NecronomiCon Providence 2019

The website is now open for


NECRONOMICON PROVIDENCE
The International Festival of Weird Fiction, Art, and Academia
August 22-25, 2019

Full details at http://necronomicon-providence.com/welcome/.

CFP Of God and Monsters Conference (11/1/2018; Texas State U 4/4-6/2019)

Sorry to have missed posting this sooner:

Of God and Monsters
April 4th – 6th 2019
Texas State University San Marcos, TX

http://www.theofantastique.com/2018/08/30/call-for-papers-of-gods-and-monsters-at-texas-state-university/

Judith Halberstam famously claimed that monsters are “meaning machines” that can be used to represent a variety of ideas, including morality, gender, race, and nationalism (to name only a few). Monsters are always part of the project of making sense of the world and our place in it. As a tool through which human beings create worlds in which to meaningfully dwell, monsters are tightly bound with many other systems of meaning-making like religion, culture, literature, and politics. Of Gods and Monsters will provide focused space to explore the definition of “monster,” the categorization of monsters as a basis of comparison across cultures, and the relationship of monsters to various systems of meaning-making with the goal of understanding how humans have used and continued to use these “meaning machines.”

The Religious Studies program at Texas State University, therefore, welcomes submissions for our upcoming conference on Monsters and Monster Theory. Through this conference, we hope to explore the complex intersections of monsters and meaning making from a variety of theoretical, academic, and intellectual angles. Because “monsters” are a category that appears across time and cultural milieus, this conference will foster conversations between scholars working in very different areas and is not limited in terms of cultural region, historical time, or religious tradition. As part of fostering this dialogue, conference organizers are thrilled to announce that Douglas E. Cowan will serve as this event’s keynote speaker, while archival researcher and cryptid expert Lyle Blackburn will offer a second plenary address. Conference organizers anticipate inviting papers presented at this conference to submit their revised papers for an edited volume.

If interested, please submit an abstract with a maximum of 300-words to TexasStateMonsters@gmail.com by November 1st, 2018. Final decisions on conference participation will be sent out by the first week of December. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact conference organizers Natasha Mikles (n.mikles@txstate.edu) or Joseph Laycock (joseph.laycock@txstate.edu).

CFP Withcraft Hysteria: Performing Witchcraft in Contemporary Art and Pop Culture (proposals by 10/1/2018)

CFP: WITCHCRAFT HYSTERIA: Performing Witchcraft in Contemporary Art and Pop Culture
https://www.fantastic-arts.org/2018/cfp-witchcraft-hysteria-performing-witchcraft-in-contemporary-art-and-pop-culture/
August 14, 2018

Type:
Call for Papers

Date:
October 1, 2018

Location:
California, United States

Subject Fields:
Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Cultural History / Studies, Popular Culture Studies, Theatre & Performance History / Studies, Women’s & Gender History / Studies

WITCHCRAFT HYSTERIA. Performing witchcraft in contemporary art and pop culture.

We seem to be living in bewitched times. Witches are everywhere, or rather: victims of alleged witch hunts pop up all over the place, preferable on Twitter or other social media. Pop-stars perform as witches, like Katy Perry in her performance at the 2014 Grammy awards, where she appeared in a cowl before a crystal ball, while later dancing with broomsticks as poles. Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade” (2016) made several explicit references to black witchcraft rituals. Azealia Banks proclaimed in the same year on Twitter that she practiced “three years worth of brujería” (brujería, Spanish: witchcraft) and tweeted––while cleaning the blood-smeared room used for her animal sacrifices––“Real witches do real things”. Marina Abramovic’s performance piece “Spirit Cooking” (1996) was used in the ominous Pizzagate conspiracy theory of 2016, accusing Abramovic and the Hillary Clinton campaign in practicing witchcraft rituals and occult magic. Clinton and other influential women in politics–such as Nany Pelosi and Maxine Waters––get labeled as witches and Sarah Palin partakes in a ritual to secure her electoral win and “save her from witchcraft”. Meanwhile, thousands of people coordinate binding spells against political leaders (#bindtrump) and Silvia Federici’s seminal book “Caliban and the Witch” moved from the bookshelf to the bedside table for many art professionals.

The title “Witchcraft Hysteria” follows the inscription on the monument dedicated 1992 to the Salem Witch Trials (1692), that were informed by European-US-American witchcraft discourses of their time and in turn were highly influential on today’s discussions.

For this publication, we want to investigate the revival and the current interest in the figure of the witch and the performance of witchcraft in contemporary art, visual culture and pop culture. The figure of the witch as icon of historical significance and present relevance in art and politics has only gained in its cultural impact. Our project focuses on performance strategies of “performing witchcraft” in a contemporary context, focusing on the last two decades.

Relevant paper topics may consider, but are not limited to:

• The figure of the witch in contemporary art and culture
• Contextualizing Witchcraft Hysteria in Theater, Film, Television, Streaming Media, Social Media, etc. in their historical representations and current manifestations
• Witchcraft (Hysteria) and Performance Studies
• Witchcraft and feminist (art) practice
• Practicing Witchcraft as political protest
• The politics of being (labeled) a witch
• Queer-Feminist perspectives on Witchcraft
• (Intersectional) Questions of Gender, Class and Race and Witchcraft

Schedule

Proposals (500 words): October 1, 2018

Final Papers Due: January 16, 2018 [I assume this is an error for 1/16/2019]

Submission of Final Revised Papers for Publication: March 4, 2018 [likewise, I assume this is an error for 3/4/2019].

Publication: Summer, 2018 [again, I assume this is an error for Summer 2019]

Please submit a 500-word proposal and a 200-word biography to both editors: Johanna Braun (johannabraun@g.ucla.edu) and Katharina Brandl (katharina.brandl@unibas.ch) by October 1, 2018.

Contact Info:
Katharina Brandl

University of Basel, Switzerland

Johanna Braun
Erwin Schrödinger Research Fellow at University of California, Los Angeles

Contact Email:
johannabraun@g.ucla.edu

CFP Stephen King Area (10/1/2018; PCA/ACA Washington DC 4/17-20/2019)

CFP: Stephen King Area (2019 PCA National Conference), Washington D.C.
https://www.fantastic-arts.org/2018/cfp-stephen-king-area-2019-pca-national-conference-washington-d-c/
July 24, 2018

Stephen King Area (2019 PCA National Conference)

deadline for submissions:
October 1, 2018

full name / name of organization:
Patrick McAleer/Popular Culture Association

contact email: stephenkingpca@gmail.com



Stephen King Area

2019 PCA/ACA Annual National Conference

Washington D.C.: Wednesday, April 17th-Saturday, April 20th

The co-chairs of the Stephen King Area—Philip Simpson of Eastern Florida State College and Patrick McAleer of Inver Hills Community College—are soliciting papers, presentations, panels and roundtable discussions which cover any aspect of Stephen King’s fiction and film for the Annual National Joint Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference to be held in Washington D.C. from April 17th-April 20th 2019. Papers, presentations, and panels can cover King’s experimentation with medium (e-books, graphic novels, TV series), his more recent fictions, including his Dark Tower series, and anything in between. Indeed, feel free to view past programs of the PCA/ACA conference at www.pcaaca.org to see what has been covered during recent conferences.

To have your proposal/abstract considered for presentation, please submit your proposal/abstract of approximately 250 words through the PCA/ACA Database—http://ncp.pcaaca.org/ — by October 1st, 2018. Here you will submit your paper proposal/abstract and also provide your name, institutional affiliation, and contact information. Responses/decisions regarding your proposals will be provided within two weeks of your submission to ensure timely replies. Of course, should you have any questions specific to the Stephen King Area, please send an e-mail to stephenkingpca@gmail.com and we will be happy to assist you.

Complete panel proposals of 3-4 people are also welcomed, as are proposals for roundtable discussions with two or more featured speakers and a moderator. For more information, visit the PCA/ACA at www.pcaaca.org.

CFP American Ecogothic (9/30/2018; NeMLA 2019)

American Ecogothic, NeMLA
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/29/american-ecogothic-nemla

deadline for submissions: September 30, 2018

full name / name of organization: Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

contact email: caitlin.duffy@stonybrook.edu


Leslie Fiedler describes American fiction as “bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction… a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation” (Love and Death in the American Novel, 29). However, for settlers within the early colonies and citizens of the young republic, the wilderness of the supposed New World not only represented material promise, but also unknown danger. This panel proposes a move away from the more common “land of light and affirmation” reading of American nature towards an ecogothic approach. Despite recent attention paid to the intersections between gothic and ecocritical studies, there continues to be an unfortunate dearth in scholarship focusing on the specifically American ecogothic. This scarcity is surprising given the important role played by nature in the formation of the American gothic mode. Three major critical works focused on the American ecogothic include Tom J. Hillard’s and Kevin Corstorphine’s essays within Ecogothic (2013) and Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2017), edited by Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils. In the introduction to their volume, Keetley and Sivils note that, given its unwavering fixation with the wilderness, “American gothic literature has always been ecogothic” (6).

