As bell hooks reminds us, “when the dominant culture demands that the Other be offered as a sign that progressive political change is taking place … it invites a resurgence of essentialist cultural nationalism” (Black Looks 1992). With that resurgence, we find the discussion of otherness ever more important. It is this concept, otherness, in all of its complexities and nuances that we seek to explore and discuss through Otherness: Essays and Studies.

Past projects from the Centre, and past issues of the journal, have brought together articles from the fields of cultural theory, continental philosophy, sociology, postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, gender studies, Gothic studies, animal alterity, the performing arts, fandom and celebrity studies, postmodernism and poststructuralist theory, and the consideration of the post-linguistic turn in their consideration of otherness. This journal invites submissions dealing with aspects of critical, socio-political, cultural, and literary exploration, within the scope of studies in otherness and alterity.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Otherness in Cultural Representation

The Representation of Otherness in Popular Culture

Race, Otherness, and Mediated Representation

Cultural Appropriation, or The Commodification of the Other

Hybridity, Creolization, and the Global Other

Representations of Otherness in the Global South

Precarity, Otherness and Marginalization

Otherness and the Non-Human Animal

Ethics, Responsibility, and the Other

Memory, History, Trauma, and Otherness

Sexuality, Gender, the Body and the Other

Otherness, Phenomenology, and Lived Experience

Absolute Otherness vs. Self-Same Other

Monstrosity, Spectrality and Terror of the Other

Uncanny or Abject Others; or The Familiar Other

The Sublime or the Unimaginable Other

Otherness and the ‘Post-Racial’

Political Otherness, Democracy, and the Post-Truth Era

Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and the Identity of the Other

Articles should be between 5,000 – 8,000 words. All electronic submissions should be sent via email with Word document attachment formatted to Chicago Manual of Style standards (Author-Date) to the editor Matthias Stephan at otherness.research@gmail.com. See the submission guidelines at www.otherness.dk/journal for more details.

While we accept papers on a rolling basis, consideration for the next general issue will cut off on Feb 15, 2026.


Last updated December 8, 2025

CFP Haunting Revisions: The Female Gothic Across Time and Media (3/1/2026)

Haunting Revisions: The Female Gothic Across Time and Media

deadline for submissions:
March 1, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Special Issue of Women's Studies on the Female Gothic

contact email:
Haunting_revisions_submissions@mailfence.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/12/12/haunting-revisions-the-female-gothic-across-time-and-media

Call for Publications

Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Taylor & Francis)

**Special Issue on

Haunting Revisions: The Female Gothic Across Time and Media**

Guest Editors:
Dr. Cindy Murillo, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Dr. Jennifer Nader, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Overview

The Female Gothic has long served as a vibrant site of cultural critique and imaginative resistance. From its eighteenth-century origins to its twenty-first-century reinventions, the mode has provided women—and now feminist, queer, trans, and nonbinary creators across media—with narrative tools for exploring domestic captivity, gendered violence, racial haunting, queer desire, environmental dread, and the uncanny dimensions of embodiment. Foundational scholarship by Ellen Moers (1976), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979), and later Diana Wallace (2009) and Andrew Smith (2009) has shaped the field, while more recent work increasingly examines the Female Gothic’s global, intersectional, and multimedia transformations.

This special issue, Haunting Revisions: The Female Gothic Across Time and Media, emerges from the panel “Unhomely Heroines: Rewriting the Female Gothic in American Fiction,” presented at the American Literature Association Symposium on the Female Gothic (October 17, 2025). The panel’s high attendance, lively discussion, and subsequent scholarly inquiries demonstrated a pressing need for renewed interdisciplinary engagement with the Female Gothic—especially given the profound cultural upheavals that have reshaped feminist discourse since the last major collected study in 2009 (Wallace & Smith).

Why Now?

Although scholars continue to publish monographs and articles on Gothic women’s writing, there has not been a recent special issue of Women’s Studies dedicated to revisiting the Female Gothic in light of the past decade’s cultural, political, and technological shifts. These include:

• The global #MeToo movement and feminist protest cultures
• Potential rollbacks of women’s voting and property rights through revived coverture frameworks
• Legal assaults on reproductive rights following the overturning of Roe v. Wade
• Rising visibility of trans and queer identities amidst escalating backlash
• Renewed racial justice movements and examinations of colonial hauntings
• Fictional and nonfictional digital Gothic forms (podcasts, TikTok horror, glitch aesthetics, AI-generated Gothic, virtual hauntings)
• Climate crisis, domestic precarity, and post-pandemic isolation reconfiguring the home as both sanctuary and site of terror

In this context, the Female Gothic has not faded—it has expanded, taking on new forms to express contemporary anxieties, desires, and resistances. Recent scholarship by Monica Germanà (2022), Gina Wisker (2016), and Maisha Wester (2012) highlights the evolving forms of the Female Gothic across global, racial, queer, and intersectional frameworks, making a 2027 special issue both timely and necessary.

Aims of the Special Issue

This special issue seeks to:Re-examine the Female Gothic through transnational, intersectional, and multimedia lenses.
Investigate how contemporary social and political pressures reshape Gothic tropes.
Explore the ways women and gender-minority creators use the Gothic to articulate trauma, agency, resistance, and radical imagination.
Highlight global, queer, racial, environmental, and posthuman approaches that extend the boundaries of Female Gothic scholarship.
Foster interdisciplinary conversations across literature, film, television, digital media, music, art, and performance.

We welcome full-length scholarly articles (approximately 20–30 pages), shorter essays, interviews, creative-critical forms, and interdisciplinary approaches.

All submissions will undergo a rigorous double-blind peer review process.

Topics May Include, but Are Not Limited To:

• Historical and Global Female Gothic Traditions
• Race, Coloniality, and Haunting
• Queer, Trans, and Nonbinary Gothic
• Digital, Virtual, and AI Gothic Media
• Domesticity, Intimacy, and Reproductive Futures
• Environmental and EcoGothic Perspectives
• Posthuman, Abject, and Embodied Gothic
• Female Gothic in Film, Television, Music, and Games
• Archival, Historical, and Recovery Work



Key Dates

Abstract Submission Deadline: March 1, 2026
Notification of Acceptance: April 10, 2026
Full Article Submission: August 10, 2026
Peer Review Decisions: October 10, 2026
Revisions Due: January 10, 2027
Final Copy Deadline: February 20, 2027
Publication: Mid-2027

Submission Guidelines

Please email a 250-word abstract (with 3–5 keywords) and a short bionote to:

Haunting_revisions_submissions@mailfence.com by March 1, 2026.

Completed manuscripts will be submitted through Women’s Studies’ editorial system after abstract approval.


Last updated December 12, 2025

CFP Welcome to Hawkins: A Special Issue on Stranger Things (1/30/2026)

Welcome to Hawkins: A Special Issue on Stranger Things

deadline for submissions:
January 30, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Slayage

contact email:
janet.croft@uni.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/01/10/welcome-to-hawkins-a-special-issue-on-stranger-things

Welcome to Hawkins: A Special Issue on Stranger Things



Slayage plans a special issue on Stranger Things for publication in late June 2026. Slayage is an international and interdisciplinary refereed scholarly journal concerned with the “fuzzy set” with Buffy the Vampire Slayer at its center, and Stranger Things, a multi-season television series with kick-ass heroines, the irruption of the supernatural into the mundane, high-stakes action, strong characterizations, snarky humor, and an emphasis on relationships and the complexities of queerness and race, fits our definition nicely. It’s even got a Hellmouth in a library!



As an interdisciplinary journal primarily concerned with visual media, we will be interested in nearly any approach to Stranger Things: literary-critical, sociological, historical, musical, queer theory, pop science, etc. Read more about Slayage at http://www.buffystudies.org/slayage-the-international-journal-of-buffy.html and please see the Slayage Style Sheet at http://www.buffystudies.org/slayage-house-style-sheet.html for guidance on citation style, especially for television episodes.



