CFP Fairy Tales, Folk Lore and Legends Conference (10/2/2015; Budapest 3/14-16/2016)

Fairy Tales, Folk Lore and Legends
Announcement published by Robert Fisher on Thursday, August 27, 2015
https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/80114/fairy-tales-folk-lore-and-legends

Type: Conference
Date: March 14, 2016 to March 16, 2016
Location: Hungary
Subject Fields: Anthropology, Cultural History / Studies, Literature, Oral History


Fairy Tales, Folk Lore and Legends
Call for Submissions 2016

Monday 14th March – Wednesday 16th March 2016
Budapest, Hungary


Wicked witches, evil stepmothers, Rumplestiltskin, jinn, gnomes, trolls, wolves and thieves versus fairy godmothers, Peri, departed beloved mothers, firebirds, dwarves, princesses, Simurgh, woodcutters and princes charming. Fairy tales, folk lore and legends are the canvas on which the vast mural of good versus evil plays out and our darkest dreams or nightmares struggle against our better selves and highest hopes. At the same time, the relationship between these tales and modern society is a complex one that invites closer consideration of the changing nature of the stories and how modern sensibilities have both challenged and been challenged by the values and viewpoints that underpin the narratives.

Fairy tales can be interpreted in a variety of ways and from a variety of viewpoints: they can be psychological exposes, blueprints for dealing with the traumas of childhood and early adulthood, guides to navigating life, windows onto social realities long forgotten, remnants of ancient mythology or hints at how to access the Transcendent.

The Fairy Tales interdisciplinary research and publishing stream investigates how fairy tales/folk tales/legends represent both good and evil, how these are personified or interact, what these reveal about the lives of those who have told them over the years, what they mean for us who read or listen to them today. Possible subjects for presentations include but are not limited to:



Exploring the Tales Themselves

• Functions of tales over time and across cultures
• Socio-political context of tales and their capacity to serve as allegories for real life issues
• Justice and morality in the tales
• Fairy tale utopias and dystopias and the blurred lines between fiction, fact, reality, science fiction and mythology
• How fairy tales shape ideas about happiness
• Considerations of why tales are an enduring aspect of culture
• Factors that make some tales more popular than others (and why popularity can shift over time)
• (Re)interpretations and re-imaginings of the same tales differ over time or across cultures
• Relationship between fairy tale characters and real life humans: do human ‘good guys’ or ‘bad guys’ behave so differently from fictional goodies and baddies, where there times when characters that seem fantastic to modern folks were actually considered to be more realistic by historical readers/listeners, what factors shape the changes that cause people to perceive characters as more or less real
• Relationship between fantastic and magical elements of tales and lived reality
• Tales and monsters: monstrous animals, monstrous humans, children’s interaction with monsters
• Intended lessons and values of stories and counter-interpretations, particularly in relation to gender, sex, materialistic values, notions of virtue and authority
• Processes around the domestication of fairy tales
• Tales as a source of/mechanism for oppression of individuals or groups
• New/modern tales
• Critical approaches to tales
• Tales and their authors
• Fairy tale artwork and imagery
• Fairy tale geographies: spaces and places of both the worlds within fairy tales as well as the spaces and places where the narratives are told or written

Encountering Fairy Tales/Legends/Folk Tales

• Studies of readers/audiences across time and cultures
• Listening versus reading: impact of oral traditions on the narratives, impact of illustrations in reception of the tales, etc.
• Relationship between traditional and modern forms of interactive storytelling involving fairy tales
• How adaptation to other mediums, such as film, television, visual art, music, theatre, graphic novels, dance and video games, affect the content of the tales themselves, appreciation of the narrative or our interpretations of narrative meaning

Uses of Fairy Tales/Legends/Folk Tales

• In advertising (re-imagining tales in advertising imagery, marketing the princess lifestyle, etc.)
• Tales and pedagogy: using tales as teaching and learning tools
• In tourism through destination marketing of spaces associated with fairy tales, Disneyfication of tales, etc.
• In the formation of national/cultural/ethnic identity
• In the publishing business
• Communities, biography and fairy tales: How social communal identity is forged around telling and re-telling tales

Tales, Health and Happiness

• Tales and magical thinking in the human development
• Tales and psychological/clinical practices involving tales
• Tales and unhealthy behaviour/beliefs
• Effect of tales on shaping notions of (un)happiness, (in)appropriate ways to pursue it and how to respond to respond to others’ (un)happiness
• Tales and aging (“growing old” as a theme in tales, how tales shape perceptions of old age, etc.)

Live Performances of Tales

• Theatrical, dance and other types of staged presentations
• Pantomime
• Vocal performances
• Art installations
• Readings

Curated film screenings

Further details can be found on the project web site:

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/persons/fairy-tales-folk-lore-and-legends/call-for-participation/

Call for Cross-Over Presentations

The Fairy Tales, Folk Lore and Legends project will be meeting at the same time as a project on Health and another project on Happiness. We welcome submissions which cross the divide between both project areas. If you would like to be considered for a cross project session, please mark your submission “Crossover Submission”.

What to Send

300 word abstracts, proposals and other forms of contribution should be submitted by Friday 2nd October 2015.
All submissions be minimally double reviewed, under anonymous (blind) conditions, by a global panel drawn from members of the Project Team and the Advisory Board. In practice our procedures usually entail that by the time a proposal is accepted, it will have been triple and quadruple reviewed.

You will be notified of the panel’s decision by Friday 16th October 2015.
If your submission is accepted for the conference, a full draft of your contribution should be submitted by Friday 5th February 2016.

Abstracts may be in Word, RTF or Notepad formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in programme, c) email address, d) title of proposal, e) body of proposal, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: Fairy Tales Abstract Submission



Where to Send

Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs:

Organising Chairs:
Stephen Morris: smmorris58@yahoo.com
Rob Fisher: fairytales@inter-disciplinary.net

This event is an inclusive interdisciplinary research and publishing project. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting.

It is anticipated that a number of publishing options will arise from the work of the project generally and from the meeting of Fairy Tales, Folk Lore and Legends stream in particular. Minimally there will be a digital eBook resulting from the conference meeting. Other options, some of which might include digital publications, paperbacks and a journal will be explored during the meeting itself.

Ethos

Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make this commitment, please do not submit an abstract for presentation. Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.

Contact Info:
 Dr. Rob Fisher

Priory House

149B Wroslyn Road

Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR

United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0)1993 882087

Fax: +44 (0)870 4601132

Contact Email:
fairytales@inter-disciplinary.net
URL:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/persons/fairy-tales-folk-lore-and-legends/call-for-participation/

CFP Preternatural Environments: Dreamscapes, Alternate Realities, Landscapes of Dread (proposals by 3/1/2016)

Preternatural Environments: Dreamscapes, Alternate Realities, Landscapes of Dread
Announcement published by Richard Raiswell on Thursday, August 27, 2015
https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/80115/preternatural-environments-dreamscapes-alternate-realities

Type: Call for Publications
Date: March 1, 2016
Location: Prince Edward Island, Canada
Subject Fields: Anthropology, Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Cultural History / Studies, Environmental History / Studies, Geography

Preternatural Environments: Dreamscapes, Alternate Realities, Landscapes of Dread

CFP for special issue of Preternature (issue 6.1)

Deadline for submissions: March 1, 2016

This special issue of Preternature seeks papers that examine elements and/or depictions of the preternatural in all sorts of environments. Scholars are increasingly drawing attention to the importance of spaces and their contexts, the stories we tell about them, and our interactions with them. This volume focuses on preternatural aspects of natural and unnatural environments such as dreamscapes, alternate worlds, and eerie landscapes.

Papers should investigate the connections between preternatural environments and literary, historical, anthropological, and artistic forms of understanding. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Defining the “preternatural environment” / preternatural aspects of an environment.
• Superstition and spaces.
• Demonic domains.
• Artistic representations of preternatural environments across the ages.
• Aspects of the uncanny in various physical settings.
• The pathetic fallacy and narrative theory.
• “Unnatural” landscapes and environments.
• Bridging natural and preternatural spaces.
• Preternatural ecology and ecocriticism.
• Connections between material environments, literary narratives, and the preternatural.
• Eerie landscapes as characters or significant presences in literature, history, and culture.
• How preternatural environments inform human behaviour, or how behaviour informs preternatural environments.

Preternature welcomes a variety of approaches, including narrative theory, ecocriticism, and behavioral studies from any cultural, literary, artistic, or historical tradition and from any time period. We particularly encourage submissions dealing with non-Western contexts.

Contributions should be 8,000 - 12,000 words, including all documentation and critical apparatus. For more information, see http://www.psupress.org/journals/jnls_submis_Preternature.html

or submit directly at https://www.editorialmanager.com/preternature/default.aspx.

(First-time users: click on “Register” in the menu at upper left.)

Preternature is published twice annually by the Pennsylvania State Press and is available through JSTOR and Project Muse. This periodical is also indexed in the ATLA Religion Database® (ATLA RDB®), www: http://www.atla.com.

Contact Info:
Richard Raiswell

Editor, Preternature

Contact Email:
rraiswell@upei.ca
URL: http://www.editorialmanager.com/preternature/default.aspx

CFP Horror and Fashion (proposals by 10/31/2015)

An intriguing idea for a collection:

CFP: Horror and fashion
Announcement published by Gudrun Whitehead on Monday, August 31, 2015

Type: Call for Papers
Date: August 28, 2015 to October 31, 2015
Subject Fields: Cultural History / Studies, Film and Film History, Literature, Popular Culture Studies, Women's & Gender History / Studies

This is a call for proposals for chapters to comprise a potential new publication, which has had strong interest from Bloomsbury. Editors of this volume are Dr. Julia Petrov, Alberta College of Art and Design, Canada and me, Dr. Gudrun D. Whitehead, University of Iceland.