This panel invites papers that interrogate gothic depictions of landscapes and wilderness in American fiction (including, but not limited to, literature, film, television, and video games) from any time period. In particular, we seek papers that work towards a definition of the American ecogothic as a national mode or style. Papers that utilize the ecogothic lens to support, challenge, or problematize current conceptions of the American gothic are especially welcome. We also encourage papers that explore the American ecogothic temporally by tracing transformations or continuations of its fictional appearance across time.

All proposals must be submitted through the NeMLA portal by September 30th and should be no more than 300 words.

The 50th annual NeMLA conference will take place on March 21-24, 2019 in Washington, DC. For more information: http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla.html

Please email any questions you may have to caitlin.duffy@stonybrook.edu.

CFP Contemporary Horror Within and Beyond the Nation (9/30/2018; NeMLA 2019)

Contemporary Horror Within and Beyond the Nation, NeMLA 2019
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/26/contemporary-horror-within-and-beyond-the-nation-nemla-2019

deadline for submissions: September 30, 2018

full name / name of organization: Jack Dudley, Mount St. Mary's University

contact email: dudley@msmary.edu



Accepted Roundtable for NeMLA 50, March 21 -24, 2019, Washington, DC.

As Sophia Siddique and Raphael Raphael write in Transnational Horror Cinema: Bodies of Excess and the Global Grotesque (2016), “From its origins, what would eventually come to be called ‘the horror genre’ has been deeply transnational both in contexts of production and reception.” In “The American Horror Film? Globalization and Transnational U.S.-Asian Genres” (2013), Christina Klein observes that this transnational quality has particularly been evident most recently, as cinema as a whole continues to become increasingly transnational. For Klein, genre films such as horror lend themselves to the transnational because of their indebtedness to convention or tropes, which can be culturally portable or which, in her words, “can be combined by local filmmakers in fresh ways to carry locally specific meanings.” This accepted roundtable invites participants to interrogate the relationship between contemporary horror—understood as roughly post-1960—and the critical categories of the nation, the global, and the transnational. How do the particular conventions, tropes, and forms most associated with horror facilitate and/or complicate its relationship to the nation? Are the conventions, tropes, and forms of particular national traditions truly exportable and what are the limits of their cultural adaptability? Have recent examples of contemporary horror resisted the transnational and instead laid claim to specifically national visions of horror? By exploring these questions, this roundtable seeks not only to examine how the category of the nation and the transnational have shaped contemporary horror, but how what is still often denigrated as a marginal genre, horror itself, can help us continue to theorize the nation and the transnational as well. Participants are welcome to focus on any medium.

Please submit abstracts through the NeMLA portal, which can be accessed here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/Login

Abstracts are due to the NeMLA portal by Sept. 30, 2018.

Please email dudley@msmary.edu with any questions.

CFP Things That Go Bump in the North: Canadian Horror Media (7/31/2018)

Seems its a good time to be studying monsters. Here's another interesting call.


Things That Go Bump in the North: Canadian Horror Media
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/03/things-that-go-bump-in-the-north-canadian-horror-media

deadline for submissions: July 31, 2018

full name / name of organization: UOIT

contact email: andrea.braithwaite@uoit.ca



Things That Go Bump in the North: Canadian Horror Media


Horror stories speak of our fears. In doing so, horror stories also speak of our everyday, our “normal,” as this ordinariness is quickly thrown into disarray. Things That Go Bump in the North will look at Canadian horror across media – from fiction, film, and television to games, graphic novels, and web series. This edited collection considers what Canadian horror texts can tell us about Canadian culture, media, history, and politics. Things That Go Bump in the North aims to see horror stories as stories about nation, as sites for critical reflection on the meanings and uses of “Canada” in this genre – and what we are terrified to lose, or perhaps keep.


This collection deliberately uses “Canadian” and of “horror” loosely in order to more fully explore the cultural work of horror stories. By “Canadian,” we seek texts that are by, in, and/or about Canada or Canadians; “horror” includes inflections like the gothic and the grotesque, the silly and the supernatural. We encourage diverse submissions from a range of critical approaches and research methods; we are particularly excited about work that addresses Indigenous, diasporic, and other underrepresented productions and perspectives.


Topics may include and are not limited to:

• A specific creator or creative team
• A singular media form, text, or series
• Adaptations and transformations
• Generic hybrids
• Regional or community-specific horror stories
• Studies of fans, audiences, and reception contexts
• Historical horror tales and texts
• Co-productions and international ventures
• Alternate histories and horrifying futures
• Industry and/or policy analysis
• Transmedia texts and storytelling
• True crime texts

Proposals of not more than 250 words will be due by July 31 2018. Final essays of approximately 6000-8000 words, including all notes and references in Chicago author-date style will be due by April 30 2019. Please direct inquiries and proposals to: andrea.braithwaite@uoit.ca and p.greenhill@uwinnipeg.ca.

CFP Gothic Journeys: Paths, Crossings, and Intersections Conference (8/31/2018; Australia 1/22-23-2019)

Gothic Journeys: Paths, Crossings, and Intersections
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/11/gothic-journeys-paths-crossings-and-intersections

deadline for submissions: August 31, 2018

full name / name of organization: The Gothic Association of New Zealand and Australia (GANZA)

contact email: conference@ganza.co.nz



The Gothic Association of New Zealand and Australia (GANZA) welcomes papers for its fourth biennial conference, to be held at the Mantra on View Hotel in Surfers Paradise, Australia, on 22-23 January 2019.

GANZA is interdisciplinary in nature, bringing together scholars, students, teachers and professionals from a number of Gothic disciplines, including literature, film, music, television, fashion, architecture, and other popular culture forms. It is the aim of the Association to not only place a focus on Australasian Gothic scholarship, but also to build international links with the wider Gothic community as a whole.

The conference invites abstracts for 20-minute presentations related to the theme of 'Gothic Journeys’.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

• Gothic wanderers, travellers, and explorers
• Journeys of the mind and body
• Gothic spaces, regionalities, and geographies
• Death, haunting, and ‘crossing over’
• Boundaries and transgressions
• Monsters and the Monstrous
• Gothic maps and migrations
• Gothic histories and Gothic folklore
• Horror in its various contexts
• Displacement and identity
• Trauma and trauma narratives
• Movement through time, space, and digital worlds
• Gothic forms in popular culture
• Navigating the Gothic (from the road well-travelled to new pathways)
• Intersections between the Gothic and other fields of study
• Global Gothic
• The Uncanny
• Postcolonial Gothic
• Travel Gothic and Gothic tourism
• The Gothic in the past, present, and future

Please e-mail abstracts of 200 words to the attention of the conference organisers at: conference@ganza.co.nz

Abstracts should include your name, affiliation, e-mail address, the title of your proposed paper, and a short bio (100 words max). The deadline for submissions is 31st August 2018.

For more information, visit our web site: www.ganza.co.nz. Alternatively, please contact Dr Gwyneth Peaty (g.peaty@curtin.edu.au) and/or Dr Erin Mercer (e.mercer@massey.ac.nz).

CFP Re-Visions of Eden: The Idea of the Midwestern Gothic (9/1/2018)

Another great idea for a collection:

Re-Visions of Eden: The Idea of the Midwestern Gothic
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/14/re-visions-of-eden-the-idea-of-the-midwestern-gothic

deadline for submissions: September 1, 2018

full name / name of organization: Brandi Homan & Julia Madsen

contact email: mwgothicscholar@gmail.com



In the American cultural imagination, the Midwest embodies the “home” or “heart” of the nation associated with frontier and rural values of promise, fertility, order, and stability, according to Joanna Jacobson in “The Idea of the Midwest.” Jacobson argues that the Midwest has come to symbolize the quintessentially “American,” speaking to “the impulse to invent a myth of commonality rooted in the physical landscape at the center of the continent and for the insufficiency of that myth as a response to the conditions of urban industrial culture.” While the idea and image of the Midwest in American culture serve as resources of recovery and refuge from the ill effects of urban industrialism, it is increasingly evident that these visions of a pastoral, rural middlescape illuminate the necessity for a more comprehensive, critical view of the region. The Midwestern Gothic complicates the Midwest’s role in myths of progress, drawing attention to vital sociopolitical and economic concerns of the region, including deindustrialization and economic disparity, crime, addiction, mental illness, racism, sexism, homophobia, and isolation. In this sense, the Midwestern Gothic counterintuitively articulates the region as the “wound” of the United States, a place ravaged by the nation’s myths and ideals.