Here are some ideas to consider:

• Mothers and mothering: good mothers, evil mothers, avenging mothers
• Strong women, beweaponed and weaponized girls, and the Ripley (Alien) trope
• Fathers and fathering, and masculinities in general
• Groupings of generations and cohorts, and how their different story arcs work together
• Nostalgia and audience engagement
• Mythic patterns in storytelling
• Music used in the show and its significance; music as weapon and lifeline
• Resonances with other texts: A Wrinkle in Time, The Lord of the Rings, the Indiana Jones movies, the Star Wars movies, Carrie, The Goonies, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Ghostbusters, the Whedonverse, and on and on and on. Not just a recap of inspirations, but digging into the how and why.
• The show’s use of Dungeons and Dragons, and the early D&D panic
• Queer characters, queer theory, queer history
• Race in the 1980s: what the show got right, what it got wrong
• US/Russia/world relations in the 1980s and what the show does with them
• Crazy science and conspiracy theories
• The stage play Stranger Things: The First Shadow and the canonicity of other supplemental texts
• The independent-kids-on-bikes motif in Stranger Things and its sources
• The midwestern setting and its callbacks to sources like Breaking Away
• The suburban shopping mall: its significance in 80s teen culture and its use in horror films like Dawn of the Dead

Editors for this special issue are:



Dr. Kristine Larsen is distinguished Connecticut State University Professor of Earth and Space Sciences at Central Connecticut State University, where she has taught since 1989. Her teaching and research focus on the intersections between science and society, including science in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Her latest books are Science, Technology and Magic in The Witcher: A Medievalist Spin on Modern Monsters (McFarland, 2023), and The Sun We Share: Our Star in Popular Media and Science (McFarland, 2024).



Janet Brennan Croft (ORCiD 0001-0001-2691-3586) recently retired from the University of Northern Iowa as Librarian Emerita. She is the author of War in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien (recently reissued by Bloomsbury; 2005 Mythopoeic Society Award for Inklings Studies). She has also written on the Peter Jackson Middle-earth films, the Whedonverse, Orphan Black, Terry Pratchett, Lois McMaster Bujold, and other authors, TV shows, and movies, and is editor or co-editor of many collections of literary essays, the most recent being Loremasters and Libraries in Fantasy and Science Fiction, co-edited with Jason Fisher(Mythopoeic Press, 2021). She edits the refereed scholarly journal Mythlore, is archivist and associate editor of Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy+, and chairs the Tolkien in Popular Culture Area at SWPACA.



Send abstracts of 400 words plus selected preliminary references to Kris Larsen and Janet Brennan Croft at janet.croft@uni.edu and larsen@ccsu.edu by January 30, 2026. Decisions on abstracts will be made by February 4. Initial submissions are due by April 15, and final revisions completed by June 10 for publication at the end of June.


Last updated January 12, 2026

CFP Slayage 11 Conference (1/15/2026; Illinois 7/9-12/2026)

Slayage 11 Conference

deadline for submissions:
January 15, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Association for the Study of Buffy+

contact email:
slayage.conference@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/10/19/slayage-11-conference

Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy+ and the Association for the Study of Buffy+ invite proposals for the eleventh biennial Slayage Conference (SC11). Devoted to creative works and workers of the ‘fuzzy set’ surrounding Buffy the Vampire Slayer, SC11 will be held on the campus of Illinois State University in Normal Illinois, 9-12 July 2026. This eleventh convening of Slayage conference will be organized by Local Arrangements Chair Bin Lizzo, rlizzo@ilstu.edu.

We welcome proposals of 200-300 words (or an abstract of a completed paper) on any aspect of Buffy+ television, film, and web texts. The name Buffy recalls the significance of scholarly examinations of feminism, but Slayage is much more. The “plus” is meant to be a sign of inclusivity, both for scholars and texts.

The plus-mark is meant to invite analyses of not only Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, etcetera, but also the work of all the various creators involved with those texts (ranging from, but not limited to: Amy Acker, Christophe Beck, Charisma Carpenter, Stephen DeKnight, Jane Espenson, Nathan Fillion, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ron Glass, Summer Glau, Marita Grabiak, David Greenwalt, Diego Gutierrez, and all the alphabetical others, including the Ws) as well as (primarily visual) media more or less resembling Buffy (where ‘resemblance’ is likewise subject to further discussion). In other words, the plus-mark indicates the “fuzzy set” of which Buffy is the center. Drawing on Brian Attebery's description in Strategies of Fantasy, the fuzzy set is “defined not by boundaries but by a center.” Hence, a scholar applying to Slayage Conference 10 might use Buffy as a yardstick to tell us why we should consider their chosen topic to be part of this fuzzy set. For further thought, consider:

Is your object of study “high stakes TV” with a kick-ass young female lead?


A movie or book series concerned with the frequent irruption of the supernatural into the mundane?


Are snarky humor and linguistic play part of the appeal of the source text? Strong characterization, an emphasis on relationships, and long story arcs spanning a season or more?


Moral dilemmas, stylish but affordable boots, and starship captains with tight pants?

Moreover, the “plus” specifically alludes to LGBTQIA+, too, one of the important touchstones of the original series. The complexities of queerness are part of the intriguingly nuanced nature of many of these texts. The Tara/Willow storyline was both groundbreaking and, with Tara’s death, ultimately controversial. Scholarship explored this subject from many angles; the response to this LGBTQIA+ storyline is an illustration that our analyses should be scholarly critiques, not just hagiography. The conference was established to provide a venue for writing about good work, but good works are not perfect, and scholarship should strive to see clearly. LGBTQIA+ texts and scholars have been an important part of this clear-sighted assessment, and SC10would be strengthened by further contributions in light of contemporary scholarship. Intersectional scholarship is strongly encouraged.For further thought, consider:

How do we now see Dru and Darla?


Does Felicia Day’s Mag of Dollhouse connect at all with her Charlie in Supernatural?


Is asexuality visible anywhere in these texts?


How might current scholars address the presentation of J. August Richards’ Gunn in the light of his coming out as a gay man?

Importantly, the “plus” is meant to refer to the need to counteract a “minus”—that is, the scarcity of Latinx and Black, Indigenous, Person of Color representations in Buffy (the Original Sin of the Buffy text) as well as problematic representations in that and related texts. Since Kent Ono’s 2000 essay “To Be a Vampire on Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” scholars have been examining these matters. However, a great deal remains to be done—again, not just on Buffy but also on related texts. For further thought, consider:

What can we say about the multiple roles of Maurissa Tancharoen?


What about Gina Torres and Harry Lennix?


We can revive Kendra in our scholarly discussions, but we should not stop there.

Multidisciplinary approaches (literature, philosophy, political science, history, communications, film and television studies, women’s studies, religion, linguistics, music, cultural studies, art, and others) are all welcome. A proposal/abstract should demonstrate familiarity with already-published scholarship in the field, which includes dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and over twenty years of the peer-reviewed journal Slayage. Proposers may wish to consult the annotated Oxford University Press bibliography on Buffy the Vampire Slayer as well as the Slayage contents list and the bibliography housed at the ASB+ website.

An individual paper is strictly limited to a maximum reading time of 20 minutes, and we encourage, though do not require, self-organized panels of three presenters. Proposals for workshops, roundtables, or other types of sessions are also welcome. Submissions by graduate and undergraduate students are invited; undergraduates should provide the name, email, and phone number of a faculty member willing to consult with them (the faculty member does not need to attend). A limited number of hybrid slots will be provided. 

Proposals should be submitted online to using this form and will be reviewed by program chairs Cynthia Burkhead, Jessica Hautsch, and James Rocha. Submissions must be received by January 15th, 2026. Decisions will be made no later than March 15th; however, a rolling response to early submissions will be provided. Questions regarding proposals can be directed to the conference email address: slayage.conference@gmail.com.


