CFP 9th Biennial Slayage Conference (4/30/2022; online 6/21-24/2022)

CFP: 9th Biennial Slayage Conference

source: https://www.whedonstudies.tv/cfps.html

Call for Proposals: 2022 Slayage Virtual Conference, 21 - 24 July 2022
Submission Deadline: 30 April 2022

The newly renamed and refocused Association for the Study of Buffy+ invites proposals for the 9th Slayage Conference, which will convene virtually on 21-24 July, 2022.
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Association for the Study of Buffy+ Mission Statement

The mission of the Association is to promote the scholarship of Buffy+ Studies, focusing on inclusivity, intersectionality, and excellence. We define Buffy+ Studies as the scholarly exploration of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its related texts. This includes the work of the many contributors to the Buffyverse (i.e., the diegetic world of Buffy), transmedial or intertextual engagements with the Buffyverse, and texts influenced by or sharing thematic concerns or representational strategies with the Buffyverse writ large. We seek an inclusive critical engagement with these texts across multiple media, from film and television to comics and graphic novels, video games, paratexts, music, and more.

In a similar dedication to inclusivity, we seek to promote diversity, agency, and empowerment, both within the Association and in the larger academic community. Our goal is to give voice to the voiceless, center the marginalized, make the invisible visible, and lift up the formerly disenfranchised. As such, we work to support and amplify the voices of scholars of color, queer scholars, and disabled scholars, as well as the voices of students, early-career scholars, independent scholars, contingent faculty, and other marginalized groups. We also privilege accessibility and open access, both of which increase the reach and impact of Buffy+ scholarship.
_______________________________________________________________________________

In line with the ASB+ mission statement, we invite both newcomers to Buffy+ Studies as well as long-standing scholars in the field to propose presentations/ panels/ roundtables that engage critically not only with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its related texts, but also with the work of contributors and creators associated with that corpus as well as later texts that have been influenced and shaped by Buffyverse texts.

We welcome multidisciplinary approaches (literature, philosophy, political science, history, communications, film and television studies, women’s studies, gender and sexuality studies, social sciences, religious studies, linguistics, music, fandom studies, cultural studies, art, costuming, and others) as well as examinations of a variety of media in addition to film and TV such as paratexts, games, comics, novelizations, and more. A proposal/abstract should demonstrate familiarity with the extant scholarship in the field, which includes a plethora of books, articles, and over twenty years of Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy+, an open-access, blind peer-reviewed, MLA-indexed publication and a member of the Directory of Open Access Journals.

An individual paper is strictly limited to a maximum reading time of 20 minutes, and self-organized panels of three presenters are encouraged though not required. 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 is not required to attend). Since this is a virtual conference, presenters will need stable internet access in order to participate, as well as some facility with the Zoom platform with which the conference will be held. Because the ASB+ strives to center inclusivity, if there is an accommodation that would allow for or improve your experience with the conference, please let us know in your proposal so we can make every effort to address your needs.

To submit a proposal, please send your 250–300 word abstract, contact information and institutional affiliation (if any), and a brief bio to slayage.conference@gmail.com by 30 April 2022. Decisions may be expected by 15 May 2022. Questions about the conference may also be directed to the same email address.

Click HERE for a downloadable PDF of this call for papers.

CFP Hauntings (Halloween Symposium of the Australasian Horror Studies Network) (7/1/2022; online

Australasian Horror Studies Network

Call for Papers

source: https://australasianhorrorstudiesnetwork.wordpress.com/call-for-papers/ (more details on site)


2022

The CFP is now live for our second annual Halloween Symposium! The theme this year is ‘hauntings’ and presentations on all aspects of the theme are encouraged.