The Midwestern Gothic tradition has a vibrant lineage in American literature, including authors like Sherwood Anderson, Toni Morrison, Sinclair Lewis, Bonnie Jo Campbell, and Ander Monson. This edited volume seeks critical, academic essays on the Midwestern Gothic in American literature and culture. In particular, this edited volume looks to establish the Midwestern Gothic as genre, exploring relationships with other regional gothics and the American gothic broadly speaking. It is also interested in critical essays on particular authors or works associated with the Midwestern Gothic tradition, including Sherwood Anderson, Toby Altman’s Arcadia, Indiana, Frank Bill, Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Harmony Korine’s Gummo, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, Sinclair Lewis, Edgar Lee Masters, Ander Monson, Toni Morrison, Donald Ray Pollock, C.S. Giscombe’s Prairie Style, Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, Laird Hunt’s Indiana, Indiana, James Wright, and others.


This edited volume is particularly interested in original contributions of between 3,000 and 6,000 words on topics including, but not limited to:

• Intersections with other regional American gothics (e.g., the Southern Gothic, Great Plains Gothic, etc.)
• The Midwestern Gothic and popular culture
• Race, class, and gender politics in the Midwestern Gothic
• Grotesque, uncanny, and abject domestic spaces in the Midwestern Gothic
• Histories and myths of place and region
• Community formation politics and identity politics
• The Midwest and frontierism
• Deindustrialization and economic disparity
• The opioid crisis, addiction, and mental illness
• Pastoral/post-pastoral studies
• The decline of the Rust Belt
• Rural studies
• The dark side of Midwestern “niceness”
• Current politics of the Midwest
• Documentary and non-fiction approaches to the Midwestern Gothic
• Visual studies in the Midwestern Gothic (film, photography, and multimedia)

Please submit abstracts of 300-500 words to Dr. Brandi Homan and Julia Madsen at mwgothicscholar@gmail.com by September 1, 2018. Selections will be made by December 1, 2018. Final essays (of 3000-6000 words) are due March 1, 2019.

Out Now: Neil Gaiman's A Study in Emerald HC

Now available from Dark Horse Comics:

Neil Gaiman's A Study in Emerald HC
https://www.darkhorse.com/Books/30-897/Neil-Gaimans-A-Study-in-Emerald-HC (click link for a multi-page preview)

This supernatural mystery set in the world of Sherlock Holmes and Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos features a brilliant detective and his partner as they try to solve a horrific murder.

This complex investigation takes the Baker Street investigators from the slums of Whitechapel all the way to the Queen's Palace as they attempt to find the answers to this bizarre murder of cosmic horror!

From the Hugo, Bram Stoker, Locus, World Fantasy, Nebula Award-winning, and New York Times bestselling writer Neil Gaiman comes this graphic novel adaptation with art by Eisner award-winning artist Rafael Albuquerque!


Creators
Writer:Neil Gaiman, Rafael Albuquerque, Rafael Scavone
Artist:Rafael Albuquerque, Dave Stewart
Colorist:Dave Stewart
Cover Artist:Rafael Albuquerque
Genre: Science-Fiction, Crime
 
Publication Date: June 27, 2018
Format: FC, 88 pages; HC; 6 5/8" x 10 3/16"
Price:$17.99
ISBN-10:1-50670-393-3
ISBN-13:978-1-50670-393-0

CFP Tropical Gothic (Spec Issue of eTropic) (12/30/2018)

'Tropical Gothic'
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/07/02/tropical-gothic

deadline for submissions:
December 30, 2018

full name / name of organization:
eTropic journal

contact email:
etropic@jcu.edu.au


CALL FOR PAPERS special issue ‘Tropical Gothic’


Submission Deadline: 30 December 2018



‘TROPICAL GOTHIC’

‘The Gothic’ is undergoing a resurgence in academic and popular cultures. Propelled by fears produced by globalization, the neoliberal order, networked technologies, post-truth and environmental uncertainty – tropes of ‘the gothic’ resonate. The gothic allows us to delve into the unknown. It calls up unspoken truths and secret desires.

Across the tropics, the gothic manifests in specific ways according to spaces and places, and in relation to cultures and their encounters, crossings and interminglings.

Gothic studies that provide particularly interesting arenas of analysis include: culture, ritual, mythology, film, architecture, literature, fashion, art, landscapes, places, nature, spaces, histories and spectral cities. ‘Tropical Gothic’ may include subgenres such as: imperial gothic, orientalism in gothic literature, colonial and postcolonial gothic. In contemporary society neoliberal connections with the tropics and gothic may be investigated. In popular culture, tropical aspects of gothic film, cybergoth, gothic-steampunk, gothic sci-fi, goth graphic novels, and gothic music may be explored.

The eTropic journal is indexed in Scopus, Ulrich's and DOAJ. Publication is in 2019.

Instructions for authors: https://journals.jcu.edu.au/etropic.

Equiries, please contact: etropic@jcu.edu.au.

CFP Varieties of the Monstrous Feminine in American Literature (9/30/2018; NeMLA 2019)

“Varieties of the Monstrous Feminine in American Literature”
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/07/01/%E2%80%9Cvarieties-of-the-monstrous-feminine-in-american-literature%E2%80%9D

deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2018

full name / name of organization:
Mary Balkun/Seton Hall University

contact email:
mary.balkun@shu.edu



NeMLA 2019

The monstrous female is a staple of the literary imagination. The Medusa, the witch, the Sirens, the succubus/vampire, the she-devil, the madwoman, the coquette, the cross-dresser—these are just some versions of this trope that can be identified from the earliest periods to the present day. Some figures represent the ways women have been marginalized as “other” and the impact of that designation, while others represent ways that outsider positions can become a locus of power. This roundtable will explore various manifestations of the monstrous feminine trope, specifically in American literature and culture. It will consider questions such as: Who defines monstrosity? How can it be construed as positive as well as negative? How does the monstrous feminine manifest in different time periods and locations (urban vs. rural, east vs. west vs. midwest, north vs. south)? Does the monstrous feminine always have to be female?

Proposals of 300 words should be submitted by Sept. 30, 2018 via the NeMLA portal https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/CFP.

Weird Fiction Review 8

Now available from Centipede Press:

Weird Fiction Review #8
http://www.centipedepress.com/anthologies/wfreview8.html

Edited by S.T. Joshi
Artwork gallery by Erol Otus.
Lengthy interview with Patrick McGrath.
History of the small press: Shasta Press by Stefan Dziemianowicz.
Several new essays and stories.
Sewn paperback.
Nearly 400 pages.

pricing: $35, on sale for $19.

 
The Weird Fiction Review is an annual periodical devoted to the study of weird and supernatural fiction. It is edited by S.T. Joshi. This eighth issue contains fiction, poetry, and reviews from leading writers and promising newcomers. This issue features fiction by John Shirley, Flannery O’Connor, Lynne Jamneck, Michael Washburn, and others, and articles by Stefan Dziemianowicz (an illustrated history of Shasta Publishing), Michael Shuman (on horror films and garage and surf music), Adam Groves (on the golden age of speculative erotic fiction), John C. Tibbetts (on John M. Barrie), Forrest J Ackerman (on Robert Bloch), as well as verse and other essays and fiction. The feature of the issue is Chad Hensley’s terrific interview with Erol Otus, the iconic artist that did so much of the Dungeons & Dragons artwork of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The front and back cover, and inside covers, are by artist Grant Griffin. The list price on this item is $35 and it is on sale for $19.

Full contents details available by visiting Centipede Press's page for the book at http://www.centipedepress.com/anthologies/wfreview8.html.

CFP I’m Already Dead: Essays on The CW’s iZombie and Vertigo’s iZOMBIE (Extended) (8/30/2018)

I’m Already Dead: Essays on The CW’s iZombie and Vertigo’s iZOMBIE (Extended)
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/14/i%E2%80%99m-already-dead-essays-on-the-cw%E2%80%99s-izombie-and-vertigo%E2%80%99s-izombie-extended

deadline for submissions:
August 30, 2018

full name / name of organization:
Weber State University

contact email:
izombiecollection@gmail.com



I’m Already Dead: Essays on The CW’s iZombie and Vertigo’s iZOMBIE

Editors

Ashley Szanter, Weber State University

Jessica K. Richards, Weber State University



Project Overview

Editors Szanter and Richards seek original essays for an edited collection on Rob Thomas’s television series iZombie as well as the show’s graphic novel source material, Roberson and Allred’s iZOMBIE. Currently under contract with McFarland Publishing, we’re requesting supplemental essays to a working collection. This particular series has begun to overhaul modern constructions of the zombie in popular culture and media. While scholarship on the television zombie is not in short supply, particularly in regards to AMC’s The Walking Dead, we believe this particular show and comic series speak to a growing trend in zombie culture whereby the zombie “passes” as human—fully assimilating into normalized society. The collection aims to explore how this new, “improved” zombie altered popular notions of the zombie monster and brought in a new group of viewers who may shy away from the blood and gore tradition of other popular zombie narratives. As each season of the series begins to take a more traditional approach to zombie narratives, we want to focus this collection on how the show tackles current power and political structures as well as asking questions about globalization and nationhood. With CW announcing that the final season will air in January, we’re looking for essays that address the entirety of the show.