Overview
Recently, academic attention has turned to exploring the links between popular culture and dress. Thematic approaches to sub-cultural dress have included Gothic: Dark Glamour (Steele and Park 2008), Punk: Chaos to Couture (Bolton et al 2013). The role of media in fashion dissemination and reception has been discussed in Fashion in Film (Munich 2011) and Fashion in Popular Culture (Hancock et al 2013). Furthermore, scholars have recently noted fashion’s obsession with subversion (Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty; Bolton et al 2011), as well as the dark side of fashion production and consumption (Fashion Victims; Matthews David 2015).

At the same time, horror has gained a wider audience than ever before, moving from sub-culture into mainstream culture. No longer content with lurking in the shadows, vampires, zombies, ghouls, murderers, and mythical creatures can now be found on the big screen and in bestselling books, mesmerizing audiences in old roles and new. Previously securely identified through mannerisms and dress, monsters and villains are now fully integrated into society, attending high-school, going to work and dressing according to the latest fashion, rather than the clothes they perished in. This is evident from teen horror going mainstream such as the Twilight book and film series, but also from multiple current TV shows, such as Z nation, iZombie, the Walking Dead, and more. Cult TV program The X-files is returning to the small screen and Bruce Campbell will sport his Evil Dead chainsaw once again, this time as a major television program, rather than in a film. These are only a few examples from many, demonstrating the recent surge in the horror genre, both as mainstream and independent productions. The proposed volume seeks to explore these recent trends in horror through one of their basic components, costume design.

To date, apart from a few articles and book chapters (e.g.: Tseelon 1998, Nakahara 2009), there has been no thorough investigation of fashion and horror. This edited volume, therefore, proposes to explore the links between the horror genre and dress in all its forms, from costume to fashionable clothing. Disciplinary approaches may include fashion studies, media studies, film, literature, folklore, costume design, sociology, popular culture studies, gender studies, material culture studies and others. The editors seek contributions from scholars at a wide variety of institutions from around the globe on topics such as:

1. Fashion in horror:
Dress is an important element for developing narrative and characterization in both literary and film horror. Within this theme, chapters could explore:

• Costumes as expression of plot 
• Costumes and character archetypes
• Costumes and villains: instant recognition of horror film-series villains from costume designs
• Costumes identifying sub-genres 
• Costume style and production companies (such as Hammer Horror)
• How can costumes act as an emotional stimulus for audiences? 
• Gender and horror: costume differences between male and female characters in horror
• Collecting horror film costume
• Horror cosplay
• From burial-dress to prom-dress: History of horror through costume design.

2. Horror in fashion:
As fashion exists in a world of popular culture references, this theme seeks to explore the mutually-referential relationship between high-street/high-fashion designs and horror. Chapters might address:

• Designer clothing that references horror films or literature
• The influence of horror films on fashion
• How is horror communicated in fashion? 
• How fashion has expanded horror? Has it given the horror movie genre a new set of references or a new audience?

What the proposal should include:
300-400 word chapter summary of no more than 8,000 words (including notes and references), including a chapter title and keywords, information on central argument/research question, a summary of main points, theoretical approach, and relevant sources.
Contact information, institutional affiliation, and biographies for authors and co-authors (please note corresponding author for collaborative chapters).

Deadlines:
Please submit proposals to Dr. Petrov and Dr. Whitehead at CostumedHorror@gmail.com, no later than on Halloween, 31 October 2015.

Authors will be informed about acceptance or rejection of their proposals no later than 30 November 2015. The entire book proposal will then be sent to Bloomsbury for a thorough review by international scholars. Contributing authors will receive a contract once the proposal has been successfully peer reviewed and accepted at the publisher’s board meeting. Authors will then be sent article guidelines, and full chapters should be submitted for review and subsequent revision. The entire book manuscript will then be submitted to Bloomsbury where it will go through the publisher’s own manuscript peer review. It is anticipated that the volume will be published in late 2016, or early 2017.
Contact Info:
For further information please feel free to contact me, Gudrun D. Whitehead or Julia Petrov.  The contact email is: CostumedHorror@gmail.com

Contact Email:
CostumedHorror@gmail.com

CFP Race, Gender, and Sexuality in The Walking Dead (1/11/2016)

CFP, Collection of Essays on Race, Gender, and Sexuality in The Walking Dead, abstracts due Jan. 11, 2016
Discussion published by Dawn Keetley on Saturday, August 29, 2015
https://networks.h-net.org/node/13784/discussions/80322/cfp-collection-essays-race-gender-and-sexuality-walking-dead

RACE, GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN THE WALKING DEAD FRANCHISE

The Walking Dead franchise has become a popular culture juggernaut that shows no signs of slowing down. Yet, despite its soaring popularity, there has been a longstanding critique that the franchise, in both its comic book and television incarnations, advocates an explicitly patriarchal and predominantly white world order. Zombie narratives have shown themselves to be uniquely qualified to deconstruct the many illusions (and injustices) of our social order, so why have so many felt that The Walking Dead has only hardened the conventional boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality? Nonetheless, in all its forms, The Walking Dead is an evolving narrative—and many would argue that, specifically in its representations of what women and men of all races may become, the franchise is working toward more utopian possibilities.

All four of the collections of essays on The Walking Dead—James Lowder’s Triumph of the Walking Dead (2011), Wayne Yeun’s The Walking Dead and Philosophy (2012), Dawn Keetley’s “We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human (2014), and Travis Langley’s The Walking Dead Psychology (2015)—cover a wide swathe of topics, and take up gender, sexuality, and race only fleetingly. We think it’s time for a collection addressed squarely at these issues, so crucial to the franchise’s vision of a post-apocalyptic world.

To that end, we are currently accepting chapter proposals for an edited volume exploring the interlinked representations of gender, sexuality, and race in all The Walking Dead franchises. This edited volume will explore the many ways in which all three crucial identity categories are constructed/deconstructed on television and in the comic book series. Because our intention is to present a highly diverse collection, we are interested in chapters exploring all facets of race, gender, and sexuality related to the television shows and comic books, as well as in tie-ins and connected materials (e.g. the AMC webisodes, Walking Dead Specials, etc.).


Possible topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• The relationship between undeadness and race/gender politics in The Walking Dead
• The role a dystopian, post-apocalyptic environment plays in shaping gender and race construction in The Walking Dead
• How race, gender, and sexuality intersect in The Walking Dead
• Queer visibility and gender in in The Walking Dead
• How The Walking Dead reflects/challenges the traditional depiction of gender and race in its predecessor zombie narratives
• How either the comics or the TV series has evolved in its representations of women, men, and people of color
• How fan conversation on the internet (on blogs, for instance) has critiqued and potentially shaped the ways race, gender, and sexuality are depicted in the franchise.

Please submit a 500 word abstract and short biography to Dawn Keetley (dek7@lehigh.edu) and Elizabeth Erwin (eerwin@lccc.edu) by January 11, 2016. We anticipate a tentative due date of August 1, 2016, for full essays. We will be more than happy to respond to any and all queries in the meantime.

CFP Modern Myth and Legend (9/2/2015; Louisville, KY 2/18-20/2016)

Cross-posted from NEPCA Fantastic:

Modern Myth and Legend - Louisville Conference (Feb. 18-20, 2016)
full name / name of organization: International Lawrence Durrell Society
contact email: clawsonj@gram.edu
http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63312

The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900


http://www.thelouisvilleconference.com


Louisville, KY | 18-20 February 2016

"we do create the world around us since we get it to reflect back our inner symbolism at us. Every man carries a little myth-making machine inside him which operates often without him knowing it. Thus you might say that we live by a very exacting kind of poetic logic--since we get exactly what we ask for, no more and no less."
--The Dark Labyrinth (1947)

Dealing overtly with ideas of myth and legend, Lawrence Durrell's The Dark Labyrinth chronicles the adventures of British tourists exploring a cave system on Crete just after World War II. Despite their awareness of how reality is transformed by their individual experiences, beliefs, and myth-making, they are no less susceptible to the fear of the minotaur which might be chasing them through the dark passageways. A myth becomes the way we understand the world. As a legend, the monster and its labyrinth offer grounds to reflect on personal terrors and emerge triumphant—or be consumed.

In anticipation of our upcoming conference on Crete, the International Lawrence Durrell Society calls for papers addressing the broad theme of Modern Myth and Legend for a society-sponsored session of the 2016 Louisville Conference. We welcome proposals on aspects of Durrell's writing or other topics addressing the theme. Some possible topics include the following:

• W. B. Yeats's esoteric blending of Greek, Irish, and other mythologies
• Refigured legends in the aftermath of T.S. Eliot's "Ulysses, Order, and Myth," including Iris Murdoch's The Green Night or John Gardner's Grendel
• Frazer's The Golden Bough and its impact on modernist literature
• Fantasy repurposing legend, as in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series
• Mythologizing the 20th century in film, including for example Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth or Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away
• Legendary societies, urban legends, apocrypha, and literary mysteries
• Symbolic use of tall tales, or the literary adapting of Bigfoot, werewolves, vampires, minotaurs, homunculi, gorgons, witches, griffins, manticores, giants, etc.

Please send a 250-word abstract to James Clawson (clawsonj@gram.edu), International Lawrence Durrell Society, by Sept. 2, 2015. Final presentations should be limited to 20 minutes in length.


By web submission at 08/06/2015 - 20:58

CFP Hell Studies: Presenting and Representing Hell (9/15/2015; Kalamazoo 5/12-15/2016)

Hell Studies: Presenting and Representing Hell (ICMS Kalamazoo 2016)
full name / name of organization:
Societas Daemonetica
contact email:
burleyr@bc.edu

The Societas Daemonetica is accepting proposals for fifteen- to twenty-minute papers for the Hell Studies session Presenting and Representing Hell, to be held at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, May 12-15, 2016.