Last updated October 27, 2025

CFP Don't Look Away: The Monstrous, the Gothic, and Survivance in the Worlds of Stephen Graham Jones (1/26/2026; ALA Chicago 5/20-23/2026)

American Literature Association Panel | Don't Look Away: The Monstrous, the Gothic, and Survivance in the Worlds of Stephen Graham Jones

deadline for submissions:
January 26, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Billy J. Stratton / Stephen Graham Jones Society

contact email:
billy.stratton@du.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/11/05/american-literature-association-panel-dont-look-away-the-monstrous-the-gothic-and

Don't Look Away: The Monstrous, the Gothic, and Survivance in the Worlds of Stephen Graham Jones

Organized by the Stephen Graham Jones Society

Chair: Dr. Billy J. Stratton, University of Denver

The Stephen Graham Jones Society invites proposals for a panel at the 2026 American Literature Association (ALA) meeting. We welcome submissions from emerging and established scholars investigating the vast, ever-expanding body of work by Stephen Graham Jones. This panel will focus on the recent and ongoing scholarship surrounding his horror fiction, as well as its significant pedagogical value in the contemporary classroom.

We seek proposals that examine any aspect of Jones’s profound literary, philosophical, and cultural engagements with the horrific. While we welcome all critical approaches, we are especially interested in presentations that engage with:

• Monster Theory and the Gothic: How does Jones deploy, deconstruct, or “Indigenize” traditional Gothic tropes (the haunted past, uncanny landscapes, the doubled self)? We invite papers that draw from Monster Studies or Gothic theory (including American, Southern, the Frontier Gothic, and Indigenous Gothic) to explore how his creations—from werewolves and ghosts to human slashers—challenge boundaries, embody social anxieties, and critique settler-colonial histories.
• Genre, Form, and Film Theory: We welcome analyses of his masterful manipulation of horror subgenres (the slasher, the possession narrative, the creature feature) and his deep, career-spanning intertextual dialogue with cinema. How do his narrative techniques force a new reckoning with the tropes we think we know?
• Key Themes and Motifs: Examinations of recurring concerns such as settler-colonial anxiety, Indigenous futurity and Gerald Vizenor’s conception of survivance, intergenerational trauma, the complex politics of land and place, the search for community, and the fluid, often fraught, constructions of identity and masculinity.

We encourage presentations that trace the evolution of these themes in his early experimental works (Demon Theory, All the Beautiful Sinners, The Last Final Girl), as well as his breakout horror novels (Mongrels, The Only Good Indians) to his most recent bestsellers, including the Indian Lake Trilogy (My Heart Is a Chainsaw, Don't Fear the Reaper, The Angel of Indian Lake), The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, and Killer on the Road.

Submission Guidelines:

Please submit a 250-300 word abstract and a brief C.V. to Billy J. Stratton at bstratt4@du.edu by the deadline of January 26, 2026. Include “SGJ Society ALA 2026” in the subject line of your email.

The American Literature Association’s 37th annual conference will meet in Chicago at the Palmer House from May 20-23, 2026. For further information or specific questions, please consult the ALA website at www.americanliteratureassociation.org or contact the conference director, Professor Leslie Petty, at ALA@rhodes.edu., or the Executive Director of the ALA, Professor Alfred Bendixen of Princeton University, at ab23@princeton.edu.



Last updated November 6, 2025

CFP Haunted Bodies Conference (1/19/2026; Kingston, UK & Online 5/22-24/2026)

Please note imminent deadline:

Haunted Bodies

deadline for submissions:
January 19, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Queen’s Graduate Conference in Literature

contact email:
queensgraduateconference@gmail.com



Queen’s Graduate Conference in Literature

Call for Papers | Haunted Bodies

Date: May 22-24, 2026 Location: Queen’s University, Kingston and Online

Submissions due:

DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JANUARY 19, 2026

The Queen’s Graduate Conference in Literature (QGCL) seeks academic abstracts and creative pieces for its 2026 conference on the theme of “Haunted Bodies.” The concept of “haunting” has both literal and metaphorical implications. Literature is rife with haunted bodies and haunting spectres, from the ghost of Patroclus visiting Achilles in a dream, to Hamlet’s father stalking the ramparts of Elsinore, to Catherine Earnshaw begging to come inside, to the uncanny visitation in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Yet bodies can also be haunted in much subtler ways: characters can be haunted by grief or trauma; landscapes can be haunted by violence; bodies of text can be haunted by literary legacies, erasure, or edits. We invite proposals that aim to explore hauntings in their various forms and the ways in which these hauntings affect (or not) the unstable/undefined body.

Presentations will be 15–20 minutes long; topics of interest may include, but are not restricted to:

• Encountering the Other: How do hauntings reflect epistemological anxieties? How do ghosts and hauntings help us explore ideas surrounding belonging and alienation?
• Corporeality: What does it mean for a body to be haunted? Which body is being haunted? A human body? A body of text? Is the body corporeal at all? How can hauntings explore or complicate understandings of intimacy?
• Afterlives: Is the afterlife literal and/or metaphorical? What type of inheritances—literary, physical, or spiritual—are at play? How do we interact with loss? How does it manifest within and outside the body?
• Ghosts: In what ways do literal ghosts appear in literature? Consider ghost stories, horror fiction, the Gothic, etc. What does it mean to possess or be possessed, literally or metaphorically?

Academic Submission Guidelines:

• Submit a brief biography of no more than 100 words
• Academic abstracts should be 200–300 words
• Do not include your name in the abstract

Creative Works Submission Guidelines:

• Creative works can come in any form: fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, fragments, audio-visual, etc.
• Submit a brief biography of no more than 100 words
• Submissions should be no more than 6000 words total or 15 minutes for non-textual works
• Applicants must upload a complete copy of their submission, including a title, to the Google form
• Do not include your name in the submission document

Please fill out the Google form here to apply: https://forms.gle/zFpKpNfjXo8zBk4v6

If you have any questions about the conference, please email queensgraduateconference@gmail.com



Last updated January 13, 2026

CFP Romancing the Posthuman (Special Issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies; 11/30/2025)

CfP "Romancing the Posthuman" - Special Issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies

deadline for submissions:
November 30, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Journal of Popular Romance Studies

contact email:
j.e.m.hoorenman@uu.nl

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/10/06/cfp-romancing-the-posthuman-special-issue-of-the-journal-of-popular-romance-studies

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is calling for papers for its Special Issue “Romancing the Posthuman” focusing on romance, critical love studies and posthumanism.

The posthuman is many things: the cyborg, the monster, the zombie, shapeshifters, and vampires (Herbrechter 2018: 94; McLennon 2017). Primarily, though, it is a challenge to Cartesian and humanist understandings of the human both as an independently agentic, biologically uniform being and as a privileged category: male, white, able. As a state of being, the posthuman changes how we define humanity and its relationship to the planet and its other species (Braidotti 2013: 1-2). Critical posthumanism thus interrogates default binaries (such as organic/inorganic, human/animal etc.) and established hierarchies, and deconstructs the categories that make racial, gender, ethnic, sexual, and species othering possible: the ‘human’, ‘sub-human,’ ‘inhuman,’ and ‘non-human.’ Posthumanism thus offers a critical lens through which we can conceptualize human embeddedness in technoscientific naturecultures, past, current and future embodiments, and alternative conceptions of what it means to be human.

Inevitably, posthumanism has fully embraced science fiction literature and, to a lesser extent, fantasy, horror and Gothic literature, seeing affinities between the posthuman and futuristic imaginings of the human, the zombie and the vampire. But as Falkenhayner (2020: 10) explains, the posthuman is no longer the other that troubles but the similar: “[a]s fictions, posthuman similars appear as desire and as a danger […] Analyses of posthuman fictions reflect their respective contemporary imaginaries of inclusion and exclusion into conceptions of self and other, of similarity and difference, equality and hybridity.” Popular romance is therefore a perfect candidate for the exploration of posthuman imaginaries: for example, little attention has yet been paid to the figure of the posthuman in love and in romance, to critical posthumanism as an approach to popular romance and critical love studies, or what Pettman (2017: 8) terms creaturely love: “to rejoice in the miraculous singularity of the being that one is with.” Love, romance, desire and eroticism offer a uniquely productive vantage point from which to approach the posthuman. Popular romance, as Kamblé (2023: 2) argues, maintains a consistent investment in “seeking the truth of [the] unknown, suppressed, fragmented, or embattled self” of the heroine. How is that self re-configured within the posthuman condition? If, as Roach (2016: 175) posits, “the romance story is a reparation fantasy of the end of patriarchy” that affirms its belief in the power of erotic faith within the sacred guarantee of a HEA, what do such fantasies look like away from “the blood, earth, and origin of the classical social contract” (Braidotti 2011: 104). What alternative human and non-human embodiments does romance offer or foreclose?