Chapters we’re looking for in this collection can focus on one or more of the following categories:

• Explorations of how these two narratives construct gender—particularly in regards to femininity and masculinity. Are the rules for gender performance different for male/female zombies as opposed to male/female humans?
• Essays that explicitly address the graphic novel series iZOMBIE with a focus on character development across the narrative.
• Analyze the use of hackneyed stereotypes, especially in the television show, as the consumption of brains often leads the zombies to exhibit deeply stereotypical, sometimes racist, behaviors.
• Examinations of the place/function of romance in the show and/or comic. Relationships function as a central part of the television show in particular. How do the complications of zombie life influence or impede relationships between humans/humans, humans/zombies, zombies/zombies?
• The CW’s iZombie as the result of genre exhaustion for both the traditional zombie genre as well as the paranormal romance genre. iZombie’s network is known for attractive characters/actors and a strong inclusion of romance and sexuality. Have we taken zombies and paranormal romance as far as they can go without expanding the new ZomRomCom to include heartthrob zombies?
• Address iZombie or iZOMBIE and intersectionality. Of particular interest to the editors are non-binary gender and sexuality, feminism, race, “passing,” and non-traditional/deconstructed families or relationships.

Abstract Due Dates

Preference will be given to abstracts received before August 30, 2018. Abstracts should be no longer than 350 words and be accompanied by a current CV.

Contact us and send abstracts to Ashley and Jessica at izombiecollection@gmail.com. 

CFP Edited Collection on Young Adult Gothic Fiction (7/16/2018)

Edited Collection on Young Adult Gothic Fiction
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/05/22/edited-collection-on-young-adult-gothic-fiction

deadline for submissions: July 16, 2018

full name / name of organization: Dr Michelle Smith and Dr Kristine Moruzi

contact email: Michelle.Smith@monash.edu



Call for Papers: Edited Collection on Young Adult Gothic Fiction

The twenty-first century has seen a marked increase in the Gothic themes of liminality, monstrosity, transgression, romance, and sexuality in fiction for young adults. While Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series (2005-2008) is the most well-known example of Gothic young adult fiction, it is part of a growing corpus of hundreds of novels published in the genre since the turn of the millennium. During this period, the Gothic itself has simultaneously undergone a transformation. The Gothic monster is increasingly presented sympathetically, especially through narration and focalisation from the “monster’s” perspective. In YA Gothic, the crossing of boundaries that is typical of the Gothic is often motivated by a heterosexual romance plot in which the human or monstrous female protagonist desires a boy who is not her “type”. In addition, as the Gothic works to define what it means to be human, particularly in relation to gender, race, and identity, contemporary shifts and flashpoints in identity politics are also being negotiated under the metaphoric cloak of monstrosity.

Yet the Gothic also operates within young adult fiction to enable discussions about fears and anxieties in relation to a variety of contemporary concerns, including environmentalism, human rights, and alienation. Catherine Spooner suggests that the Gothic takes the form of a series of revivals. In the proposed collection we seek to explain what the current Gothic revival in YA fiction signifies and call for papers engaging with any aspect of Gothic fiction published for young adults since 2000.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• The Gothic and the posthuman
• The paranormal romance
• The monstrous feminine
• The adolescent body
• The evolution of canonical monsters including the vampire, the werewolf, the witch
• Postfeminism and the Gothic
• The Gothic and race
• Gothic spaces
• Gothic historical fiction

The editors are currently preparing a proposal for a university press Gothic series, in which the publisher has already expressed preliminary interest.

Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words and a biographical note of up to 150 words to both Dr Kristine Moruzi (kristine.moruzi@deakin.edu.au) and Dr Michelle Smith (michelle.smith@monash.edu) by 16 July 2018.

Full papers of 6000 words will be due by 1 December 2018.

CFP Journal of Dracula Studies (expired for 2018 volume)

Sorry to have missed this for the year, but the journal would now be accepting for 2019:

[UPDATE] DEADLINE EXTENDED to June 1, 2018
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/05/02/update-deadline-extended-to-june-1-2018

deadline for submissions:
June 1, 2018

full name / name of organization:
Journal of Dracula Studies

contact email:
journalofdraculastudies@kutztown.edu



We invite manuscripts of scholarly articles (4000-6000 words) on any of the following: Bram Stoker, the novel Dracula, the historical Dracula, the vampire in folklore, fiction, film, popular culture, and related topics.

Submissions should be sent electronically (as an e-mail attachment in .doc or .rtf). Please indicate the title of your submission in the subject line of your e-mail. Send electronic submissions to journalofdraculastudies@kutztown.edu.

Please follow the updated MLA style. Contributors are responsible for obtaining any necessary permissions and ensuring observance of copyright. Manuscripts will be peer-reviewed independently by at least two scholars in the field. Copyright for published articles remains with the author.

CFP Theorizing Zombiism: Toward a Critical Theory Framework Conference (9/1/2018; Dublin 7/25-27/2019)

Theorizing Zombiism: Toward a Critical Theory Framework
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/04/13/theorizing-zombiism-toward-a-critical-theory-framework

deadline for submissions: September 1, 2018

full name / name of organization: University College Dublin, Ireland

contact email: theorizingzombiism@gmail.com



Theorizing Zombiism: Toward a Critical Theory Framework

University College Dublin

UCD Humanities Institute

25-27 July 2019


The rising academic interest in the zombie as an allegory for cultural and social analysis is spanning disciplines including, humanities, anthropology, economics, and political science. The zombie has been used as a metaphor for economic policy, political administrations, and cultural critique through various theoretical frameworks. The zombie has been examined as a metaphor for capitalism, geopolitics, globalism, neo-liberal markets, and even equating Zombiism to restrictive aspects of academia.


The zombie as a cultural figure has its beginnings in allegorical folk tales related to the experience of the Haitian slave. Roger Lockhurst, Zombies: A Cultural History, examines these folk tales concerned with the horrific existence of slavery as told through the enigmatic zombi, which was quickly assimilated into western film and pulp fiction. Early films such as White Zombie, mark the induction of the savage zombies into western culture. George A. Romero transformed the zombie narrative into a survival story reflecting aspects of human society. This long standing tradition of the zombie genre is the basis for the successful series The Walking Dead. However, the rise of popular forms of the Zombie narrative, I, Zombie and the Netflix Original Santa Clarita Diet shifts the focus to the first person experience of the Zombie.


The evolution of the zombie narrative in both culture and academics indicates its adaptability and viability as a distinct framework for critical theory. This conference aims to investigate the possibility of developing a singular theoretical framework to evaluate culture and society through the zombie narrative trope. Contributors are encouraged to provide discipline specific, and interdisciplinary, examinations of the zombie with the purpose of formulating an overall theoretical structure of Zombiism.


Potential Topics both discipline specific and non-discipline specific, but not limited to:

• Nationalism through the zombie narrative films: Rec (Spain), Le Horde (France), Cockneys vs Zombies (England), Dead Meat (Ireland), Ravenous (Canada), etc.
• Zombie phenomenology/philosophy/phsychoanalysis
• Globalization, Refugees, and Migration.
• Pedagogical Zombiism.
• Gender and the Undead.
• Zombies in Popular Culture: Re-evaluating the function of horror in society.
• Expanding Praxis: Evaluating the expanding Zombie trope into other art forms and fields.
• The Zombification of History: Re-telling historical events through Zombiism and other horror tropes (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, etc).
• Undead digital objects and issues of digital curation/Undead archival objects.
• Legal Zombiism: Law and Legislation that refuses to die.
• Ecocritcal Zombiism.
• Science/Science Fiction: The science of Zombiism/The Zombification of science.
• Zombiism and visual culture and art history.

Send abstracts of 300 words for consideration to theorizingzombiism@gmail.com by 1 Sept, 2018.