Representations of Hell appear throughout the Middle Ages, in textual descriptions, manuscript illuminations, portal sculpture, wall paintings - indeed, in nearly every representational medium across Europe from the 5th century to the 15th. How is Hell represented? How are its occupants characterized? From the cold and serpent-filled Hell of the Blickling Homilies to the fiery and torturous one that adorns the façade of Autun, the presentation and representation of Hell has been done in many ways and, it would appear, to many ends. This session seeks to bring scholars from various disciplines together to discuss the ways in which “the other place” is offered up to medieval audiences for consumption, and the insights which can be derived from its study. Despite the vast literature on Hell and its related topics – populated by the likes of J. B. Russell, Henry Ansgar Kelly, Jacques Le Goff, Eileen Gardiner, and so many more – there remains a great deal more to study and address. New scholarship, like Philip Almond's well-received new biography of the Devil published just last year, is constantly being published, adding to our understanding of this dynamic field. With this session, we hope to provide an interdisciplinary forum for new ideas and new perspectives on the looming historical spectre of Hell and what it meant for the people at the time.

We welcome papers from literary, art historical, historical, theological, and interdisciplinary perspectives -- all treatments of the topic are welcome. Please send proposals of no longer than 250 words along with a completed Participant Information Form (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html) to Richard Ford Burley (burleyr@bc.edu) by September 15, 2015. Preliminary inquiries and other questions are also welcome.


By web submission at 08/11/2015 - 22:52

CFP Chronicles and Grimoires: The Occult as Political Commentary (9/15/2015; Kalamazoo 5/12-15/2016)

[Update] Chronicles and Grimoires: The Occult as Political Commentary
full name / name of organization: ICMS Kalamazoo 2016
contact email: dominique.hoche@westliberty.edu
http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63393

Whether seen in signs and portents, or read in grimoires or magic books, the occult in the premodern world is both marveled at and feared. A significant amount of the description of occult and sorcerous activity, however, also functions as political commentary, whether as direct criticism of secular current events or as a voice or conceptual space for the spiritual “other” in medieval society.

Some examples of these voices can be heard in the manuscript BN Ffr. 1553 that is the chronicle of Eustache le Moine (known as the Black Friar, ca. 1170-1217) who was a Benedictine who studied necromancy and the black arts and ultimately became a pirate; the popularity and repeated multi-language printings of the Clavicule of Solomon in Italy in the 1300’s; the introductory and defensive letters in the German humanist scholar Agrippa’s books on occult philosophy (c. 1533); the tempered criticism of Johan Weyer’s De Praestigiis Daemonum (1563) or its opposite, Martin Del Rio’s inflammatory Disquisitionum magicae (1608). Political commentary regarding the occult often tests the limits of scribal activity, and can lead to persecution and/or charges of treason or heresy. We welcome papers that explore this dangerous connection between the reception of the occult and political commentary or criticism.

Proposals (for presentations of no longer than 20 minutes) should be no longer than 400 words and must clearly indicate the significance, line of argument, principal texts and relation to existing scholarship (if possible). Email the proposal in the body of the message, a 50-word bio note, and a completed Participant Information form (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF) to Dominique Hoche at dominique.hoche@westliberty.edu . Due September 15, 2015.
For general information about the 2016 Medieval Congress, visit: http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/index.html.


By web submission at 08/11/2015 - 22:07
CFP Website maintained by
The University of Pennsylvania Department of English

CFP Edited anthology of Conjure, Hoodoo and Voodoo in African-American Literature (no posted deadline)

Edited anthology of Conjure, Hoodoo and Voodoo in African-American Literature
full name / name of organization: James Mellis/ William Paterson University
contact email: mellisj@wpunj.edu

Articles are sought for a collection of essays on representations of Conjure, Hoodoo and Voodoo in African-American literature. This collection seeks to explore how African-American writers have used, referenced, engaged and disengaged with Conjure, Hoodoo and Voodoo in their writing through various cultural and historical movements.

The primary thread of this study will be an argument that from their initial arrival on American shores, African-American writers have used voodoo and conjuring as a literary trope that has served as a touchstone for religious, political and national identity. By examining slave narratives, novels, poetry and drama, this study will interrogate how African-American authors repeatedly returned to Conjure, Hoodoo and Voodoo as a way to examine their own shifting political and cultural positions in America. I am seeking original essays for a major academic publisher who has accepted the proposed anthology. Some authors that can treated are: Frederick Douglass, Phyllis Wheatley, Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, Nat Turner, William Grimes, Olaudah Equiano, Charles Chesnutt, George Washington Cable, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, Arna Bomtemps, Countee Cullen,Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, Robert Hayden, Toni Morrison, Rainelle Burton, Colson Whitehead, Charles Johnson, August Wilson, Ntzoke Shange, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Gloria Naylor, Darius James, Gayl Jones and Carl Hancock Rux, and others.

Please send proposals of 250-350 words to mellis@wpunj.edu. Please note that an invitation to submit a full essay does not guarantee inclusion in the published volume.


By web submission at 08/20/2015 - 15:03

CFP The Supernatural (Conference) (10/2/2015; Budapest 3/11-13/2016)

The Supernatural [11 March 2016 - 13 March 2016]
full name / name of organization: Inter-Disciplinary.Net
contact email: supernatural@inter-disciplinary.net
http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63555

The Supernatural
Call for Participation 2016

Friday 11th March – Sunday 13th March 2016
Budapest, Hungary

From vengeful gods and goddesses and witches to poltergeists and hauntings, to demonic possession and the accompany exorcism rituals, the human imagination has been captivated for millennia by the power of forces that operate outside the laws of nature and the relationship between humans and the spirit world. Over time, the supernatural has served as a basis for titillating audiences and generating fear. The supernatural has served as a useful means of explaining complicated natural processes in terms humans understand. As history’s famous witch-hunts have demonstrated, the supernatural is also a potent weapon for exerting control over individuals whose behaviour or appearance fail to confirm to the ‘norms’ of the community. Conversely, the supernatural can also provide a means of expressing minority beliefs in a way that challenges the power of mainstream organized religions. The supernatural offers a source of personal comfort in the face of grief by providing assurance that a departed loved one is watching over us. However, as the long line of supernatural hoaxes reveal, however, this longing to believe in the afterlife can enable schemes designed to manipulate and swindle vulnerable people.

But just what purpose does the supernatural serve in 21st century societies? Is it a throwback to the irrational, superstitious and archaic beliefs of a so-called primitive era, or is it a reminder that there is more to existence than the ‘truths’ revealed by the sciences? The Supernatural interdisciplinary research and publishing event aims to interrogate and investigate the supernatural from a variety of perspectives in order to understand the uses and meanings of the supernatural across time and cultures. Subjects for presentation include, but are not limited to, the following:

The Supernatural in Theory and Practice

• Shifting perspectives of what is supernatural over time and across cultures
• Non-Western perspectives on the supernatural
• What attitudes toward the supernatural suggest about human perceptions of the boundaries between worlds
• Ancestor worship and the cultures in which this tradition is practiced
• Witchcraft, voodoo and the cultures where these traditions are practiced
• Satanism and cultural perceptions of this belief system
• Reasons behind the enduring fascination with supernatural evil, including philosophical, theological and anthropological perspectives on this question
• Relationship between the supernatural and magic
• Religious traditions and the supernatural (supernatural aspects of faith and belief, attitudes of faith traditions toward the supernatural, how clergy respond to individuals who report supernatural experiences, etc.)

The Supernatural and Real Life

• Socially accepted forms of supernatural belief and the factors that make some beliefs more acceptable than others
• Harms and benefits of believing in the supernatural
• Relationship between the supernatural and cruelty
• Apocalyptic supernatural evil events or characters and the significance of millenarianism
• Characteristics of supernatural entities and the significance of their difference from/similarity to human traits
• Relationship between the supernatural and social power/ideologies (e.g. witchcraft as pretext for dealing with non-conforming women, using the supernatural to engage with physical enemies, etc.)
• Legal/legislative approaches to restricting or enabling supernatural belief (limits of religious freedom principles, state-sanctioned punishment of witches, etc.)
• Medical/clinical perspectives on belief in the supernatural: the neuroscience behind (dis)belief, clinical responses to individuals who report supernatural experiences
• Science and the supernatural: using science to (dis)prove supernatural occurrences
• Technologies that facilitate/measure/prove engagement with the paranormal/occult
• Future of the supernatural in a world increasingly driven by science and reason

Supernatural Encounters

• Analyses of reports of supernatural encounters: common conventions of reports, style and mode of recounting experience, impact of titillation versus simple reporting of events in the reports of these encounters
• How the function and/or interpretation of a report of supernatural evil changes over time or across cultures
• Impact of oral traditions, artistic renderings and generic conventions on the telling and reception of accounts involving supernatural encounters
• How the reception of reports of the supernatural is influenced by the experience of listening versus reading or viewing
• Emotional and intellectual pleasures associated with the supernatural: pleasures of fear and titillation, etc.
• Comedic interpretations of supernatural evil: haunted houses in amusement parks, horror movie spoofs, etc
• Supernatural in film, television (including reality series like Most Haunted and Ghost Hunters), theatre, music, art and literature—and how they differ from more ‘traditional’ accounts
• Supernatural spaces: spaces associated with evil and the economic benefits/tourism implications of such connections
• Hoaxes, frauds and swindles

Supernatural and live performance

Curated film screenings
Performances (dramatic staging, dance, music)
Readings
Art installations

Call for Cross-Over Presentations
The Supernatural project will be meeting at the same time as a project on Trauma and another project on Loss. We welcome submissions which cross the divide between both project areas. If you would like to be considered for a cross project session, please mark your submission “Crossover Submission”.

Further details and information can be found at the project web site:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ethos/the-supernatural...

What to Send
300 word abstracts, proposals and other forms of contribution should be submitted by Friday 2nd October 2015.
All submissions be minimally double reviewed, under anonymous (blind) conditions, by a global panel drawn from members of the Project Team and the Advisory Board. In practice our procedures usually entail that by the time a proposal is accepted, it will have been triple and quadruple reviewed.