There are many more questions to explore at the intersection of critical love/ popular romance studies and posthumanism, and to that effect, the special issue of JPRS “Romancing the Posthuman” is interested in creating, for the first time, a dedicated academic space for that work. With this special issue, we invite popular romance scholars and scholars of posthumanism to engage with the posthuman in their reading of romance and to bring posthuman theory to bear on popular romance texts.

Topics of interest may include but are not limited to:

• Representations/cultural expressions of love in a posthuman world
• Technologically mediated love in global popular culture
• Creaturely love, humanimality and interspecies intimacies
• The posthuman in and/or a posthumanist reading of paranormal, science fiction, fantasy, dystopian, post-apocalyptic, steampunk and speculative popular romance
• Posthuman love, sexuality and desire
• Alternative imaginings of human subjectivities, embodiments and love
• Transhumanist and/or tranimacy fantasies in romantic media
• Critical posthumanist and new materialist understandings of love, romance and kinship
• The mediation of these cultural/theoretical considerations in a variety of media, including but not limited to: genre fiction, literary texts, autobiography/memoir, screen media, music, performing arts, or in the teaching of these media/texts.

We are inviting submissions for the Special Issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies: “Romancing the Posthuman.” The Special Issue is jointly edited by Hanna Hoorenman and Evvie Valliou. Please submit abstracts in MS Word of no more than 300 words and bios of no more than 100 words to j.e.m.hoorenman@uu.nl and e.k.valiou@sheffield.ac.uk by 31 October 2025. See also https://www.jprstudies.org/submissions/special-issue-call-for-papers/.

*** Note: Deadline extended to 30 November 2025 ***

Suggested bibliography:

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

—-. The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013.

Christmas, A.J. “Augmented Intimacies: Posthuman Love Stories in Contemporary Science Fiction.” PhD Dissertation Leeds University, 2013.

Falkenhayner, N. “The Ship Who Sang: Feminism, the Posthuman, and Similarity.” Open Library of Humanities, 6(2): 21 (2020), pp. 1–24.

Herbrechter, Stephan. “Critical Posthumanism.” In Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Kamblé, Jayashree, Eric Murphy Selinger, and Hsu-Ming Teo, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction. Routledge, 2021.

Kamblé, Jayashree. Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine’s Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation. Indiana University Press, 2023.

MacCormack, Patricia. “Posthuman Sexuality.” In Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

McLennon, Leigh. “Contemporary Vampire Genre Fiction: Ethical Feeding and the Posthuman Vampire in Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance.” PhD Dissertation. University of Melbourne, 2017.

Ostalska, Katarzyna. “Dystopias in the Realm of Popular Culture: Introducing Elements of Posthuman and Postfeminist Discourse to the Mass Audience Female Readership in Cecelia Ahern’s Roar (2018).” Text Matters, no. 11 (2021): 204–21.

Pettman, Dominic. Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less than Human. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Roach, Catherine M. Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture. Indiana University Press, 2016.


Last updated October 13, 2025

CFP Enmonsterisations in the Fantastic (1/10/2026; TU Braunschweig 6/26-28/2026)

Enmonsterisations in the Fantastic

deadline for submissions:
January 10, 2026

full name / name of organization:
German Inklings Society

contact email:
carsten.kullmann@ovgu.de

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/09/22/enmonsterisations-in-the-fantastic

Enmonsterisations in the Fantastic
Annual Symposium of the German Inklings Society

“Epochs throw up the monsters they need.”
— China Miéville, “Theses on Monsters”

Monsters are ubiquitous in the fantastic imaginary and come in all shapes and sizes. Narratively, they perform a variety of functions, serving for instance as obstacles or revelations. However, as both J.R.R. Tolkien, in his landmark essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”, and China Miéville, in “Theses on Monsters”, remind us, monsters are “anything but a sad mistake” (Tolkien 16); they are never neutral. Because “[h]omo sapiens is a bringer-forth of monsters as reason’s dream”, they are culturally and symbolically revealing and “demand decoding” (Miéville). They serve as mirrors for our world, transgressors of the status quo, or punishments for those daring to wander off the path of normativity. Contemplating these cultural functions, Miéville introduces the verb “to enmonster” – a dynamic act of transformation whereby a figure or force is rendered monstrous. To “enmonster” is to signify, to mark, to disfigure, to other. It is, therefore, a socio-political act invested with power.

The Inklings themselves were deeply concerned with the monstrous. Tolkien’s orcs and Balrogs, Lewis’s demonic bureaucrats and hybrid beasts, Williams’s metaphysical powers – all participate in theological, moral, and existential discourses about monstrosity. Yet, as new adaptations of the Inklings’ work such as Rings of Power attest, they also anticipate more contemporary frameworks, such as those of othering, racialisation, queerness, and ideological projection. Beyond the Inklings, fantastical genres across literature, film, television, comics, and games offer fertile ground for analysing processes of enmonsterisation, from the posthuman mutations of vampires (Dracula, V Wars), the ‘villain origin story’ reappraised (Wicked, Maleficent), the monstrous-feminine (Carmilla, The Witch), alien threats (Under the Skin), rewritings and adaptations (Frankissstein, Rings of Power), monstrous nature (Mythago Wood, Last of Us) to new imaginations of (White) colonial monstrosity (Get Out) or experiencing enmonsterisation oneself (Dungeons & Dragons). Whether posthuman, more-than-human or nonhuman, the monster can be friend, enemy or kin and represent the abject (Finzsch), the revolutionary, the colonised, the deviant, or the divine. Enmonsterisation, then, is a process of cultural transformation and negotiation.

The 2026 conference of the German Inklings Society wants to take up Miéville’s claim that we experience the conjunction of certain monsters, as “[a]ll our moments are monstrous moments”, and investigate processes of enmonsterisation in the fantastic imaginary. We invite papers that treat monsters as “as a significant and rich field of social production rather than a mirage to be dispelled“ (Cohen 11) and explore the theme of enmonsterisation in all fantastical genres. What does it mean to make a monster? Which narrative function do they serve within the stories that imagine them? What cultural work does the act of enmonsterisation perform? And how are these processes represented, resisted, or reimagined in fantastic texts?

We welcome papers that investigate the processes and functions of enmonsterisation that the fantastic employs; how it (de)constructs, complicates, and politicises its monsters. Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Theorising enmonsterisation from Tolkien to Miéville and beyond
• Narrativisation, style, and aesthetics of enmonsterisation
• Monsters in the works of the Inklings: allegory, morality, metaphysics
• Monstrosity and world-building (ecology, politics, theology)
• Monstrosity and identity/alterity (‘race’, gender, sexuality, class, culture, and ethnicity)
• The monstrous-feminine
• Engagements with the enmonsterisation of queer/homosexual identities and its history
• The ethics of enmonsterisation
• Reclaiming the monster, countering enmonsterisation
• Contemporary retellings (rehabilitated villains, monstrous protagonists)
• Monstrous metamorphoses (transformation, mutation, hybridity)
• The posthuman and the monstrous body
• Enmonsterisation of nature
• Political uses of enmonsterisation
• Enmonsterisation and (Gothic) Marxism
• Enmonsterisation, Orientalism and Post-Colonialism
• Cinematic explorations and techniques of enmonsterisation

We invite proposals (300 to 500 words, in English or German) for papers (20 minutes) along with a brief biographical note (150 words) to be sent to aylin-dilek.walder@tu-braunschweig.de andcarsten.kullmann@ovgu.de. Please use the subject line “Inklings Symposium 2026”.