Website: https://theorizingzombiism.wordpress.com

Conference organizers: Scott Hamilton (UCD), Conor Heffernan (UCD)

CFP Critical Essays on Arthur Machen (9/1/2018)

Collection on Arthur MACHEN [EXTENSION OF DEADLINE]
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/07/collection-on-arthur-machen-extension-of-deadline

deadline for submissions: September 1, 2018

full name / name of organization: Dr. Antonio Sanna

contact email: isonisanna@hotmail.com



Critical Essays on Arthur Machen

edited by Antonio Sanna


In spite of his prolific production of novels, short stories and essays, Arthur Machen (1863-1947) is one of those Victorian and twentieth-century writers whose works have been unjustly forgotten by contemporary readers and scholars. Machen was an ardent believer in mysticism and the occult, an admirer of the medieval world and a pioneer in psychogeography. His literary works have influenced celebrated writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Charles Williams and Jorge Luis Borges and they are still pleasurable and valuable sources of entertainment. However, nowadays he is mainly remembered for his 1894 novella“The Great God Pan”, whereas his equally-successful volumes The Three Impostors (1895), The Hill of Dreams (1907), The Terror (1917), The Secret Glory (1922) and The Green Round (1933) as well as his short stories (“The Inmost Light”, “The White People”, “The Bowmen” and “N”, to mention merely a few) are rarely mentioned in studies on the English literature of the late-Victorian period and the first half of the twentieth century.

This anthology will explore Machen’s heterogeneous oeuvre from multidisciplinary perspectives. This volume seeks previously-unpublished essays that explore the English writer’s production. I am particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the subject that can illuminate the diverse facets of the writer’s work. There are several themes worth exploring when analyzing Machen’soeuvre, utilizing any number of theoretical frameworks of your choosing. I request the chapters 1) to be based on formal, academic analysis and 2) to be focused mainly on the writer’s works (though comparisons with other authors’ works are more than welcome).

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

• Machen’s autobiographies
• The supernatural
• The seen and the unseen
• Representations of madness
• Representations of childhood, parenting and ageing
• Machenand fairy tales
• Gender and queer readings
• Machenand philosophy
• Exploration of dreams and the subconscious
• Fear of the Other
• The problem of evil
• Biblical interpretations
• Cultural studies and popular culture
• Class consciousness
• Science, science fiction and mystery
• Machen and the occult
• Machen and psychogeography
• Machen’s legacy

The anthology will be organized into thematic sections around these topics and others that emerge from submissions. I am open to works that focus on other topics as well and authors interested in pursuing other related lines of inquiry. Feel free to contact me 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.

Please submit a 300-500 word abstract of your proposed chapter contribution, a brief CV and complete contact information to Dr. Antonio Sanna (isonisanna@hotmail.com) by the 1st of September, 2018. Full chapters of 4000-6000 words would be due upon signing a contract with a publisher. Note: all full chapters submitted will be included subject to review.

CFP Otherness and the Urban (Spec Issue of Otherness: Essays and Studies) (9/28/2018)

Special Journal Issue: “Otherness and the Urban”

deadline for submissions: September 28, 2018

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

contact email: otherness.research@gmail.com


Otherness: Essays and Studies 7.1

The peer-reviewed e-journal Otherness: Essays and Studies is now accepting submissions for a special issue, forthcoming Spring 2019 – “Otherness and the Urban”


Edited by Maria Beville, this issue seeks to publish research articles from and across different scholarly disciplines that examine, in as many ways as possible, the concepts of otherness and alterity as these relate to the experience and representation of the city.


The city is a unique and subjective space. It is fragmented and indistinct. It is at once place and text: to walk the city is to read it. In ‘Semiology and Urbanism’ (The Semiotic Challenge), Roland Barthes notes that the city is a discourse and a language: ‘[t]he city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by inhabiting it, by traversing it, by looking at it’. However, in this discourse, there exists ‘a conflict between signification and reason, or at least between signification and that calculating reason which wants all the elements of the city to be uniformly recuperated by planning’. Our desire to map the city is a desire to map the self: an impossibility that constantly reminds us of our own inherent Otherness.


In this way the city is multivalent. It is both the location and the sign of the Other. And rather than merely existing as a physical place, the city is experience; individualised and multiplied in its alterity. While the city exists as a place to be read and is unique in every individual reading, it is also a place to be written, inspiring writers, artists, and thinkers to become lost in city streets and locales as they struggle to find new ways to meet the challenge of representing the unrepresentable.


Thus, the city is where the subject and space become intertwined. While the city becomes part of the subject and the subject a part of the city, urban space in its resistance of representation remains a constant challenge to notions of self, of sameness, of homogeneity. The city is therefore bound to exist in tension with identity, both individual and collective. Just as is the case with the self, there can be no cohesive vision of the city because the city not only resists mapping, it resists unified narrative in its flux; in its phantasmagoria.


And yet the otherness of the city remains a part of the definition of urban selfhood and understanding this is best achieved through a balanced view of the city’s physical and metaphysical dimensions. No examination of the textuality of the city should overlook the materiality of the city and its impact on the city experience. City design, city building, city governance and city use form the structures of the city which carry and mediate its otherness.


This issue seeks to develop a collective of research papers which examine the otherness of the city and the Other in the city.


Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The city as other in literature/ Otherness in the city in literature
• Otherness and the philosophy of the city
• Urban aesthetics and otherness
• Twinned cities
• Hybrid cities
• Haunted cities
• Folklore and otherness in the city
• Globalisation, otherness and the urban
• The uncanny city (in literature, art, film, media)
• The politics of alterity in the city
• Otherness in the postcolonial city
• The postmodern city
• The Gothic city
• Minority urban experience (in literature, art, film, media)
• Urban Otherness and popular culture

Articles should be between 5,000 – 7,000 words. All electronic submissions should be sent via email with a Word document attachment formatted to the Chicago Manual of Style standards. Please send submissions to the editor, Maria Beville at otherness.research@gmail.com


The deadline for submissions is Friday, September 28, 2018.


*Barthes, Roland. ‘Semiology and Urbanism.’ In The Semiotic Challenge, translated by Richard Howard. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. P191-201.



General Submissions

Scholars are always welcome to submit articles within the scope of the journal for consideration for our next general issue. We anticipate a general issue to come out in the Autumn of 2019.

Please address any inquires to Matthias Stephan: otherness.research@gmail.com.
 

CFP Gothic in the Nineteenth Century (7/15/2018; Loyola University Chicago 10/27/2018)

CFP Deadline Extended: “Hideous Progeny”: The Gothic in the Nineteenth Century (7/15/2018; 10/27/2018)
https://www.navsa.org/2018/06/14/cfp-deadline-extended-hideous-progeny-the-gothic-in-the-nineteenth-century-7-15-2018-10-27-2018/
Jun 14, 2018

“Hideous Progeny”: The Gothic in the Nineteenth Century

Lake Shore Campus, Klarcheck Information Commons, 4th floor

October 27, 2018, 8:30am-5:30pm



“And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper.”
Mary Shelley, 1831 Introduction to Frankenstein

In this truly Gothic year, the Loyola University Chicago Victorian Society celebrates both the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and the birth of Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights (1847), two famous Gothic novels which sparked questions regarding the potential of human connections across social classes, time, and death itself. Subsequent authors of Gothic fiction similarly employed this genre to interrogate the breakdown of patriarchal family structures, systems of power and reproduction, sexual, religious, and socio-political taboos and norms, reinterpret previous literatures, and reject contemporary notions of the limits of reality, scientific possibility, and human progress. Given the 19th-century recognition of the Gothic as an unstable, versatile space that can function as a surprising and subversive mechanism for social critique, the Loyola University Chicago Victorian Society asks what are the possibilities, values, narrative strategies, ideas, versions, mutations, and adaptations of the nineteenth century Gothic? Over the course of the nineteenth century, what endured, progressed, and morphed in this genre, and why?

The Loyola University Chicago Victorian Society solicits paper proposals addressing Gothic questionings of texts, bodies, and the supernatural. Possible CFP categories include but are not limited to the following:

• textual studies and digital humanities
• narrative theory
• adaptations
• history of science
• queer theory
• women and gender studies
• art and architecture
• post-colonial studies
• the gothic and the neo-gothic
• mutations, perversions, and disability studies.

Plenary Speaker: Alison Booth (University of Virginia)

Keynote Speaker: Suzy Anger (University of British Columbia)

Please send abstracts no longer than 300 words to lucvictoriansociety@gmail.com no later than 15 July 2018.

In the weeks and months ahead, more details will be forthcoming on our website: http://lucvictoriansociety.wix.com/lucvs.