You will be notified of the panel’s decision by Friday 16th October 2015.
If your submission is accepted for the conference, a full draft of your contribution should be submitted by Friday 5th February 2016.

Abstracts may be in Word, RTF or Notepad formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in programme, c) email address, d) title of proposal, e) body of proposal, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: The Supernatural Abstract Submission

Where to Send
Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs:

Organising Chairs:
Stephen Morris: smmorris58@yahoo.com
Rob Fisher: supernatural@inter-disciplinary.net

This event is an inclusive interdisciplinary research and publishing project. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting.

There will be an eBook resulting from the conference meeting. It is also anticipated that a number of other publishing options will arise from the work of the project generally and from the meeting of The Supernatural stream in particular. Other options, some of which might include digital publications, paperbacks and a journal will be explored during the meeting itself.

Ethos
Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make this commitment, please do not submit an abstract for presentation. Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.


By web submission at 08/21/2015 - 13:48

CFP Monsters, Demons and the Jewish Fantastic (Spec Issue of Jewish Film & New Media) (10/1/2015)

[UPDATE] CFP: Monsters, Demons and the Jewish Fantastic (Special Issue of Jewish Film & New Media) [Deadline: 1 October, 2015)
full name / name of organization: Mikel J. Koven, University of Worcester
contact email: m.koven@worc.ac.uk
http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63422

CFP: Monsters, Demons and the Jewish Fantastic (Special Issue of Jewish Film & New Media) [Deadline: 1 October, 2015)
Oy! Have We Got a Monster for You!
Monsters, demons and the Jewish Fantastic
Special Issue of Jewish Film & New Media
Guest editor, Mikel J. Koven (University of Worcester)
Autumn 2016

The Journal of Jewish Film & New Media invites submissions for a special issue on Jewish horror and fantasy in film, TV and new media productions.

Jewish Film & New Media provides an outlet for research into all aspects of Jewish film, television, and new media and is unique in its interdisciplinary nature, exploring the rich and diverse cultural heritage across the globe. The journal is distinctive in bringing together a range of cinemas, televisions, films, programs, and other digital material in one volume and in its positioning of the discussions within a range of contexts—the cultural, historical, textual, and many others.

This special issue, planned for Autumn 2016, may include essays discussing any form of (broadly interpreted) Jewish horror or fantasy in film, television series (or episodes), or other digital material. Topics may include, but are not limited to,

• Representations of Jews in horror and fantasy films, TV series and new media productions
• Horror & fantasy films, TV series and new media productions made by Jewish producers – i.e. Steven Spielberg, John Landis, Roman Polanski, Larry Cohen, etc.
• Jewish spectatorship and audiences
• Jewish folklore monsters in film, TV series and new media productions – specifically golems and dybbuks
• Jewish parodies of horror and fantasy films, TV series and new media productions
• Israeli horror and fantasy films, TV series and new media productions (an article on Kalvet/Rabies would be particularly appreciated)

Submissions should be 8,000-10,0000 words in length following Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. Submissions should be made (electronically) to Dr. Mikel Koven (m.koven@worc.ac.uk) by 1 October, 2015. Informal enquiries and correspondence regarding this special issue should also be sent to m.koven@worc.ac.uk

 08/13/2015 - 11:36

Madame Frankenstein Collected

Image Comics recently released a collected edition of the Madame Frankenstein series, an intriguing blend of the Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein stories, Shaw's Pygmalion, masculine rivalry, and (for some reason) the Cotttingley fairies all set in 1932 Boston. The story, told in black and white as befitting the era, is worth a read, though the art seems a bit too cartoonish for the tone. Covers are reprinted with the story, but they have been reproduced in black and white as opposed to the original color (see them at the Grand Comics Database: http://www.comics.org/series/80562/covers/). Details from the publisher follow below.

MADAME FRANKENSTEIN TP
https://imagecomics.com/comics/releases/madame-frankenstein-tp
Story By: Jamie S. Rich
Art By: Megan Levens
Cover By: Joelle Jones
Cover By: Nick Filardi
Published: March 18, 2015
Diamond ID: DEC140674

In 1932, Vincent Krall sets out to create his perfect woman by reanimating the corpse of the love of his life. He’ll soon discover, however, that man was never meant to peer beyond the veil between life and death, and a woman is not as easily controlled as he believes. The collected MADAME FRANKENSTEIN contains all the covers by Helheim artist JOËLLE JONES and an exclusive gallery section showcasing MEGAN LEVENS’ development process. Collects MADAME FRANKENSTEIN #1-7.

 Print: $16.99

CFP The Weird and the Southern Imaginary (proposals by 11/2/2015)

CFP: The Weird and the Southern Imaginary
https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/77005/cfp-weird-and-southern-imaginary

Announcement published by James Rozier on Thursday, August 6, 2015
Type: Call for Papers
Date: November 2, 2015
Location: United States
Subject Fields: American History / Studies, Communication, Composition & Rhetoric, Cultural History / Studies, Ethnic History / Studies

Call for Papers:

The Weird & the Southern Imaginary

General Eds.: Travis Rozier & Bob Hodges



Keynote: The Weird & the Southern Imaginary will introduce the aesthetics and generic conventions of the Weird to cultural studies of the U.S. South and the region’s local, hemispheric, and (inter)national connections. Contributions from literary critics, film and popular culture scholars, philosophers, and critical theorists will consider forms of the Weird in a range of texts (literature, art, film & television, comics, music) from, about, or resonant with conceptions of different South(s).



Description: S. T. Joshi periodizes Haute Weird Fiction from 1880-1940, and China Miéville describes how the paradigm of Haute Weird Fiction, especially in its foremost practitioner H. P. Lovecraft, invokes horror, alterity, and/or awe on a cosmic scale, which seeps into the mundane experiences of cognitively ill-equipped scientific or academic protagonists. The Weird aesthetic, especially pre-World War II, is often inextricable from revanchist horrors of democracy, political revolution, miscegenation, and female or other non-normative sexualities, although Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s recent Weird compendium stresses the “darkly democratic” aspect of a C20 and C21 Weird tradition that spans nations, genders, genres, and levels of literary status.



Representations of the U.S. South as an irrational or reactionary space draw on what Deborah Barker and Kathryn McKee describe as the southern imaginary, a fluid reservoir of topoi referencing an enduring material history of land appropriation, coercive labor practices, carceral landscapes, racial and commercial mixing, extralegal violence, and insular patriarchies. The Weird & the Southern Imaginary will explore Weird South(s), whether that means national aberrance or cosmic otherness.  For example, the first television season of True Detective melds the conservative politics and religious fervor often equated with the South to vaster hints of conspiratorial and cosmic horror in a postindustrial Louisiana swampscape.



The dark fantasy of the Weird diverges sharply from the usual monstrosities of horror and speculative fictions as well as many modes of southern representation: the gothic, the grotesque, the uncanny, the ghostly or hauntological, or the folkloric, modes with longstanding southern associations and almost as longstanding critical fatigue for Southernisits. The Weird can also bridge Southern Studies and its old associations with recent work in object-oriented ontology, ecotheory, other new materialisms, and nihilist philosophy as well as apocalyptic popular cultural fixations without ceding inquires about the production of southern alterity.



Submission Guidelines: All proposed essays should address the concepts of the Weird and the South, however understood. Essays should be written in English, but can be written about texts read or viewed in other languages. We will also accept work on texts in translation. We are looking for critical essays (5,000-8,000 words). If you are interested in contributing an essay to the collection please send us a 300-500 word abstract by November 2, 2015.



Possible Topics:  (Feel free to combine topics or propose a topic not represented in the list)

• Weird South(s) in U.S. literature
• International Weird Fiction & southern imaginary, subtly connected or not
• Race & the southern imaginary in Weird Fiction
• Political or cultural reaction & Weird South(s)
• Weird carceral practices & the southern imaginary (Franz Kafka “In the Penal Colony”)
• Environmental transformation or degradation & Weird South(s)
• The nonhuman or posthuman in southern literature (Matthew Taylor)
• Dark ecology (Timothy Morton) & southern landscapes, swampscapes, etc.
• Nihilism, extinction, or the recalcitrance of the world (Eugene Thacker) & the South(s)
• C19 South & proto-Weird Fiction
• Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, & H. P. Lovecraft
• The Weird associations of the South & the Antarctic (Poe, Herman Melville, Lovecraft)
• R. H. Barlow in Florida, his Weird Fiction, or his correspondence with Lovecraft
• Robert E. Howard in Texas, his Weird Fiction, or his correspondence with Lovecraft
• Weird Appalachia (Lovecraft, Manly Wade Hopkins’s Silver John stories, Fred Chappell)
• Henry S. Whitehead’s Weird West Indian tales
• Eudora Welty & Weird Fiction (Mitch Frye)
• Weird Fiction, modernist literary strategies, & the South (William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston “Uncle Monday”, Flannery O’Connor)
• The Weird in Latin American Boom fiction (Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Augusto Monterroso), its forbearers (Jorge Luis Borges), & its successors (Junot Díaz, Jamaica Kincaid)
• Contemporary or New (South) Weird (Poppy Z. Brite, Stephen Graham Jones, Caitlín Kiernan, Joe Lansdale, Joyce Carol Oates, Jeff VanderMeer The Southern Reach Trilogy)
• Weird southern comics (Alan Moore et al. Saga of the Swamp Thing, Garth Ennis et al. Preacher)

Contact Info:

Travis Rozier, Ph.D.
Department of English & Linguistics
Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz
jamesrzr138@gmail.com


Bob Hodges, Ph.C.
Kollar Endowed Fellow
Dept. of English, U of Washington
bhodge4@gmail.com


Contact Email:
jamesrzr138@gmail.com

CFP Monster at the Table session (8/30/2015; IMC Leeds 7/4-7/2016)

Great idea for a session!