Deadline for proposals: 10 January 2026
Conference date: 26–28 June 2026
Location: TU Braunschweig

Please note that the conference will be an in-person event. There will be no possibility of remote participation.

A limited travel and accommodation allowance will be available for speakers.
Selected papers will be considered for publication in the Inklings Yearbook.

Works Cited

Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illuminations: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. U of California P, 1993.

Finzsch, Norbert. Abjekte Körper: Zur Kulturgeschichte der Monstrositäten. Transcript, 2024.

Miéville, China. “Theses on Monsters.” Conjunctions, vol. 59, Fall 2012.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays. Edited by Christopher Tolkien, HarperCollins, 1997.



Last updated September 24, 2025

CFP Horror Studies Now 2026 Conference (1/30/2026; Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK 5/28-29/2026)

Horror Studies Now 2026: A Major International Conference

deadline for submissions:
January 30, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Johnny Walker / Northumbria University

contact email:
horrorstudies@northumbria.ac.uk

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/09/18/horror-studies-now-2026-a-major-international-conference

Horror Studies Now: A Major International Conference (28-29 May 2026, Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK)

The Horror Studies Research Group at Northumbria University invites researchers working in the multidisciplinary field of “Horror Studies” to submit abstracts about their research for the 2026 edition of the major, in-person, annual conference, Horror Studies Now, taking place on 28-29 May 2026.

Speakers will each deliver a 15-minute talk about their research, followed by extended discussion and questions from the conference delegation. We welcome submissions from scholars at any career stage. The event is intended to provide a space in which to develop ideas, network, and forge collaborations with fellow Horror Studies researchers.

Members of the organising committee are keen to read abstracts which address any aspect of the horror genre and popular culture, but are especially keen to hear from scholars who explore areas and approaches that have not yet been adequately accounted for or represented in the field, encompassing (but not limited to):

The diversity of perspectives, identities, and voices that comprise Horror Studies and horror production


Independent horror production, alternative histories, and horror produced outside of Europe and North America


The field’s methodological richness, including archival approaches, audience research, practice-based research, and new theoretical perspectives


The breadth of cultural perspectives that inform Horror Studies and horror media


Papers that address horror in all its media forms including games, film, comics, music, social media, television, literature, art, and so forth

We seek to foreground scholarly excellence within the field by embracing a wide range of approaches, confronting representational biases within the canon, highlighting strategies to counter these biases, and contributing to a more diverse and inclusive academic landscape. We encourage and welcome expressions of interest from members of the global majority and people from underrepresented or marginalised groups.


The programme will feature talks and workshops delivered by soon-to-be-announced special guests. Check http://horrorstudies.com for updates.

The deadline for abstracts (of 250 words) is 23:59 30th January 2026. Abstracts should be accompanied by a biographical statement (of 50-100 words) and submitted at the following link: https://forms.office.com/e/eH16H68hsk.

A small fee will be required to attend. All speakers, unless they choose to decline, will have their work considered for the Peter Hutchings Award for Outstanding Contribution to Horror Studies. The award includes a certificate for the winner and a publication (subject to revision) in the journal Studies in the Fantastic.

Applicants will be notified of the outcome of their proposal by 27 February 2026.

Any questions should be directed to horrorstudies@northumbria.ac.uk


The Horror Studies Research Group at Northumbria:

Northumbria University is internationally renowned as the home of horror scholarship. This research specialism was founded by our late Professor Peter Hutchings, and the Horror Studies Research Group formalises Northumbria’s concentration of experts in this area. Our core team are widely recognised as leaders in this area, publishing field-defining monographs, presenting keynote lectures at major conferences, delivering talks at numerous European film festivals, holding positions on the editorial boards of the field’s primary book series and winning major research grants. Our global reputation for research excellence in Horror Studies is further proliferated by our many genre-based PhDs and alumni. Find out more: http://horrorstudies.com.



Last updated September 18, 2025

CFP Monsters, Monstrosities, & the Monstrous Area of PCA (11/30/2025; Atlanta PCA)

Monsters, Monstrosities, & the Monstrous Area of PCA

deadline for submissions:
November 30, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Popular Culture Association

contact email:
MonsterStudiesPCA@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/09/17/monsters-monstrosities-the-monstrous-area-of-pca

Monsters, Monstrosities, & the Monstrous Area

Join us for the 2026 Popular Culture/American Culture Association's National Conference.

Our area provides a home for everything monsters at PCA. We are proud to be the sister area of Vampire Studies who inspired us to create this area for the rest of the monsters. Please join us in exploring the themes, influences, and impact of the monster as a cultural and historical touchstone.

Across the globe and throughout the centuries, the label of monster has been invoked to separate the “natural” from the “unnatural” and the acceptable from the socially unacceptable. Whether referring to mythological creatures, the Victorian creations that have become standards through Universal film adaptations, or as a shorthand to denigrate othered peoples, the monster has no shortage of applications and, sometimes, reevaluations.

We specifically welcome papers or presentations that focus on the use of the monster as a teaching tool or educational lens.

As the term monster has a wide application, topics can be anything from the inhabitants of Sesame Street to medieval studies to medical oddities. Potential paper topics include:

• Children’s books, toys, or related media
• Film and television including remediations
• Literary texts
• Board games, RPGs, video games, and pinball
• Monsters queering societal norms and the monster as “other”
• Propaganda materials
• Sideshows and oddities

Please note: Anyone interested in presenting specifically on the vampire is heartily encouraged to apply to our sister section, Vampire Studies. They provide a space to discuss and share aspects of the global vampire, while we are here to give their monstrous kith and kin a home of their own.

Scope of the paper topics accepted under this area: From Grendel to Grover and Hannibal Lecter to high rises, topics in this area span the monstrous in form, behavior, and theory.

List of example paper titles:

• “Using Cohen’s Seven Monster Theses When Teaching Frankenstein”
• “Monsters Helping Children Understand Death in A Monster Calls”
• “Monstrifying the Other for Entertainment: From Freak Shows to B-Movies”
• “The Monster and his Monstrosity: H. H. Holmes’ Murder Hotel”
• “Deromanticizing the Monster in What We Do in the Shadows.”

Submission requirements: Please submit an abstract (maximum of 300 words) through the PCA website.

Please address any questions or concerns to the co-chairs at: MonsterStudiesPCA@gmail.com

Co-chairs

Colleen Karn

David Hansen

Cassandra Karn



Last updated September 17, 2025

CFP Unfaithful Adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde: Essays on Hybridity and the Gothic Double (3/5/2025)

Unfaithful Adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde: Essays on Hybridity and the Gothic Double

deadline for submissions:
March 5, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Eric Riddle

contact email:
UnfaithfullyHyde@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/09/11/unfaithful-adaptations-of-jekyll-and-hyde-essays-on-hybridity-and-the-gothic-double


Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one of the most adapted, parodied, and referenced works of Gothic fiction. Even those who have never read the novella know the “story,” or at least the twist: Henry Jekyll becomes Edward Hyde to live a double life, disconnected from societal pressures and expectations. Many, if not all, of these media adaptations add, edit, or remove elements from the story, making it a hybrid narrative, one part Stevenson’s and one part the adapter’s.



This hybridity will be the focus of this proposed edited collection with McFarland, under their new “Studies in Liberal Adaptation” collection with Dr. Kyle William Bishop as the series editor. This book will analyze unfaithful adaptations of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in various media formats including television, film, video and board games, and comics, and the edited collection will ultimately argue why the novella works so well as an artifact to be adapted to address modern societal concerns and remains an important touchstone more than a century after its original publication.

Following is a non-exhaustive list of potential themes and works the collection is interested in approaching. Chapters should be academically researched while also being accessibly written for a non-academic audience.