CFP MEARCSTAPA/Preternature special issue (10/1/2018)

MEARCSTAPA/Preternature special issue
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/21/mearcstapapreternature-special-issue

deadline for submissions:
October 1, 2018

full name / name of organization:
MEARCSTAPA

contact email:
tmtomaini@gmail.com



MEARCSTAPA

Call for Papers



MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: The Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory and Practical Application) invites papers on any topic of Monsters/Monster theory, or the Supernatural/Uncanny for a special issue of the journal Preternature (PSU Press). The special issue will celebrate MEARCSTAPA’s tenth anniversary as an academic society dedicated to the study of the monstrous.



Papers are welcome from anywhere on the globe, in any discipline of the Humanities, can reflect any genre, and can include any historical or literary period. Papers must be in English, and must conform to the Preternature submission guidelines. Submission guidelines can be found at http://www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_Preternature.html



Please send full papers of 8,000-12,000 words by October 1, 2018to Melissa Ridley Elmes at MElmes@lindenwood.edu and Thea Tomaini at tmtomaini@gmail.com. Papers will undergo a double-blind review by at least two reviewers.



Preternature provides an interdisciplinary, inclusive forum for the study of topics that stand in the liminal space between the known world and the inexplicable. The journal embraces a broad and dynamic definition of the preternatural that encompasses the weird and uncanny—magic, witchcraft, spiritualism, occultism, esotericism, demonology, monstrophy, and more, recognizing that the areas of magic, religion, and science are fluid and that their intersections should continue to be explored, contextualized, and challenged.

CFP Transforming Bodies in Early Modern Drama (7/16/2018; RSA Toronto 3/17-19/2019)

RSA 2019: Transforming Bodies in Early Modern Drama (July 16th, 2018)
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/17/rsa-2019-transforming-bodies-in-early-modern-drama-july-16th-2018

deadline for submissions: July 16, 2018

full name / name of organization: Christina M. Squitieri / New York University

contact email: cms531@nyu.edu




Renaissance Society of America (RSA) 2019: 17–19 March 2019, Toronto, Canada

Transforming Bodies in Early Modern Drama

**This is a guaranteed session**

How are bodies–of people, plants, or animals–transformed on the early modern stage?

What are the agents of transformation, and is there something about drama in particular that allows for bodily transformation?

How is transformation represented (or not represented) dramatically?

What constitutes a "body" on stage, and is a body still the same if parts of it transform?

What does the transformation of the body tell us about corporeal unity, identity, transformation, or the instability of the body or identity?

How can bodily transformation intersect with theoretic frameworks such as materialism, historicism, ecocriticism, animal studies, or the post-human?

Topics may include (but are not limited to) the way violence (physical, sexual, verbal), ritual, disguise, death, love, the natural world, disease, wounds, language, power, fear, etc have a transforming effect on the early modern human and non-human bodies that populate early modern drama, through any theoretical lens.

Please send 150-word abstracts and brief CV to Christina M. Squitieri (cms531@nyu.edu) and Penelope Meyers Usher (pfm250@nyu.edu) by Monday, July 16th, 2018. This panel will be sponsored by the Early Modern and Renaissance Society at New York University.

​

CFP Shakespeare and the Gothic Imagination (6/30/2018; ICR South Carolina 10/25-28/2018)

Origins and Assemblages of the "Modern;" Shakespeare and the Gothic Imagination
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/15/origins-and-assemblages-of-the-modern-shakespeare-and-the-gothic-imagination

deadline for submissions:
June 30, 2018

full name / name of organization:
Lucian Ghita (Clemson University)

contact email:
lucianghita78@gmail.com


Writing in 1800, the Marquis de Sade claimed that the Gothic was the inevitable product of the revolutionary tremors felt throughout Europe. In revealing the proximity between poetic and political terror, the Gothic became the inescapable condition and symptom of modernity itself. The rise of the Gothic in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe is closely bound up with the discovery of Shakespeare as a "modern dramatist" by Hegel and, later, Marx. Like the Gothic, Shakespeare's plays had a propensity for exploring the "dark underbelly" of the new modern world. This seminar explores the mutually constitutive relationship between "Shakespeare" and "the Gothic," viewed as cultural catalysts for modernity and modern creativity. This panel invites a vast range and variety of proposals that use theoretical, historical, empirical or contextual approaches to explore not only how the two phenomena "were born together" and developed in tandem during the "long" Romantic period (1764-1850), but also how they have become cultural and critical categories for analyzing modernity itself.

Papers might consider, but are not limited to, the following areas, questions, and issues:

- Gothic adaptations and reworkings of Shakespeare's plays from the period
- Philosophical and political assemblages (Hegel, Marx, Voltaire)
- Shakespeare Revolutions- Discourses and Narratives of Modernity (related to Shakespeare and the Gothic)
- Romantic and Gothic Formations in Shakespeare
- Theatricality and Gothic Excess
- Gothic "Monsters"
- Assembling/Disassembling Shakespeare
- Ghost in the Machine (theatrical reception and history)- Macabre, Terror, and the Uncanny
- Shakespeare and His "Doubles"
- The influence of Horace Walpole, de Sade, and other Gothicists


Send all proposals and inquiries to lucianghita78@gmail.com by June 30, 2018.



This panel will be part of the 2018 International Conference on Romanticism ("Romantic Assemblages") to be hosted by Clemson University and held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Greenville, South Carolina, between October 25-28, 2018.

http://pearce.caah.clemson.edu/international-conference-romanticism/icr-...

The International Conference on Romanticism was founded in 1991 and aims to pursue the study of Romanticism across linguistic, national, and political disciplines. For more information please visit http://icr.byu.edu. Conference attendees and participants must be current members of ICR. Please visit http://icr.byu.edu/membership to become a member or renew your membership. The International Conference on Romanticism was founded in 1991 and aims to pursue the study of Romanticism across linguistic, national, and political disciplines. For more information please visit http://icr.byu.edu. Conference attendees and participants must be current members of ICR. Please visit http://icr.byu.edu/membership to become a member or renew your membership

New Book Series: Anthem Studies in Gothic Literature

New Gothic Book Series
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/06/13/new-gothic-book-series

deadline for submissions:
December 31, 2019

full name / name of organization:
Anthem Press

contact email:
proposal@anthempress.com


NEW INTERNATIONAL GOTHIC BOOK SERIES.

The Anthem Studies in Gothic Literature incorporates a broad range of titles that undertake rigorous, multi-disciplinary and original scholarship in the domain of Gothic Studies and respond, where possible, to existing classroom/module needs. The series aims to foster innovative international scholarship that interrogates established ideas in this rapidly growing field, to broaden critical and theoretical discussion among scholars and students, and to enhance the nature and availability of existing scholarly resources.

Series Editor: Carol Margaret Davison, University of Windsor, Canada

Editorial Board Members:
Xavier Aldana Reyes – Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Katarzyna Ancuta – Chulalongkorn University, Thailand
Ken Gelder – University of Melbourne, Australia
George Haggerty – University of California, USA
Tabish Khair – Aarhus University, Denmark
Tanya Krzywinska – Falmouth University, UK
Vijay Mishra – Murdoch University, Australia
Marie Mulvey-Roberts – University of the West of England, UK
Andrew Hock Soon Ng – Monash University, Malaysia
Inés Ordiz – University of Stirling, UK
David Punter – University of Bristol, UK
Dale Townshend – Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock – Central Michigan University, USA
Maisha Wester – University of Indiana, USA
Gina Wisker – University of Brighton, UK

We welcome the submission of proposals for challenging and original works that meet the criteria of this series. We make prompt editorial decisions. Our titles are published simultaneously in print and eBook editions and are subject to peer review by recognized authorities in the field. We are accepting proposals for monographs, edited collections, scholarly introductions and sourcebooks, and course readers. Please contact proposal@anthempress.com for more information. There is no formal deadline.

CFP Our Monsters, Ourselves (Film & History Horror Area) (7/1/2018)

Wish I could attend, but this conflicts with MAPACA.


Film & History Horror Area CFP: Our Monsters, Ourselves
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2018/05/31/film-history-horror-area-cfp-our-monsters-ourselves

deadline for submissions: July 1, 2018

full name / name of organization: Film & History Conference

contact email: ashleysmith2017@u.northwestern.edu



CALL FOR PAPERS


Our Monsters, Ourselves

An area of multiple panels for the 2018 Film & History Conference:

Citizenship and Sociopathy in Film, Television, and New Media

November 7-12, 2018

Madison Concourse Hotel and Governor’s Club, Madison, WI (USA)

Full details at: www.filmandhistory.org/conference



DEADLINE for abstracts: July 1, 2018



It is often said that every era gets the monster it needs. Whether they maintain or challenge the status quo, guard or confront power, champion or eradicate difference, our cinematic monsters tell us more about our own lives than about the fantasy worlds they inhabit. Cultural, racial, and religious others often become those monsters, as anxieties about identity, loss, corruption, invasion, and rapid social change bubble over onto the screen. Likewise, we—and those like us—become the monsters as we cling to outmoded values and ways of being.