International Medieval Congress
Leeds, England, 4–7 July 2016
CFP: Monster at the Table

Session Sponsor: MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology Through Scholarly Theory and Practical Application).
Session Organizers: Larissa Tracy (Longwood University)
Session Presider: Larissa Tracy (Longwood University)


In line with the IMC Leeds theme “Food, Feast, and Famine” for 2016, MEARCSTAPA is looking for papers for a session titled “Monster at the Table.”

Monsters walk among us, and often, in medieval literature, they share our food and sit at our tables. Literary monsters take a variety of forms, and as such they interact with human actors in a multitude of ways. Sometimes they arrive to instruct the revelers at a feast, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, other times they human actors arrive to be instructed by the monster at the head table, as in Arthur and Gorlagon. Feasts are also sites for monstrous encounters when merrymakers are slaughtered, as in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale. Monstrous feats are performed at feasts, as in Fled Bricrend. Monsters may dine in human form, upon fellow human beings, as in Richard Coer de Lyon or the story of Ugolino of Pisa in both Chaucer and Dante. Monstrosity often challenges the norms surrounding consumption just as it challenges social norms in terms of what is eaten or how it is eaten. Consuming food is a way of internalizing and assimilating the world, but “monsters” often defy assimilation, and excesses in consumption are often regarded as monstrous. In short, monsters are often at the table, whether we recognize them or not.

MEARCSTAPA is accepting abstracts on any aspect of monstrous feasts/feasting or monsters at the table in any medieval tradition. Abstracts of 200 words and a short bio should be sent to Dr. Larissa Tracy: kattracy@comcast.net no later than August 30, 2015.





_______________________________________________
mearcstapa mailing list
mearcstapa@lists.csuchico.edu
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/mearcstapa

CFP Horror (September 2015; ACLA Harvard 3/17-20/2016

My thanks to Jack Dudley for forwarding this to me:

American Comparative Literature Association's 2016 Annual Meeting will take place at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts March 17-20, 2016
Horror
Organizer: Jack Dudley, Mount Saint Mary's University
Co-Organizer: Chris McVey, Boston University
http://www.acla.org/seminar/horror
Proposals due September 2015 (see http://www.acla.org/annual-meeting for details)

What would it mean to think and read with horror? What would a turn to horror look like, and what might its implications be for critical practice? Building on recent work by Eugene Thacker, Dylan Trigg, Graham Harman, Ben Woodard, and Thomas Ligotti, among others, this seminar seeks to situate horror as a site for new critical inquiry. Like other genre categories (Western, Romance, Mystery), horror fiction and film have been traditionally denigrated as “popular,” “low,” and “underground,” despite changing conceptions of canonicity and challenges to the “high/low” divide. As Harman suggests when he challenges Edmund Wilson’s reductive reading of H.P. Lovecraft, mere content should not lead to critical dismissal. If, for instance, crime and detective fiction have recently been turned to as new sites for understanding global literature, what can horror now open to comparative literary studies and theory?

Given the broad and new nature of this topic, our seminar seeks a range of papers, from large-scale interventions that situate horror broadly, to new close readings of works of horror, to re-readings of canonical texts as horror. How should horror be understood? Or, is it something that simply cannot be understood, but is, as Thacker suggests, a way of exploring the unthinkable, and so of bringing alternative philosophies, like the negative and nihilism, into the centers of critical discourse? Is there a hermeneutics of horror, in the sense of both a specific set of approaches keyed to horror and in the sense of a larger reading practice thought from within horror itself? Can traditional literary categories and even periods be rethought as horror? For instance, can European modernism, an idiom and aesthetic usually left out of genealogies of horror fiction, itself be read as a kind of literature of horror? Is horror compatible with realism? Is it a space where religion and theology have persisted in a secular age? How can horror help rethink recent areas of critical inquiry, including the global, cosmopolitanism, object-oriented ontologies, and the Anthropocene?

CFP Monstrous Messengers Extended Deadline (8/17/2015)

UPDATE: Extended Deadline: Monstrous Messengers 17 Aug. 2015
http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63143
full name / name of organization:
Leslie Ormandy
contact email:
monstrousmessengers@gmail.com

For this collection, three more papers from any discipline are welcome; however, advantaged are those focusing on a gendered or religious moral message. And I am looking for ONE paper which is willing to argue that the monsters represented are simply that, monsters, and that utilizing them as a tool toward acceptance of diversity is not a good thing. The latter is, I understand, a controversial view. This book wishes to explore all views and not promote one view by excluding another.

Picture books and early readers carry all the weight of parental authority, and are essential tools in the learning process for our children. They offer children not only hours of sanctioned entertainment and carefully chosen words and concepts, they also introduce our youngest children to specific cultural norms and belief systems. What role then does the supernatural character play for children learning to “read” and interpret the values in the interplay of images, words, and authority? At this point, there is no text addressing this question; although there is an increasing amount of scholarship regarding how the various supernatural characters (and monstrous children) reflect various adult issues when they appear within film and television. This edited collection is meant to begin the exploration of what cultural norms and morals are being offered our children in images and words in the medium of picture books and early readers since they are not just sanctioned, but encouraged.

Focus is exclusively on supernatural figures in children’s picture books and early readers. (The only exclusions are aliens, and magical entities such as talking trees, talking owls, etc.) Issues which might be explored by contributors include (but are not limited to):

• The primary purpose of the supernatural character[s] within a specific text, or series, and what it/they are teaching children
• The use of a supernatural character as harmless entertainment (is there really a picture book which doesn’t offer a moral of some sort?)
• The use of a ghost, vampire, werewolf, or other supernatural, as a stand-in for diversity. Do they work as a stand in? Why or why not? (Why not just depict the human “other?”)
• The way in which a specific moral is being offered through the use of a supernatural character
• The way the supernatural character will potentially impact the child’s view of their world
• Comparative discussion regarding how the morals in early monster tales (such as Grimm’s) are now being revised to offer a differing moral – and how/why the changes reflect new norms
Questions to get you thinking:
• Why are so many supernatural characters green?
• Are some supernatural characters depicted as “bad” while others are “good?”
• Does the color scheme used impact the child’s reading of the characters?
• In what way does adult encouragement regarding “reading” the text impact the child’s reading of the supernatural character[s]?
• Is there a different reading/interpretation of the text offered the child when the supernatural being is the protagonist or the antagonist?

Please submit a 300 word abstract and a brief scholarly bio to Leslie Ormandy at monstrousmessengers@gmail.com . The closing date for submissions for this final selection is August 15. Notice of acceptance will follow by no later than August 25 (and will include a listing of helpful readings). Complete rough drafts of 7000 – 8000 word essays are to be submitted by December 15, 2015 in MLA format with US spelling and punctuation for notes.


By web submission at 07/24/2015 - 20:45

CFP Horror (8/31/2015; ACLA Harvard 3/17-20/2016)

My thanks to Jack Dudley for forwarding this to me:

American Comparative Literature Association's 2016 Annual Meeting will take place at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts March 17-20, 2016
Horror
Organizer: Jack Dudley, Mount Saint Mary's University
Co-Organizer: Chris McVey, Boston University
http://www.acla.org/seminar/horror
Proposals due September 2015

What would it mean to think and read with horror? What would a turn to horror look like, and what might its implications be for critical practice? Building on recent work by Eugene Thacker, Dylan Trigg, Graham Harman, Ben Woodard, and Thomas Ligotti, among others, this seminar seeks to situate horror as a site for new critical inquiry. Like other genre categories (Western, Romance, Mystery), horror fiction and film have been traditionally denigrated as “popular,” “low,” and “underground,” despite changing conceptions of canonicity and challenges to the “high/low” divide. As Harman suggests when he challenges Edmund Wilson’s reductive reading of H.P. Lovecraft, mere content should not lead to critical dismissal. If, for instance, crime and detective fiction have recently been turned to as new sites for understanding global literature, what can horror now open to comparative literary studies and theory?

Given the broad and new nature of this topic, our seminar seeks a range of papers, from large-scale interventions that situate horror broadly, to new close readings of works of horror, to re-readings of canonical texts as horror. How should horror be understood? Or, is it something that simply cannot be understood, but is, as Thacker suggests, a way of exploring the unthinkable, and so of bringing alternative philosophies, like the negative and nihilism, into the centers of critical discourse? Is there a hermeneutics of horror, in the sense of both a specific set of approaches keyed to horror and in the sense of a larger reading practice thought from within horror itself? Can traditional literary categories and even periods be rethought as horror? For instance, can European modernism, an idiom and aesthetic usually left out of genealogies of horror fiction, itself be read as a kind of literature of horror? Is horror compatible with realism? Is it a space where religion and theology have persisted in a secular age? How can horror help rethink recent areas of critical inquiry, including the global, cosmopolitanism, object-oriented ontologies, and the Anthropocene?

CFP Female Tricksters (9/15/15; Kalamazoo 2016)

Also from MEARCSTAPA-L:

CFP: Kalamazoo 2016: Female Tricksters
Session Sponsors: MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology Through Scholarly Theory and Practical Application) and the American Society of Irish Medieval Studies (ASIMS).
Session Organizers: Sarah L. Higley (University of Rochester), Larissa Tracy (Longwood University), and Asa Simon Mittman (Chico State University).
Session Presider: Sarah L. Higley (University of Rochester)

The trickster, who conquers by cunning and not force, inhabits a complex moral/ethical world and seems to provoke a culture already steeped in cruelty and punishment in order to enact his/her own cruelty and punishment. The trickster in the “Beast Epic” gratifies his brute desires at the expense of others for fun and sadism, and is often punished for doing so in order to restore order to a damaged cultural body, but also to expose its injustices and hypocrisies. It has been suggested by Joan Acocella in the New Yorker that that the only kind of creature that can’t be a trickster is a woman, and yet medieval literature is rife with female tricksters of all kinds—particularly in fabliaux and Celtic fairy lore where the hero is defeated by a woman’s underhanded magic or rewarded by his ability to deal with her.