THEMES

• Addiction and Aggression
• Anonymity / Secret Identities
• Class struggles
• Comics and Superheroes
• Gender and Sexuality
• “Inappropriate” love, Prostitution, etc.
• Pride and Hubris
• Race

TEXTS (in no particular order)

• Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953)
• Batman (As hero with secret identity and/or the comic villain Hyde)
• Cartoon Adaptations (Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, Mighty Mouse)
• Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype (1980)
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920, 1931, 1941 versions, as well as any others)
• Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde (1995)
• Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971)
• Fight Club
• Jekyll (2007 BBS series)
• Mary Reilly (1996)
• Once Upon a Time
• Penny Dreadful
• The Incredible Hulk (various)
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)
• The Mummy (2017)
• The Nutty Professor (all versions)
• The Pagemaster (1994)
• Van Helsing (2004)

Please send an abstract of 300-500 words describing your proposed chapter and thesis, along with a short author bio, to Dr. Eric Riddle at UnfaithfullyHyde@gmail.com before March 5th, 2026. Final chapters of 5,000-6,000 words will be due late 2026.


Last updated September 12, 2025

Call for Presenters: Online Talk Series - Gothic, Horror, Folklore and the Supernatural (12/20/2025)

Online Talk Series - Gothic, Horror, Folklore and the Supernatural

deadline for submissions:
December 20, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Romancing the Gothic

contact email:
sam@romancingthegothic.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/09/02/online-talk-series-gothic-horror-folklore-and-the-supernatural

Romancing the Gothic Talk Series

This talk series offers online talks each week and has a global audience and speaker pool. Talks are 40-45 minutes and are run (in real time) twice to catch different time zones. An honorarium is offered. Our categories, laid out below, allow for flexibility. Please contact me (details at the end) if you have any questions. We strongly encourage speakers to attend other sessions as well as there own and join in with the community!

In 2026, our annual conference will be celebrating the 200th anniversary of Ann Radcliffe's final, posthumous, publications. An early Gothic writer, Radcliffe was known to some as the 'Great Enchantress', to others as the 'Shakespeare of Romance writers'. She was a key figure in the early Gothic - both in shaping it and in its meteoric rise to popularity. In keeping with this year's conference celebrating a famous female writer, this year's talk programme has an increased focused on women writers and writers of marginalised genders. As you'll see, a number of months are focused on those taking the Gothic, horror and the supernatural and using it to explore the world from the position of those who, for reasons of gender, are marginalised within it. We're excited for a year of talks which take on the Gothic and Horror's potential for subversion, for exploring the horrors that seethe beneath the family friendly facade, and for giving voice to those made quiet. This is why we have several months specifically focused on female writers and writers of marginalised genders but we will, as always, have a wide-ranging and exciting programme. There's space for every type of talk on this year's list of themes!

Note: It is particularly important for us to include the voices of people of marginalised genders - including trans, non-binary, intersex and two-spirit identities - in a world which is increasingly hostile to them. Romancing the Gothic has always been, and will always be, an inclusive space for people of all genders.

Below is a list of themes by month. We welcome talks from every country - all talks are online.

January 2026 - Women and Other Marginalised Genders in Horror (film)

We invite talks on all aspects of film from tracing an actor or director's career, to in-depth case studies, to exploring thematics of representation. Scream queens of all descriptions, enthusiastically welcome and if anyone fancies doing a deep dive into Samara Weaving's career, you'll have my eternal gratitude.

February 2026 - Writers of the Ghostly

We welcome talks which focus on specific authors or broader surveys of ghostly fiction. This may be an introduction to a specific writer's work, a deep dive, a thematic or theoretical approach, or, a creative workshop focusing on writing the ghostly!

March 2026 - Introduction to...

Our 'Introduction' series was popular in 2025 so we'll be having two months this year dedicated to 'introductions'. This should be an introduction to a larger theme, a specific author/director/actor, a introduction to a genre or other overview

April 2026 - Fear and Folklore

We welcome talks on any aspects of folklore and the supernatural and strongly encourage contributions from all countries.

May 2026 - Supernatural Women/People of Marginalised Genders

We welcome talks which explore folkloric or fictional creatures, protagonists from specific filmic/literary/gaming texts, or connections between the supernatural and women or people of marginalised gender historically or in different cultures.

June 2026 - Nineteenth Century Gothic Women and People of Marginalised Genders

We welcome overviews of specific writers, introductions to particular texts, thematic literary or historical explorations

July 2026 - Sapphic Gothic and Horror

We welcome talks on books, films, games, fan cultures or any other form of Sapphic Gothic and Horror. Bring me your murder ladies!

August 2026 - Women and People of Marginalised Genders writing horror, the Gothic, and the Supernatural

We are particularly interested in the written word here but this extends across all fields: scripts, books, graphic novels, operas and more!

September 2026 - Introduction to...

See March!

October 2026 - Internationally Horrifying

This month we welcome talks on international traditions outside of the US and the UK. Talks may focus on individual works, genres, traditions, folklore, specific writers or any combination of the above!

November 2026 - Paranormal Romance

We welcome talks which explore any aspect of paranormal romance (defined here as a romance involving at least one supernatural agent) from folkloric traditions, to urban fantasy, to popular serials, to visual novels, ttrpgs or any type of text. We are flexible in our definitions!

December 2026 - 'Final Girls'

We welcome talks on horror and the Gothic's survivors. This may literally be the classic 'final girl', but can include any exploration of horror 'survival'. Be creative!

How to Apply

You should send an abstract before December 20th 2025. You should send an abstract (a short blurb) of approximately 250 words to sam@romancingthegothic.com. You may also direct any questions to the same address. We do NOT ask for a bio.

Talks occur twice on a Saturday, although we are happy to accommodate people on a Sunday if preferred for religious or other reasons. We pay a flat fee of £80 plus any donations for tickets.

PLEASE NOTE: It's first come, first served and the spaces go fast in popular months!



Last updated September 2, 2025

CFP Horror Area SWPACA (10/31/2025; Albuquerque, 2/25-28/2026)

CFP: "Horror" at SWPACA, Albuquerque, Feb. 25-28, 2026

deadline for submissions:
October 31, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Southwest Popular/American Culture Association

contact email:
steffenhantke@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/08/31/cfp-horror-at-swpaca-albuquerque-feb-25-28-2026


Call for Papers

“Horror (Literary & Cinematic)”

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)



47th Annual Conference, February 25-28, 2026

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2025

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2025



Proposals for papers and panels are now being accepted for the 47th annual SWPACA conference. One of the nation’s largest interdisciplinary academic conferences, SWPACA offers nearly 70 subject areas, each typically featuring multiple panels. For a full list of subject areas, area descriptions, and Area Chairs, please visit https://swpaca.org/subject-areas/.



The area chair for Horror invites all interested scholars to submit paper proposals on any aspect of horror in literature, film, television, digital and online media, as well as in general culture. Given the strong showing of work on horror cinema in recent years, we hope to continue this tradition, but also to diversify into new and unconventional areas, especially with the addition of roundtable sessions on a variety of topics that are broadly popular or serve a more narrowly defined issue of thematic or topical urgency. If you are interested in participating in a roundtable event regarding horror, please contact the area chair with questions and suggestions for topics and presenters.



All proposals must be submitted through the conference’s database at https://swpaca.org/app.



For details on using the submission database and on the application process in general (including submitting proposals for roundtables and preformed panels), please see the FAQS & Resources tab on https://swpaca.org/.



Individual proposals for 15-minute papers must include an abstract of approximately 200-500 words and a brief summary of 100 words or less.



For information on how to submit a proposal for a roundtable or a multi-paper panel, please view the above FAQs & Resources link.



The deadline for submissions is October 31, 2025.



SWPACA offers monetary awards for the best graduate student papers in a variety of categories. Submissions of accepted, full papers are due January 1, 2026. More details are here: https://swpaca.org/graduate-student-paper-awards/. SWPACA also offers travel fellowships for undergraduate and graduate students as well as contingent faculty: https://swpaca.org/travel-awards-students-faculty/.



Registration and travel information for the conference is available at https://swpaca.org/albuquerque-conference/. For 2026, we will be returning to the Marriott Albuquerque (2101 Louisiana Blvd NE, Albuquerque, NM 87110), which boasts free parking and close proximity to shopping and dining.