How do we use our cinematic monsters to craft the stories we tell about ourselves, and our ever-changing fears? In what ways do our monsters defend or interrogate our ideas of nation? With so much real-world horror interwoven in our daily lives, how might our monsters be a source of coming to terms with—and perhaps healing—the evils of the world?



Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:

• National horror (Don’t Breathe, The Witch, The Walling, The Purge)
• Monsters among us (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Cherry Tree Lane, Cloverfield)
• Power, politics, and horror (Society, The People Under the Stairs, The Howling)
• Making racism’s horrors explicit (Get Out, White Dog, Candyman)
• Buying into the horror: monstrous consumption (Fido, The Stuff, Dawn of the Dead, American Psycho, Street Trash)
• The horrors of aging (Drag Me to Hell, Rosemary’s Baby, The Visit, Rabid Grannies)
• Fear and fascination: our romance with sociopathy (My Friend Dahmer, The Killer Inside Me, Zodiac)
• Body horror: Fear of frailty (Malefique, Don’t Look Back, Tusk, Teeth)
• Stuck in a post-9/11 horror film: What’s next?

Abstracts that engage with genre horror films as social commentary are particularly welcome. Proposals for complete panels of three related presentations are also welcome, but should include an abstract and contact information (including email) for each presenter.



Please e-mail your 200-word proposal to the area chair:



Ashley R. Smith

Northwestern University

ashleysmith2017@u.northwestern.edu

Vampires and New England

I recently finished Blood Lines: Vampire Stories from New England (Nashville: Cumberland House, 1997), edited by Lawrence Schimel and Martin H. Greenberg as part of The American Vampire Series.

It is an interesting collection with works from a very disparate selection of writers. A number of the stories play with New England's own traditions of vampire folklore (or create new ones), but too many of the narratives seemed to use the setting only as a place to tell a vampire story rather than expand on what has come before or relish in the location. All are worth a read, but readers should be forewarned that they might not find what they are expecting here. These are, perhaps, best referred to as "Vampire Stories Set in New England," rather than to be thought of "Vampire Stories of New England".


Contents (from The Locus Index to Science Fiction: 1984-1998):

Blood Lines: Vampire Stories from New England ed. Lawrence Schimel & Martin H. Greenberg (Cumberland House 1-888952-50-4, Sep ’97 [Oct ’97], $12.95, 225pp, tp) Vampire anthology of ten stories, one original. Authors include Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Manly Wade Wellman, H.P. Lovecraft, and Esther Friesner. Introduction by Schimel.

• ix · Introduction · Lawrence Schimel · in
• · New Hampshire
• 1 · Investigating Jericho [Saint-Germain] · Chelsea Quinn Yarbro · na F&SF Apr ’92
• · Massachussetts
• 51 · The Brotherhood of Blood · Hugh B. Cave · nv Weird Tales May ’32
• · Connecticut
• 73 · Chastel [Lee Cobbett; Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant] · Manly Wade Wellman · nv The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series VII, ed. Gerald W. Page, DAW, 1979
• · Maine
• 99 · Doom of the House of Duryea · Earl Peirce, Jr. · ss Weird Tales Oct ’36
• · Vermont
• 115 · Moonlight in Vermont · Esther Friesner · nv Sisters in Fantasy 2, ed. Susan Shwartz & Martin H. Greenberg, Roc, 1996
• · Connecticut
• 139 · Secret Societies · Lawrence Schimel · ss *
• · Massachussetts
• 151 · Luella Miller · Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman · ss Everybody’s Magazine Dec ’02
• · New Hampshire
• 165 · When the Red Storm Comes · Sarah Smith · ss Shudder Again, ed. Michele Slung, Roc, 1993
• · Connecticut
• 179 · The Beautiful, the Damned · Kristine Kathryn Rusch · ss F&SF Feb ’95
• · Rhode Island
• 197 · The Shunned House · H. P. Lovecraft · nv Weird Tales Oct ’37

 

Review of Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones

The local news magazine The Smithfield Times recently included a review of the Lovecraft-inspired game Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones. The review by columnist Ron Scopolleti can be accessed at http://smithfieldtimesri.net/2018/03/game-preview-stygian-reign-of-the-old-ones/.

The official site for the game is http://www.stygianthegame.com/.

Gothic Nature: New Journal Launch/CFP

 A head's up from the IAFA news site:

NEW JOURNAL: Gothic Nature: New Directions in Eco-horror and the EcoGothic
https://www.fantastic-arts.org/2017/cfp-new-journal-gothic-nature-new-directions-in-eco-horror-and-the-ecogothic/

deadline for submissions:
April 15, 2018

full name / name of organization:
Gothic Nature: New Directions in Eco-horror and the EcoGothic

contact email:
gothicnaturejournal@gmail.com

We are seeking submissions for our new Gothic Nature journal, due out in 2018.

Further to the success of the November 2017 conference Gothic Nature: New Directions in Eco-horror and the EcoGothic, we will be producing a peer-reviewed journal devoted to the same themes.

The editorial board so far includes Dr Elizabeth Parker, Emily Bourke, Professor Simon C. Estok, Professor Andrew Smith, Professor Dawn Keetley, Professor Matthew Wynn Sivils, and Dr Stacy Alaimo. The inaugural issue will also feature an opening essay on eco-horror and the ecoGothic from Dr Tom J. Hillard.



‘Horror is becoming the environmental norm.’ —Sara L. Crosby

Gothic and horror fictions have long functioned as vivid reflections of contemporary cultural fears. Wood argues that horror is ‘the struggle for recognition of all that our society represses or oppresses’, and Newman puts forward the idea that it ‘actively eliminates and exorcises our fears by allowing them to be relegated to the imaginary realm of fiction’. Now, more than ever, the environment has become a locus of those fears for many people, and this conference seeks to investigate the wide range of Gothic- and horror-inflected texts that tackle the darker side of nature.

As we inch ever closer toward an anthropogenic ecological crisis, this type of fiction demands our attention. In 2009, Simon C. Estok highlighted the importance of ‘ecophobia’ in representations of nature, emphasising the need for ecocriticism to acknowledge the ‘irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world’ present in contemporary society. Tom J. Hillard responded to Estok’s call ‘to talk about how fear of the natural world is a definable and recognizable discourse’, suggesting that ‘we need look no further than the rich and varied vein of critical approaches used to investigate fear in literature.’ What happens, he asks, ‘when we bring the critical tools associated with Gothic fiction to bear on writing about nature?’

Gothic Nature seeks to address this question, interrogating the place of non-human nature in horror and the Gothic today, and showcasing the most exciting and innovative research currently being conducted in the field. We are especially interested for our inaugural issue in articles which address ecocritical theory and endeavour to define and discern the distinctions between ‘eco-horror’ and ‘ecoGothic’. We welcome academic articles from a variety of different subject backgrounds, as well as interdisciplinary work.

Subjects may include, but are by no means limited to:

1. Eco-horror and the ecoGothic: theory and distinctions

2. Ecocriticism and horror literature/ media

3. Ecocriticism and Gothic literature/ media

4. Gothic nature/ecophobia

5. Global eco-horror/global ecoGothic

6. Environmental activism and horror/ the Gothic

7. Human nature vs. nonhuman nature

8. Rural Gothic

9. Landscapes of fear

10. Legends of haunted nature/Gothic nature and mythology

11. Monsters in nature/natural spectres

12. Climate change and Gothic nature

13. Environmental apocalypse

14. Animal horror

15. Gothic nature in art through the ages

If you are interested in submitting a piece for our inaugural issue, please send an article of 6-8,000 words (Harvard referencing), along with a brief biography to gothicnaturejournal@gmail.com by April 15th, 2018. Please feel free to contact either Elizabeth Parker (parkereh@tcd.ie) or Emily Bourke (bourkee2@tcd.ie) with any informal queries you may have.

Please do get in touch, too, if you are interested in serving on the editorial board or contributing to the work on our website.