This session engages the challenge set forth by Acocella to locate and examine female tricksters in medieval culture. What role does the female trickster/monster play in it? The Morrígan of The Táin takes multiple animal shapes, as does Cerridwen of Welsh tradition. Acocella mentions Alison of The Miller’s Tale, but not the Wife of Bath or her model, La Vieille of Roman de la Rose; nor Dame Sirith; nor the monstrous loathly ladies in Irish and Middle English literature; nor the ugly, otherworldly woman in The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel who brings down the hapless Conaire. Hags and widows are relentlessly portrayed as “cunning women.” Women of the Old French fabliaux beguile and trick their witless spouses and lovers through a variety of means. In short, female tricksters abound in the medieval literary traditions all over the world.

MEARCSTAPA and ASIMS invite 20-minute papers from any field or theoretical approach and on any subject relating to the topic of medieval female tricksters. Please send abstracts of 300 words and a brief bio to session organizers Sarah L. Higley (sarah.higley@rochester.edu) and Larissa Tracy (kattracy@comcast.net) by Sept. 15, 2015.

CFP Imagery from the Medieval Bestiary (9/18/2015; Kalamazoo 2016)

A heads up courtesy of the MEARCSTAPA listserv:

Call for Papers: 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan: May 12-15, 2016

Session Title: “"Beauty and the Beast: Imagery from the Medieval Bestiary"
Session Organizer:  Elizabeth Morrison (Senior Curator of Manuscripts, J. Paul Getty Museum)

The role of animals in the Middle Ages has recently become a popular topic for research in all realms of medieval studies. Given this interest, it seems a good time to turn attention to perhaps the most important source of information about animals in the period, the bestiary. The animal stories contained in the bestiary were used as inspiration for public sermons, daily reading for the religious, and entertainment by the nobility, thereby exerting a powerful hold over the understanding and interpretation of animals in the medieval world. This session would propose to focus in particular on the influential role of the imagery associated with the bestiary. The bestiary is one of a very small number of medieval texts that seems to be almost invariably accompanied by illumination, and with a more even balance between image and text than is found in almost any other surviving manuscript tradition. The stable iconography of the bestiary was so well-known, in fact, that it was instantly recognizable, even when separated from its accompanying text; examples such as a lion breathing life into its cubs or the pelican piercing its own breast to revive its chicks can be found in the visual arts well beyond the bestiary. Papers for this session could address the text/image relationship in the bestiary, illuminated texts that are often bound together with the bestiary, non-bestiary texts that are accompanied by bestiary imagery, or other artistic media that integrate iconography traditionally associated with bestiaries
Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words (for a paper planned to be 15-20 minutes), along with the conference Participant Information Form, to Elizabeth Morrison at * emorrison@getty.edu * by September 18, 2015. Any proposals not accepted for this session will be sent on to for consideration in one of the general sessions at Kalamazoo.

The Participant Information Form can be found on the Congress website:http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html

CFP Food and Horror on Screen Collection (proposals by 5/31/15)

Mea culpa. Please note expired deadline: 

What's Eating You?: Food and Horror on Screen (Abstracts 5/31/15)
https://networks.h-net.org/node/13784/discussions/70525/deadline-extended-whats-eating-you-food-and-horror-screen-abstracts
Discussion published by Cynthia Miller on Friday, May 22, 2015

DEADLINE EXTENDED!!! ** Abstracts accepted through 5/31 **

Lots of territory to explore here - Poultrygeist ... Bad Taste ... Sweeney Todd ... The Stuff ... Delicatessen ... Dead Sushi ... Motel Hell ... Attack of the Killer Tomatoes ... and so much more!!



Call for Contributors  (Abstracts 5/31/15; Essays 12/1/15)

What’s Eating You?: Food and Horror on Screen

There is, perhaps, no closer association than the one between food and life – and nearly as close is that between food and quality of life.  Old adages tell us that we are what we eat, or more broadly, divide us into two categories: those who live to eat, and those who eat to live. And of course, what child hasn’t heard “Eeww! Don’t put that in your mouth!”?

Food sustains our bodies, creates and binds relationships, signals beliefs, and engenders romance.  Our relationship with food, then, is not only one of biological continuance, but of what it means to be human, and so, bubbles over with taboos, fears, morals, boundaries, and hierarchies. Are we hunters or prey?  Connoisseurs or cave dwellers?  Pure or polluted?

Horror narratives routinely grasp those questions and spin them into nightmares. Monstrous others dine on bugs and worms, or force-feed them to unwilling captives; Bodies, still thrashing with life are ripped apart for consumption by zombies, or worse, by other humans; The tables of consumption are turned, and the consumer becomes the consumed; The unaware innocently dine on their friends, neighbors, and loved ones. Overindulgence, as Le Grande Bouffe (1973) and Se7en (1995) warn, can kill us, and occasionally, as films like The Stuff (1985) and Poultrygeist (2006) illustrate, our food fights back.  From Blood Feast (1963) to Sweeney Todd (2007); Delicatessen (1991) to Hannibal (2001); and Bad Taste (1987) to Black Sheep (2006), motion pictures have reminded us that it is an “eat or be eaten” world.

This volume is intended to explore the deeper significance of such stories: The ways in which they reflect (or challenge) our deepest fears about consuming and being consumed. How do these films mock our taboos, threaten our complacencies, and unsettle our notions about the human condition?  How do they critique our increasing focus on consumption?  In what ways do they hold a mirror to our taken-for-granteds about food and humanity and ask if we are more than what we eat, or if what we eat truly matters?

Proposals for both topical essays and close readings of a single text are welcome. Please note that this volume is focused on fictional, or explicitly fictionalized, narratives on screen. Essays that treat documentary or other non-fiction horror stories about food and consumption are outside the scope of this project.

The editors seek 500-word proposals for engaging, accessible essays that will explore a wide range of narratives linking food and horror, with an eye toward the ways in which food is used as cultural, social, and philosophical commentary. Please send your 500-word abstract to both co-editors, Cindy Miller (cynthia_miller@emerson.edu) and Bow Van Riper (abvanriper@gmail.com).

Publication timetable:

May 31, 2015 – Deadline for Abstracts

June 1, 2015 – Notification of Acceptance Decisions
December 1, 2015 – Chapter Drafts Due
March 1, 2016 – Chapter Revisions Due

May 1, 2016 –Delivery to Publisher

Acceptance will be contingent upon the contributors' ability to meet these deadlines, and to deliver professional-quality work.  First drafts not submitted by the December 1 deadline will, regrettably, be replaced.

CFP Hermeneutics of Hell Collection (proposals by 9/1/15)

Call for Submissions: The Hermeneutics of Hell (Essay Collection; 09/01/15;03/15/16)
https://networks.h-net.org/node/13784/discussions/72983/call-submissions-hermeneutics-hell-essay-collection-090115031516
Discussion published by Gregor Thuswaldner on Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Call for Submissions: The Hermeneutics of Hell: Devilish Visions and Visions of the Devil in World Literature

“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist or magician with the same delight.”  C. S. Lewis.  The Screwtape Letters

For centuries, the biblical account of Satan has inspired countless authors worldwide. Medieval texts dealing with devils often combined biblical and pagan imageries. But it wasn’t until the early Baroque era when the devil in world literature became more individualistic. Since then, authors from around the world have been drawn to the devil as a literary figure. Often times, the devils created by Milton, Goethe, Chateaubriand, Byron, Lermontov, Strindberg, C.S. Lewis, Mahfouz and many others differ significantly from biblical texts and the literal interpretation of the Satan in the Old Testament. Even though the topic of hell seems to have lost its appeal on pulpits, it is still alive and well in literature.

This collection of essays aims to analyze devilish visions and visions of the devil and the different roles devils have assumed in world literature. What makes devils attractive literary figures? What are the functions of the devils? What are the underlying theologies? How do the literary devils differ from biblical images? Why are we as readers still fascinated by literary manifestations of the devil?


Possible topics may include:

•          The devil as tempter

•          The devil as accuser

•          The devil as satirist

•          The devil as cultural critic

•          The devil as God’s counterpart

•          The devil as revolutionist

•          The devil as a tragic figure

•          The devil and damnation

•          The devil and salvation

•          The devil in passion plays

•          Sympathy for the devil

•          The future of devils

•          Hell on earth

•          Visions of hell

•          Eternal damnation vs. extinction



Email your 250 word abstracts by September 1, 2015 to Dan Russ and Gregor Thuswaldner at dkruss47@gmail.com and Gregor.Thuswaldner@gordon.edu  If selected for the essay collection, the finished assays are due by March 15, 2016.

CFP The Automated Body (Spec Issue) (8/15/15)

CFP: ESC—“‘Fear, Love, and Confusion’: A Special Issue on the AUTOMATED BODY” (Deadline: August 15, 2015)
http://accute.ca/2015/05/28/call-for-papers-esc-fear-love-and-confusion-a-special-issue-on-the-automated-body-deadline-august-15-2015/
BY INFOACCUTE ON MAY 28, 2015

ESC—“‘Fear, Love, and Confusion’: A Special Issue on the AUTOMATED BODY”
Deadline for submission of abstracts or completed papers: August 15, 2015

ESC: English Studies in Canada invites submissions for a special issue on the automated body, edited by Cecily Devereux and Marcelle Kosman, to be published Spring 2016. This special issue is situated in response to an expanding range of questions and concerns about humans and automation in early twenty-first-century cultural representation. Such questions and concerns are arguably evident in representation from the earliest days of mechanization and industrialization in the late eighteenth century, and what a scant twenty years ago were referred to as “cybercultures” have been the focus for nearly three decades of academic considerations. Contemporary cultural texts, we suggest, demonstrate a renewed engagement with questions of the implications of the convergence of the biological with the mechanical and the relationships and the limits of what Donna Haraway characterized in her 1985 “Cyborg Manifesto” as “couplings between organism and machine” and the “fear, love, and confusion” they generate. If fear is evident in what a 2014 New York Times op-ed (June 22) characterized as “robot-worriers’” concerns about automation and unemployment in the workplace, to take only one example, love of—and confusion regarding—human-machine convergences is evident in proliferating stories of transformation, connection, and relationship such as the 2014 film Her and Allison de Fren’s 2012 documentary The Mechanical Bride. This special issue of ESC is interested in questions of automated bodies broadly conceived. It undertakes to bring into conversation a range of papers focused on any aspect of bodies and automation in cultural representation across media and disciplines. We are interested in automated embodiment as a distinctively contemporary concern yet also/and as well in the histories and archaeologies of such embodiment across periods and contexts.