In addition, please check out the organization’s peer-reviewed, scholarly journal, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, at https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dialogue/.



If you have any questions about the Horror Area, please contact its Area Chair, Steffen Hantke, Sogang University, steffenhantke@gmail.com. If you have general questions about the conference, please contact us at support@swpaca.org, and a member of the executive team will get back to you.



This will be a fully in-person conference. If you’re looking for an online option to present your work, keep an eye out for details about the 2026 SWPACA Summer Salon, a completely virtual conference to take place in June 2026.



We look forward to receiving your submissions!



Last updated September 1, 2025

CFP Spectral Panels: Gothic Traditions in Comics and Graphic Novels (NeMLA Panel) – Deadline 9/30/2025

Spectral Panels: Gothic Traditions in Comics and Graphic Novels (NeMLA Panel) – Deadline 9/30/2025

Deadline for Submissions is September 30, 2025

Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

March 5-8, 2026, Pittsburgh, PA

Source: https://americangothicsociety.com/spectral-panels-gothic-traditions-in-comics-and-graphic-novels-nemla-panel/

Gothic literature, art, and film have long trafficked in the uncanny, the monstrous, and the psychologically fractured—motifs that unsettle boundaries between self and other, life and death, reality and illusion. These elements find renewed resonance in the graphic novel, a form whose visual and often fragmented structure lends itself to the disjointed temporalities, haunting imagery, and corporeal distortions central to Gothic expression. As a hybrid medium that combines word and image, the graphic novel offers fertile ground for reimagining Gothic conventions in ways that are both formally and thematically transgressive. This panel seeks to explore the intersection of Gothic aesthetics and themes with the graphic novel form, examining how graphic narratives absorb, revise, or subvert Gothic tropes across historical and cultural contexts. The panel invites interdisciplinary proposals from scholars working in comics studies, as well as literature, visual culture, film and media studies.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Adaptations of classic Gothic texts in graphic form
• Visual and graphic representations of the haunted, abject, or monstrous body
• Fragmentation, spatial horror, and temporal disjunction in Gothic comics
• The uncanny and the visual narrative
• Queer Gothic and graphic storytelling
• Race, colonialism, and the Gothic in comics
• Gender, sexuality, and Gothic archetypes in illustrated narratives
• Horror aesthetics and panel composition
• Global perspectives on the Gothic graphic novel

Please submit your proposal to this link: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21724

• Title of paper
• Abstract (300 words)
• Short bio (100 words)

CFP Kafka's Fiction (Panel) (9/30/2025; NeMLA 2026 Pittsburgh/hybrid)

Kafka's Fiction (Panel)

Primary Area / Secondary Area
Comparative Literature / German

Modality
Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.

Chair(s)
Adam Hartman-Whitfield (Binghamton University, SUNY)

Direct link for submissions: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21815

Abstract

Marking a century since the posthumous publication of The Castle in 1926, this panel aims to explore the enduring currency of Franz Kafka's fiction. His work feels uncanny today: we read of protagonists trapped in impossibly complex systems, unnavigable physical and mental spaces, and enigmatic configurations of law and justice occasioning unusual arrests and forced disappearances, all of which are described in equal parts cruelty and black humor—stories, and perhaps a tone, that resonate now more than ever. Borges once reflected that Kafka's work "modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future" (Kafka and His Precursors). We want to consider, in essence, what Kafka might mean in 2026.

In light of this year’s theme of (re)generation, we ask: what might we generate in a (re)turn to Kafka at this particular moment? While any engagement with Kafka's work and its afterlives are welcome additions to this panel, we are especially interested in approaches that extend beyond disciplinary boundaries. Some potential generative approaches could include:

• Close and/or theoretical readings of Kafka's work
• Adaptations of Kafka's work into other media
• Translating Kafka's work
• Teaching Kafka's stories
• Kafka as a mode of reading the present

Description

Marking a century since the posthumous publication of The Castle in 1926, this panel aims to explore the enduring currency of Franz Kafka's fiction. We want to consider what Kafka might mean in 2026—a particularly Kafkaesque moment—from a variety of inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives.

CFP Regenerating Genre: History and Multicultural Perspectives in Horror (NeMLA 26) (9/30/2025)

Regenerating Genre: History and Multicultural Perspectives in Horror (NeMLA 26)

deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Joshua Gooch / NeMLA 2026 panel

contact email:
goochj@dyc.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/06/25/regenerating-genre-history-and-multicultural-perspectives-in-horror-nemla-26



History is horrifying. For horror creators in the twenty-first century, the terrors of the past have become central to the genre’s regeneration. The increasing diversity of who writes and creates horror has been tightly connected to the genre’s ability to depict otherwise occluded historical terrors. Critics have taken on horror’s relation of past and present as different subgenera, from what Sheri-Marie Harrison calls “the new Black Gothic” to Patricia Stuelke’s “anticapitalist feminist horror.”

This panel will examine how the genre has increasingly come to engage directly with history and its horrors. How do creators put to use the genre’s affordances to represent historical experience? How does the choice of a particular medium affect these choices? And, most importantly, how are creators using the affordances of genre and medium to represent history?

Of particular interest are the ways that recent horror has turned to realist or magical realist representational strategies to communicate with audiences about real historical traumas.

In film, this includes Jennifer Kent’s follow-up to The Babadook, The Nightingale, and how other directors have followed her into a realist horror of the past, e.g., Ali Abbasi with Holy Spider and Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala with The Devil’s Bath. Also of interest are the ways that directors have followed the path of magical realist allegory laid out by Guilermo Del Toro in The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth: Issa Lopez with Tigers Are Not Afraid and Kenneth Dagatan with In my mother’s skin to Jayro Bustamente with his two films, La Llorna and Rita and Finnegan Lorcan with Nocebo.

In fiction, this includes writers who mix genre, history, and realism in varying degrees, from Tananarive Due’s depiction of the history of the Dozier School for Boys via the ghost story, Victor Lavalle’s examination of Black settlers in the west in Lone Women, and Emil Ferris’s use of the genre to mediate historical trauma in My Favorite Thing is Monsters, to the more fantastical elaborations of historical traumas found in Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, and Silver Nitrate, Isabel Cañas’s The Hacienda and Vampires of El Norte, and Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night.

Please submit 250 word abstracts to https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21575 by 30 Septmber 2025.




Last updated June 26, 2025

CFP EXTENDED DEADLINE: Fearful Performances: Stardom, Skill, and Style of Acting in the Horror Film (10/1/2025)

EXTENDED DEADLINE: Fearful Performances: Stardom, Skill, and Style of Acting in the Horror Film

deadline for submissions:
October 1, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Steffen Hantke

contact email:
steffenhantke@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/05/04/extended-deadline-fearful-performances-stardom-skill-and-style-of-acting-in-the

CFP: Extended Deadline, October 1, 2025





Edited Collection of Critical Essays

“Fearful Performances: Stardom, Skill, and Style of Acting in the Horror Film”



Appearing in a horror film is likely to make high demands on even the most seasoned members of the acting profession. No matter if a horror film features characters in extreme states of mental or physical distress or characters who embody abject states of monstrosity or alterity, actors are facing obstacles unlike those in other cinematic genres. Just being rendered invisible under extensive make-up and prosthetics is a formidable challenge. Hence, the genre’s lore is rife with tales of actors pushing themselves—or being pushed—to the edge of mental and physical endurance in pursuit of a memorable performance. Performances in horror films can be notable for being cool and understated, or hotly and hysterically pitched. Amateurs are praised for impressive performances, as professionals are lambasted for making bad choices, chewing the scenery, or phoning it in. Actors have immersed themselves in the Method, or planted their feet squarely and simply delivered their lines. Styles vary, as horror subgenres do, as do actors’ bodies and faces and voices, as do actors’ collaborations with cinematographers and lighting technicians, makeup artists and voice coaches. Not surprisingly, then, the success of many horror films stands and falls with the intensity and credibility of an acting performance. Actors ruin horror films, or rescue them.