CFP Metaphor of the Monster Conference (7/1/2018; Mississipi State U 9/21-22/2018)

From the MEARCSTAPA List: 
 
The Metaphor of the Monster
Friday, September 21 - Saturday, September 22, 2018
Deadline for abstract submission: Tuesday, July 1st, 2018

Mermaids, giants, gorgons, harpies, dragons, cyclopes, hermaphrodites, cannibals, amazons, crackens, were-wolves, barbarians, savages, zombies, vampires, angels, demons… all of them inhabit and represent our deepest fears of attack and hybridization, but also our deepest desires of transgression. Frequently described in antithetical terms, monsters were frequently read in the past as holy inscriptions and proofs of the variety and beauty of the world created by God, or as threats to civilization and order. These opposing views on the monster show the radically different values that have been assigned to monsters since they started to permeate the human imagination in manuscripts, maps, and books.

Their hybridity challenges natural order and escapes taxonomy, thus problematizing our epistemological certainties. Inhabiting the margins of society, monsters also police social laws and show the consequences of transgressions on their own deformed bodies. Moreover, they are pervasive in nature and metamorphose into something else in different historical periods in order to embody the fears of that age, never to disappear from our imagination.

The 2018 Classical & Modern Languages and Literatures Symposium focuses on the concept of monstrosity as a cultural construct in literature, science, and art, and the ways in which the monster has been shaped, used, and interpreted as metaphor by scientists, writers, and artists in order to depict otherness, hybridization, threat to hegemonic order, and transgression.

We accept submissions in English that explore monstrosity from various disciplinary or interdisciplinary angles. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Representation in literature/art of different forms of monstrosity
• Gendered- or queer-focused studies of monstrosity
• The depiction of the Other as monster, and the depiction of marginalized communities
• Hybridity, miscegenation, and the problem of categorizing
• Cartography, margins of civilization
• Books as monsters
• Transgressive subjects as monsters
• The medicalization of the monster: monstrosity in medical discourse; monsters within: parasites, viruses, and illness
• Ecocritical approaches to the topic: humans as "parasites" and "predators"
• Dystopian depictions of the urban space as a monstrosity
• The monster as spectacle, freak shows
• Deconstructing monstrosity through inclusion
• Teaching monstrosity

To submit an Individual Proposal, fill an application through our website: https://www.cmll.msstate.edu/symposium/proposal/index.php
All proposals are due on July 1st, 2018.

• Paper title
• Name, institutional affiliation, position or title and contact information of the presenter including e-mail address and phone number.
• Abstract for an individual paper: up to 300 words for a single paper
• Brief (2-4 sentence) scholarly or professional biography of the presenter.
• Indication of any audiovisual needs or special accommodations.

To submit a Panel Proposal, each presenter must submit an Individual Proposal, and note the name of the Panel Chair on the appropriate box of the application.

Publication of Peer-Reviewed Selected Proceedings

After the conference, all presenters will be eligible to submit their papers for publication consideration.

Registration fees

Early registration by July 1st:

• $100.00 U.S. academics (faculty)
• $75.00 foreign academics and U.S. graduate students

Late registration fee (after July 1st):

• $125.00 U.S. academics (faculty)
• $100.00 foreign academics and U.S. graduate students

If you have any questions please contact Silvia Arroyo at SArroyo@cmll.msstate.edu.

CFP Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses Eight (expired) (Alabama, 6/21/-24/2018)

Sorry to have missed posting this much earlier: 

CFP: Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses Eight
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2017/05/10/cfp-slayage-conference-on-the-whedonverses-eight

deadline for submissions: 

January 8, 2018

full name / name of organization: 

Whedon Studies Association

contact email: 

slayage.conference@gmail.com

Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies, the Whedon Studies Association, and conveners Stacey Abbott and Cynthia Burkhead invite proposals for the eighth biennial Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses (SCW8). Devoted to Joss Whedon’s creative works, SCW8 will be held on the campus of the University of North Alabama, Florence, Alabama, June 21-24, 2018. The conference will be organized by Local Arrangements Chair Cynthia Burkhead, along with Slayage alumns Anissa Graham, Stephanie Graves, Jennifer Butler Keeton, and Brenna Wardell

We welcome proposals of 200-300 words (or an abstract of a completed paper) on any aspect of Whedon’s television and web texts (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Dollhouse,Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.); his films (Serenity, The Cabin in the Woods, Marvel’s The Avengers, Much Ado About Nothing, The Avengers: Age of Ultron, In Your Eyes); his comics (e.g. Fray; Astonishing X-Men; Runaways;Sugarshock!; Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Nine, and Ten; Angel: After the Fall; Angel & Faith Season Nine and Ten); or any element of the work of Whedon and his collaborators. Additionally, a proposal may address paratexts, fandoms, or Whedon’s extracurricular—political and activist—activities, such as his involvement with Equality Now or the 2016 US elections.  Since Florence, Alabama is one of the four cities making up the Shoals, and the area is rich in music history (the Muscle Shoals Sound, W.C. Handy) as well as Native American History, we look forward to papers addressing these subjects as they relate to the Whedonverses. Multidisciplinary approaches (literature, philosophy, political science, history, communications, film and television studies, women’s studies, religion, linguistics, music, cultural studies, art, and others) are all welcome. A proposal/abstract should demonstrate familiarity with already-published scholarship in the field, which includes dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and over a fifteen years of the blind peer-reviewed journal Slayage. Proposers may wish to consult Whedonology: An Academic Whedon Studies Bibliography, housed with Slayage at www.whedonstudies.tv.

An individual paper is strictly limited to a maximum reading time of 20 minutes, and we encourage, though do not require, self-organized panels of three presenters. Proposals for workshops, roundtables, or other types of sessions are also welcome. Submissions by graduate and undergraduate students are invited; undergraduates should provide the name, email, and phone number of a faculty member willing to consult with them (the faculty member does not need to attend). Proposals should be submitted online through the SCW8 webpage at http://www.whedonstudies.tv/scw8--2018.html   and will be reviewed by program chairs Stacey Abbott, Cynthia Burkhead, and Rhonda V. Wilcox. Submissions must be received by Monday, 8 January 2018. Decisions will be made by 5 March 2018. Questions regarding proposals can be directed to Rhonda V. Wilcox at the conference email address: slayage.conference@gmail.com.

Last updated May 11, 2017
This CFP has been viewed 1,098 times. 

CFP Haunted Heritage: Confronting a Culture of Specters Graduate Conference (2/15/2018; Rutgers 4/14/2018)

CALL FOR PAPERS: "Haunted Heritage: Confronting a Culture of Specters"
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2017/11/12/call-for-papers-haunted-heritage-confronting-a-culture-of-specters

deadline for submissions: 

February 15, 2018

 

full name / name of organization: 

Rutgers University, Camden / English Graduate Student Association 

 

contact email: 

egsa2018conference@gmail.com

 

 The EGSA is pleased to release the call for papers for our fifth annual graduate conference to be held on Saturday, April 14th 2018. This year's conference theme is "Haunted Heritage: Confronting a Culture of Specters."

Haunted Heritage: Confronting a Culture of Specters

Rutgers University, Camden Graduate Conference

We inhabit a haunted culture, surrounded by specters of every sort. From digital culture, the political mainstreaming of ideas once thought past, to the domination of popular culture by zombies, apocalypses, and nostalgia, our cultural moment is consumed by spectral presences.   Everywhere we turn, there is a haunting to comprehend and confront. Even language, our primary mode for understanding all of these various specters, is haunted.

Understanding our cultural hauntings, and our haunted selves, empowers us to begin the struggle of overcoming, living with, or even appreciating the specters surrounding us. This conference explores the past, present, and future of our cultural situation and the ways we learn to live with the knowledge of an other-worldly, forgotten, or translucent presence. We seek papers and presentations that explore presences felt but invisible, otherworldly, esoteric, uncanny, monstrous, and/or mysterious.

The English Graduate Student Association, is pleased to invite papers from graduate, and exceptional undergraduate, students within literary studies, literary theory or philosophy, digital studies, film studies, game studies, creative writing, literacy studies, linguistics, rhetoric & composition, and childhood studies for our fifth annual conference on April 14, 2018. 

Papers and presentations might include (but are not limited to):

• Histories, of any kind
• Identity 
• Materialisms
• Digital Content and Spaces
• Exile and Migration
• Colonialism
• Post/Trans-Humanism, Animal Studies
• Modernity and Post-Modernity
• Mysticisms, Religion 
• Hauntologies
• Affect
• Popular Culture

Keynote Speaker: TBD

Submission Deadline: Proposals should be submitted to egsa2018conference@gmail.com by February 15th, 2018. 

Submission Guidelines: Please submit a 350 word abstract proposing an 8-12 page paper. Abstracts should be added to the email submission as an attachment with no identifying information present. In the body of the email, please include your name, affiliated institution, area of study, and contact information. 

For questions, email egsa2018conference@gmail.com. 

Last updated January 22, 2018
This CFP has been viewed 2,701 times.