• Bodies and/as machines; anthropomorphized machines; mechanical enhancement; prosthetics
• Cybernetics, biomedical engineering, genetic engineering; new eugenics and reproductive technologies
• Science fiction, fantasy, speculative and dystopic fiction and film; genres and subgenres: cyberpunk, biopunk, steampunk; automated bodies in comics media
• Fictions of transformation across media: Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” Coppélia, The Nutcracker
• Fictions of male reproduction; parthenogenesis; auto-generation; cloning
• Mechanical bodies and televisual media: The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Dark Angel, Aeon Flux; media and mechanization
• Mechanical bodies in dance; dancing machines; machine music; music and automatism; karaoke; Dance Dance Revolution
• Mechanical bodies and fitness; sports and automation
• Robots as themes and instruments in contemporary music: Daft Punk, Ladytron, Kraftwerk, Radiohead, Robyn; Auto-Tune
• Avatars; gaming bodies (bodies in games, players’ bodies); virtual automation; virtual companions; intimate operating systems: Her; Siri; artificial intelligence
• Humans and computers; computer automation; machine dependency; devices, appliances, watches, glasses; brain-computer interface
• Social media and automatism
• Robot, robotics, fembot, cyborg, cylon, clone, replicant; robots as “immigrants from the future” (The Economist)
• Anthropomorphized robots; robots and affect; robots and love; robots we love; robots we fear; human/robot hybrids; roboethics
• Donna Haraway: reading organisms and machines since “The Cyborg Manifesto”
• Gender and automation; automation and patriarchy; fantasies of automation; housewives and mechanization
• Femininity and living dolls; Mechanical Brides, Stepford Wives, Windup Girls
• Masculinity and living dolls; Lars and the Real Girl, My Living Doll, Metropolis
• Automation, capital, and labour; automation and exhaustion; robots and dirty human work; overwork and automation; automation and unemployment
• Bodies in industry; factory bodies; Taylorism; Fordism; factory girls, typewriter girls; modernism, modernity, Modern Times
• Automated monsters (Chucky); zombies and/as automated bodies; Frankenstein; bodies and/as weapons; automation and monstrosity
• Automatic writing; computer-generated poetry; hypnotism and performing bodies
• Animals and automation; robot animals; cinema and mechanical creatures; technologies of 3D animation
• Automobility, automaticity, bodies and cars; killer cars (Christine, Killdozer)
• Automated toys and other things; sex toys; future toys
• Talking to machines: everyday life and automated systems
• Machines without humans: self-parking cars, self-flying planes, drones, drone photography; killing machines
• Surveillance and security systems; facial recognition technology; NSA monitoring; bio-identification

Please forward either a 500-word abstract OR a completed paper (6000-8000 words, in MLA format) and a 50-word biographical statement to Marcelle Kosman (mkosman@ualberta.ca) and Cecily Devereux (cecily.devereux@ualberta.ca) by August 15, 2015. Final revisions to accepted papers will need to be completed by December 15, 2015.

ESC: English Studies in Canada is a quarterly journal of scholarship and criticism concerned with the study of literature and culture. Recent special issues include “Hysteria Manifest: Cultural Lives of a Great Disorder” (40.1: 2014), edited by Derritt Mason and Ela Pryzbylo); “The Global Animal” (39.1: 2013), edited by Karyn Ball and Melissa Haynes), and “Childhood and Its Discontents” (38:3-4: 2012), edited by Nat Hurley. For more information visit ESC Digital at www.arts.ualberta.ca/~esc ESC normally accepts black and white images, up to a limit of six per article. Contributors are responsible for providing image files in black and white with a resolution no less than… and for securing permissions in advance of publication. The journal’s style sheet is available at http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~esc/submit.php.

CFP Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities (Spec Issue) (3/1/16)

This sounds promising:

Call for Papers for Medical Humanities
Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities
http://scifimedhums.glasgow.ac.uk/journal-issue/

The BMJ Group journal Medical Humanities will be publishing a special issue: ‘Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities’.

Themes

We invite papers of broad interest to an international readership of medical humanities scholars and practising clinicians on the topic ‘Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities’.

Science fiction is a fertile ground for the imagining of biomedical advances. Technologies such as cloning, prosthetics, and rejuvenation are frequently encountered in science-fiction stories. Science fiction also offers alternative ideals of health and wellbeing, and imagines new forms of disease and suffering. The special issue seeks papers that explore issues of health, illness, and medicine in science-fiction narratives within a variety of media (written word, graphic novel, theatre, dance, film and television, etc.).

We are also particularly interested in articles that explore the biomedical ‘technoscientific imaginary’: the culturally-embedded imagining of futures enabled by technoscientific innovation. We especially welcome papers that explore science-fiction tropes, motifs, and narratives within medical and health-related discourses, practices, and institutions. The question – how does the biomedical technoscientific imaginary permeate the everyday and expert worlds of modern medicine and healthcare? – may be a useful prompt for potential authors.

Subject areas might include but are not limited to:

• clinicians as science-fiction writers
• representations of medicine, health, disability, and illness in science-fiction literature, cinema, and other media
• the use and misuse of science fiction in public engagement with biomedical science and technology
• utopian narratives of miraculous biomedical progress (and their counter-narratives)
• socio-political critique in medical science fiction (via cognitive estrangement, critical utopias, etc.)
• science fiction as stimulus to biomedical research and technology (e.g. science-fiction prototyping)
• science-fiction tropes, motifs and narratives in medical publicity, research announcements, promotional material, etc.
• the visual and material aesthetic of science fiction in medicine and healthcare settings

Publication

Up to 10 articles will be published in Medical Humanities in 2016.

All articles will be blind peer-reviewed according to the journal’s editorial policies. Final publication decisions will rest with the Editor-in-Chief, Professor Deborah Bowman.

Important Dates

Please submit your article no later than 1 March 2016

Submission Instructions

Articles for Medical Humanities should be a maximum of 5,000 words, and submitted via the journal’s website. Please choose the special issue ‘Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities’ during the submission process.

If you would like to discuss any aspect of your submission, including possible topics, or the possibility of presenting your work under the auspices of the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities’, please contact the Guest Editor in the first instance:  Dr Gavin Miller (gavin.miller@glasgow.ac.uk)

CFP Expanding the Scope of Horror (Spec Issue) (no deadline noted)

"Expanding the Scope of Horror"; special journal issue of Interdisciplinary Humanities Humanities Education and Research Association
Fall 2016: Expanding the Scope of Horror
http://www.theofantastique.com/2015/07/07/cfp-expanding-the-scope-of-horror-special-journal-issue-of-interdisciplinary-humanities/

Guest Editors: Edmund Cueva and William Novak

The proposed set of essays and book reviews would have as its main objective to offer a new practical model for research and analysis as an alternative to the rigid and dichotomous methodologies often used in investigations on horror. Currently, most of the scholarship either tends to situate horror on the fringe of academic research and therefore not worthy of attention. Or, research isolates and defines horror as being strictly the intellectual property of those who are experts in literature or film.

The proposed paradigm would seek to create a multidisciplinary investigatory paradigm that will bring together into productive discussion such varied disciplines as classics, art history, philosophy, architecture, psychology, religious studies, history, gender studies, music, and the traditionally associated areas of literature and film.

The special issue would serve as a starting point for future discussion and research on horror in all of its multiple and complex forms. Please send inquiries and submissions to: Edmund Cueva at cuevae@uhd.edu and William Nowak at nowakw@uhd.edu.

Contact Info:

Edmund Cueva at cuevae@uhd.edu and William Nowak at nowakw@uhd.edu.

CFP Critical Companion to Tim Burton (9/1/15)

A CRITICAL COMPANION TO TIM BURTON (Abstr. by 30 September)
http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63040

full name / name of organization: Prof. Adam Barkman and Dr. Antonio Sanna
contact email: adam_barkman@hotmail.com isonisanna@hotmail.com

Tim Burton is certainly one of the most popular directors of contemporary Hollywood. His oeuvre includes blockbuster films such as Batman (1989), Planet of the Apes (2001) and Alice in Wonderland (2010) as well as less profitable– but still highly recognizable - films such as Ed Wood (1994). His work with stop motion, evident in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (2005) and the recent Frankenweenie (2013) has further popularized and updated a technique that has been fundamental in cinema since the silent era. His distinctive and personal touch, a visionary style that is now referred to as “Burtonesque”, and his frequent collaborations with Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Danny Elfman (to mention merely a few) has contributed to establish a unique and identifiable brand. All of his achievements have offered (and still offer) an incredibly fertile ground for critical examination, analysis and discussion. Indeed, in recent years the scholarship on Burton has proliferated and a number of distinct theoretical approaches that analyze the director’s visual texts and their philosophical and cultural weight have emerged.

This anthology will explore Burton’s multi-medial oeuvre from multidisciplinary perspectives. This volume seeks previously-unpublished essays that explore the American director’s heterogeneous career, from short films such as Vincent (1982) and Frankenweenie (1984) and his direction of commercials and music videos to his drawings, paintings and photographs. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the subject that can illuminate the diverse facets of the director’s work and his unique visual style. We do not yet have a publisher, but are very confident in finding one soon.