With the notable exception of the genre’s most enduringly popular stars, as well as the genre’s emblematic Final Girls and Scream Queens, critical analysis of actors and acting performances in horror films have largely been limited and sporadic. Is there an idiosyncratic aesthetic or performative approach to horror film acting that distinguishes it from working in other genres? How does horror film acting position itself within the larger field of professional acting on film? What are the evaluative criteria of assessing an actor’s performance in a horror film? How does an actor’s performance in a horror film engage with prosthetic or digital effects? How does an actor’s unique performance seize and interpret a character in a literary source text? At the intersection of horror film studies, star studies, and performance studies, this collection of critical essays aims to map out horror film acting in individual performances and across entire career arcs, illuminate it in larger trends and recurring tropes, and provide a cogent critical discussion that allows readers to grasp the horror film in this crucial performative dimension.



Possible topics can include, but are not limited to:


- Horror films as gateways into acting careers (first films, first performances)

- The Professionalism of horror film actors and acting

- Techniques, skills, requirements, routines, tricks, and shticks

- The aesthetics of horror film acting

- Going Slumming: “serious” actors and their forays into the horror genre

- Typecasting/casting-against-type

- Stardom and the horror film as star vehicle

- Performance styles (Method Acting, silent film acting, etc.)

- Iconic performances and performers (individual films, individual performances)

- Embodying and interpreting characters from non-cinematic source texts

- Acting performances on the edge of discomfort, for viewer and/or performer

- Underplayed and muted performances

- Acting in “quiet horror” films

- Self-conscious performances

- Acting in digital environments

- The prosthetic and make-up enhancement of the actor’s body

- Child actors

- Amateur actors

- Digital actors

- Invisible Actors (voice actors, body doubles, stunt workers)

- Embodying genre functions: “monstrosity”

- Embodying genre functions: “victimization”

- Embodying genre functions: “normality”

- The politics of evaluating horror film actors and acting

- Canonizing: the “best/worst” horror film acting performances

- Awards and accolades: acting as cultural/social/professional capital

- Polarizing/scandalizing horror film performances

- Acting in horror film subgenres (silent films, splatter films, found footage horror, torture porn, etc.)

- Representing horror film actors and acting: interviews, appearances at screenings and cons, documentaries, etc.

- The discourse on horror film acting (acting manuals and guidebooks, anecdotal writing about horror film production, autobiographical and professional writing by actors and directors, past critical writing in its canonizing function, etc.)



Given the nature and breadth of the topic, the internal organization of the anthology is not predetermined but will develop in dialogue with submitted and accepted proposals. Broadly, however, the anthology aims at a foreword and afterword, as well as four or five thematically differentiated sections, each featuring three to five essays, each at a length of 5000-7000 words. The anthology aims at covering a wide historical scope, with essays starting as early as the silent film era and including recent horror film production. Thematically, the anthology has a wide international scope, but is expected to gravitate toward U.S. and anglophone productions. The anthology does not exclude contributions that cover canonical films and performers. However, in order to avoid overlap with already existing research, it strongly favors contributions that cover either overlooked films and performers or films and performers of recent years that have not yet received critical recognition. While individual proposals on Final Girls and Scream Queens are evaluated on their individual merits, these topics are in themselves not of any primary interest given the wealth of already existing research.



Please submit a proposal/abstract of 500-1000 words, and a brief biographical blurb that lists specific examples of your published work (or a professional CV). Please email your proposal/abstract, or any questions or suggestions you might have, to Steffen Hantke at steffenhantke@gmail.com before October 1, 2025.



Steffen Hantke has edited Horror, a special topic issue of Paradoxa (2002), Horror: Creating and Marketing Fear (2004), Caligari’s Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear after 1945 (2007), American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (2010), and, with Agnieszka Soltysik-Monnet, War Gothic in Literature and Culture (2016). He is also author of Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Literature (1994), Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America after World War II (2016), and Cloverfield: Creatures and Catastrophes in Post-9/11 Cinema (2023).



Last updated June 13, 2025

CFP Postmodern Horror in the New Millennium (9/30/2025; NeMLA 2026)

Postmodern Horror in the New Millennium

deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2025

full name / name of organization:
NeMLA

contact email:
ciski77@scarletmail.rutgers.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/07/08/postmodern-horror-in-the-new-millennium

direct submission link: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21593

This panel seeks to investigate the intersection of postmodernism and horror cinema in the 21st century, highlighting shifts in themes, the rise of new filmmakers, innovative production techniques, and the ways in which the genre has absorbed and requalified postmodernist conventions. Comparative studies among American, European, and/or non-Western cinema are encouraged.


Last updated July 8, 2025

Slayage 11 Announcement

The Association for the Study of Buffy+ has recently announced the dates for its upcoming conference, Slayage 11. Look to their official conference website for details at http://www.buffystudies.org/conference.html.

 

CFP To Be Loved by Death: Afterlives of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles Collection (10/15/2025)

Edited collection - To Be Loved by Death: Afterlives of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles

deadline for submissions:
October 15, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Deanna Koretsky

contact email:
dkoretsk@spelman.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/07/24/edited-collection-to-be-loved-by-death-afterlives-of-anne-rices-vampire-chronicles

With the recent and highly acclaimed AMC adaptation of Interview with the Vampire and AMC’s broader acquisition of Anne Rice’s literary corpus, The Vampire Chronicles have found renewed cultural relevance. As Season 3 enters production, we invite reexaminations of the legacy and transformation of Rice’s vampiric work across media, genres, and generations.

We are seeking scholarly essays that critically engage the many adaptations, appropriations, and afterlives of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles for an edited volume in Palgrave’s Studies in Monstrosity series. We invite contributions from scholars across disciplines. 

Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to:

• AMC’s Interview with the Vampire (2022- ): approaches to race, queerness, temporality, and trauma; departures from and faithfulness to Rice’s canon; cultural impact as seen in fan engagements, rewatch podcasts, and public writing; place within AMC’s Immortal Universe.

• Of particular interest: in addition to the reimagining of Louis and Claudia as Black and expressly queer characters, we are also keen to see critical work that addresses the reimagining of Armand as Brown, as well as the show’s addition of Dubai as a touchstone setting

• Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994): performance, aesthetics, reception, and the film’s place in gothic cinema.
• Michael Rymer’s Queen of the Damned (2002): casting, music, race, cult status.
• Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s Lestat (2006): Broadway reception, musical form, queer gothic sensibilities, status as commercial and critical failure.
• Adaptations and appropriations in other media: comics/graphic novels, theater, ballet, visual art, body art, etc.
• Comparative interpretations: Rice's vampires (in any iteration) in dialogue with other vampire narratives (e.g., Sinners, Suicide by Sunlight, The Originals, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Only Lovers Left Alive, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, etc.); vampires and authors that inspired Rice (e.g., Blacula, Carmilla, Dracula’s Daughter, Byron, Polidori, Stoker, etc.)
• Tourism and cultural geographies: vampire tours in New Orleans and beyond, the commodification of Rice’s legacy, intersections of fiction, space, and local/global histories.
• Fandom and community: fan fiction, online forums, cosplay cultures, conventions, and the evolving role of fan labor in sustaining Rice’s mythos.
• Vampire Balls and immersive fan events: performance, ritual, identity play, and the gothic carnivalesque.
• Sexuality, gender, race, colonial histories and legacies, queer and trans embodiments, illness and disease, disability, neurodivergence, youth and age/ageing, world religions/religious feeling, and other key thematic preoccupations in Rice’s fiction and/or its adaptations.
• Adaptation as translation, revision, or resistance to Rice’s politics or aesthetics.

Submission Guidelines

• Abstracts of 300 words due: October 15, 2025
• Complete first draft (7,000–9,000 words, MLA style) due: May 30, 2026
• Revised final draft due: October 31, 2026

Submit abstracts to: Deanna Koretsky (dkoretsk@spelman.edu) and Alex Milsom (amilsom@hostos.cuny.edu). Please include a short bio (50–100 words) with your abstract.


Last updated August 1, 2025