There are several themes worth exploring when analyzing Burton’s works, utilizing any number of theoretical frameworks of your choosing. We request that chapters based on formal analysis cover a maximum of three films to allow for reasonably close readings. Contributions may include (but are not limited to) the following topics:

• Burton and philosophy
• Burton and the visual arts
• Humour, Black Humour and the Macabre
• Burton and fairy tales
• Gender and queer readings
• Neo-Victorian art
• Exploration of dreams and the subconscious
• Fascination with machines and ecocriticism
• Mob mentality
• Alienation and misperception, conformity/nonconformity
• Disfigurement, deformity and (dis)ability
• Death and the afterlife
• Intertextuality
• Adaptations, Remakes and Appropriations
• Music and Danny Elfman
• Tim Burton in/and translation
• Evil Clowns
• Fan practice and fan communities

The anthology will be organized into thematic sections around these topics and others that emerge from submissions. We are open to works that focus on other topics as well and authors interested in pursuing other related lines of inquiry. Feel free to contact the editors with any questions you may have about the project and please share this announcement with colleagues whose work aligns with the focus of this volume.
Submit a 300-500 word abstract of your proposed chapter contribution, a brief CV and complete contact information to Prof. Adam Barkam (adam_barkman@hotmail.com) and Dr. Antonio Sanna (isonisanna@hotmail.com) by 30 September, 2015. Full chapters of 5000-7000 words would be due by 1 January, 2016. Note: all full chapters submitted will be included subject to review.

By web submission at 07/18/2015 - 10:29

CFP Natural and Unnatural Histories (11/2/15; Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies 3/10-13/16)

Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) 2016: Natural and Unnatural Histories
http://navsa.org/2015/07/18/cfp-incs-2016-natural-and-unnatural-histories-1122015-310-132016/

Keynote Speakers Kate Flint (University of Southern California) and Elaine Freedgood (NYU)

March 10-13, 2016, Renaissance Asheville Hotel, Asheville, NC
Hosted by Appalachian State University
incs2016.appstate.edu

Historicism achieved its full flowering in the nineteenth century, when the historical methods of inquiry envisioned by figures such as Vico, Herder, and von Ranke were taken up and transformed in philosophy, art criticism, hermeneutics, philology, the human sciences, and, of course, history itself. By 1831, John Stuart Mill was already declaring historicism the dominant idea of the age. Taking human activity as their central subject, some nineteenth-century historicisms extended Hegel’s distinction between historical processes governed by thought and non-historical processes governed by nature. At the same time, scientists like Lyell and Darwin radically challenged nineteenth-century understandings of history by arguing that nature itself is historical. Powered by fossil fuels, industrialization began to prove this point by profoundly altering global ecologies at a previously unimaginable scale. We seek papers that investigate nineteenth-century histories and natures. How do natures, environments, or ecologies interact with histories at different scales—the local, the national, the transnational, or the planetary? What role does the nineteenth century play in the recent idea of an Anthropocene era? How might nineteenth-century natural histories help us to rethink historicism in the present? What are the risks and promises of presentist approaches to the nineteenth century? Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Narrating history, narrating nature
• Ideas of the natural, the unnatural, and/or the supernatural
• Nineteenth-century ecologies broadly construed: domestic ecologies, aesthetic ecologies, imperial and postcolonial ecologies, synthetic or technological ecologies
• Evolution and extinction
• Posthuman histories
• History, nature, and/or science in art
• Family histories, social histories
• Climate change, geosystems, geohistories
• Bioregionalisms, transregionalisms, literature and “sustainability”
• Queer ecologies/histories
• Disability histories/Cripping nature
• Life and non-life
• Flora, fauna, and fossils
• Ecopoetics, Environmental justice
• Reporting events/recording nature
• Commemorative musical compositions/performances
• Biopolitics, biopoetics
• Discourses of pollution, toxicity, garbage, waste
• Resource imperialism
• Political ecologies and economies
• Cross-cultural, indigenous, mestizo, subaltern nature writing
• Creaturely life, life forms, nonhumans, monstrosity
• Landscape aesthetics
• Global South studies
• Utopian/dystopian, steampunk, or neo-Victorian natures and/or histories
• Nineteenth-century histories of philosophy, religion and/or theology
• History of science, history of medicine, public health discourses
• Natural disasters, cataclysmic events
• Sexological, criminological, and/or psychiatric narratives
• Resources, capital, economies
• Biography and autobiography, case studies, archives
• History as genre: history painting, Bildungsroman, epic, historical novel, historical drama, etc.

 Deadline: November 2, 2015. Upload proposals and a one-page CV via incs2016.appstate.edu.  For individual papers, send 250-word proposals; for panels, send individual proposals plus a 250-word panel description. Proposals that are interdisciplinary in method or panels that involve multiple disciplines are especially welcome. Questions? Contact Jill Ehnenn at incs@appstate.edu

CFP Space Horror in Film (collection) (8/25/2015)

This sounds like a great idea:

CFP: Essays on Space Horror in Film, 1950s - 2000s Abstract Submission Deadline: August 25, 2015
Sunday, June 14, 2015
https://networks.h-net.org/node/13784/discussions/72546/cfp-essays-space-horror-film-1950s-2000s-abstract-submission

Call for Papers

Essays on Space Horror in Film, 1950s – 2000s

Abstract Submission Deadline: August 25, 2015

In 1979, the word A L I E N was spelled out across the top of an ominous movie poster, conveying a sense of foreboding of something unknown. An eerie yellow light seeped out of the egg-shaped space pod with the tagline: In space no one hears you scream. Audiences were drawn along with the Nostromo crew as they explored the mysterious abandoned ship on LV-426 and encountered a new and hostile alien species. It was one of the first movies to successfully combine science fiction and horror in an interstellar setting, spawning several inferior imitations in the 1980s while also inspiring standout films that furthered the genre, such as Event Horizon (1997), Pitch Black (2000), Sunshine (2007), and Europa Report (2013). While it may have seemed like space horror was a new genre after the release of Ridley Scott’s film, the genre has a rich history that took hold of movie audience-goers almost thirty years prior with the space horror films that could best be classified as invasion films. With a plethora of films, much has been written about science fiction, horror or on individual films (mostly the Alien franchise), yet surprisingly, little analysis can be found on space horror as its own genre in cinema. Essays for this anthology will seek to deconstruct and analyze the genre via the films from 1950s through the present offerings with the goal of exploring and bridging the gap of critical analysis that currently exists between science fiction and the horror genres. The intended audience is expected to include individuals studying and/or curious to increase their understanding of science fiction, horror and of course, space horror.

There are several themes worth exploring when analyzing space horror, utilizing any number of theoretical framework of your choosing. Here is a brief list of ideas, which is by no means exhaustive:

• Claustrophobia,  Outer Space fears (Pandorum, Dark Star, Europa Report, The Black Hole)
• The influence of slasher films (Alien, Event Horizon, Jason X, Sunshine, Leprechaun 4: In Space)
• Psychological (2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, Sunshine, Moon)
• Body Horror and/or transformation (Supernova, Event Horizon, Hellraiser: Bloodline, Slither)
• Final girl (Alien, Prometheus, Dead Space: Downfall)
• Paranormal/Occult (Event Horizon, Hellraiser: Bloodline, Dracula 3000, Ghosts of Mars)
• Cold War fears (most invasion films of the 1950s – 1970s)
• Doppelganger (Event Horizon, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, Moon)
• Compare/Contrast maleficent vs. animal “aliens” (Xenomorphs in Alien franchise vs. alien species encountered in Pitch Black, Apollo 18, Europa Report for example)
• Alien abduction (Communion, Fire In The Sky, Extraterrestrial)
• Found footage (Europa Report, Apollo 18)
• Sacrifice of self and/or self-destruct sequence (Alien franchise, Event Horizon, Critters 4, The Last Days on Mars)
• Role of AI, robotics and/or the concept of “uncanny valley” (Alien franchise, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Prometheus, Dracula 3000)
• Bram Stoker and Space Vampires (Dracula 3000, Planet of the Vampires, Lifeforce)
• Exploring Literary roots such as H.P. Lovecraft, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, etc. 

I am accepting up to two abstracts in order to assemble the most cohesive arrangement of essays that will provide a well-rounded exploration and representation of this little discussed genre. The deadlines are as follows:

• August 25, 2015: Abstract of 300-500 words, 1 page CV, preliminary draft bibliography
• September 1, 2015: Notification of acceptance/rejection (editor will send comprehensive style sheet)
• January 31, 2016: Essays due of 5,000-8,000 words in length (earlier submissions welcomed and encouraged)
• February 1 - April 20, 2016: Essays will be edited and returned to the author for review and revision. The final version of the essay, author’s release and a brief contributor’s bio is due to the editor by April 20, 2016
• June 1, 2016: Manuscript  is received by the publisher

Accepted essays received on or before January 31st will continue through the editing process. The editor will utilize Microsoft Word’s tracking function to record all edits and return the edited version back to the author for final correction.

The final manuscript will be delivered to the publisher June 1, 2016. Contributors will receive a complimentary book copy when published, which is anticipated for late 2016.

Please direct all correspondence to:

Michele Brittany, Editor

Email: SpaceHorrorFilms@gmail.com

Blog: http://spacehorrorfilms.blogspot.com

Website: www.spacehorrorfilms.com

Michele Brittany is an independent popular culture scholar residing in Southern California and is the editor of James Bond and Popular Culture: Essays on the Influence of the Fictional Superspy (2014, McFarland & Company). She is the James Bond, Espionage and Eurospy Area Chair for the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association’s annual conference. She is a West Coast Correspondent for Bleeding Cool and writes daily on all things spy related at her blog, Spy-Fi & Superspies. She annually presents at the SWPACA and has presented at Wondercon Anaheim as part of the Comic Arts Conference series. She is also an academic member of the Horror Writer’s Association in Los Angeles.

Michele Brittany, Editor
Independent Scholar
Email: spacehorrorfilms@gmail.com
Visit the website at http://www.spacehorrorfilms.com