To be part of this event, please send a 200-250 word abstract and short bio to australasian.horror.network@gmail.com

CFP Three centuries of the literature of fear by women authors (Spec Issue of Revista Abusões; 7/17/2022)

Three centuries of the literature of fear by women authors

source: https://www.e-publicacoes.uerj.br/index.php/abusoes/index

Editors:
Ana Paula Araujo dos Santos (UERJ, Brazil); Ana Resende (UERJ, Brazil); Anna Faedrich (UFF, Brazil); Renata Philippov (UNIFESP, Brazil)

Submissions are due by July 17, 2022
Publicado: 2022-04-12





Three centuries of the literature of fear by women authors



In Literary Women (1976), Ellen Moers defines the term “female Gothic” as those works written by women that produce fear or fear-related sensations, such as horror, terror, and disgust, in the readers. Moers makes her point by drawing on Ann Radcliffe, the most successful writer of the eighteenth century, and the Gothic machinery she used in her novels to create the sublime effect, such as dark landscapes and ruined castles—suitable spaces for supernatural apparitions. According to Mary Shelley, in Frankenstein (1831), a successful narrative depends on the intensity of the physical sensations produced, such as freezing the blood and accelerating the heartbeat.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, only the “ghosts within us” caused chills and excited the nerves, as Virginia Woolf observes in Granite and Rainbow (1928), referring to the interest in a fiction that addressed more contemporary fears rather than those explored by early Gothic literature. The literature of fear has gained a new life with the fin-de-siècle and modernist female fiction of authors such as Kate Chopin, Júlia Lopes de Almeida, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, and Virginia Woolf herself.

Contributors may submit work that focuses on various aspects of women’s literature of fear from a transnational and transhistorical perspective, reflecting its global diversity. We invite contributions in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.




Revista Abusões
e-ISSN: 2525-4022

CFP Gothic Pedagogies: teaching, learning, and the literatures of terror Conference (4/30/2022; Birmingham, UK 7/14/2022)

Gothic Pedagogies: teaching, learning, and the literatures of terror

Abstracts due: 30th April 2022

14 July 2022

University of Birmingham

source: https://gothicpedagogy.wordpress.com/cfp/


Keynote speakers:
Professor Gina Wisker
Dr Ian Burrows


It has been a decade and a half since the last period of sustained work exploring the ways in which gothic literature is, and might be, taught in the classroom. This symposium seeks to renew this important critical discussion. It invites contributions that explore the richness, value, and complexities of pedagogy that situates the careful scrutiny of gothic literature at its heart.

Critical interest in the gothic remains high and the critical field is notable for the breadth of its scholarship; moreover, gothic literature courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level are enduringly popular choices for students, whether they are survey and introductory courses or bespoke Masters-level programmes, and the genre is a mainstay on UK secondary education curricula. But how might recent innovations in the critical field inform, and be informed by, innovations in the classroom? In order to explore this question more fully, we are motivated by several central concerns:

• How do we teach gothic literature in the classroom?
• What do gothic texts themselves have to say about learning and pedagogy?
• How do we negotiate a genre that thrives on forms of affect – what Fred Botting calls the genre’s ‘negative aesthetics’ – that are, by and large, difficult to recapture in classroom environments, and difficult to evaluate cogently?

The gothic undoubtedly wants us to experience its thrills and chills. But it insists frequently on its own unspeakability and seems to prioritise individual susceptibility to its terrorising affect in ways that would suggest a shared experience of the gothic is an extremely difficult thing to recover. In what ways can something that wants quite deliberately to bypass rational thought be better understood via supposedly detached or objective small group discussions in secondary and higher education? How do we bring to light that which is secret and hidden, that which thrives only when briefly glimpsed?

Relatedly, there are questions to be asked here about responsible ways of teaching this literature, grappling as it does with subject matter that may be hoping to deliberately discomfort, shock, or offend its readers. We are interested, also, in what happens when the gothic does not succeed, and how far the gothic is in this respect indicative of broader issues when teaching genre literature. The classroom and lecture theatre might readily make space for the pleasures of reading lurid gothic texts. But what if the gothic text does not scare us (anymore)? If the gothic seeks above all to be experiential, hoping to stimulate certain sensations in its readers, in what ways do we make room in the classroom for our failure to experience something, for those moments when we did not “get it”?

We invite proposals for 15–20 minute papers and joint/collaborative presentations, 5 minute lightning talks, poster presentations, or any other relevant format that reflects on the questions above or any other issues pertaining to humanities pedagogy and the various literatures of terror and horror.

Please send an abstract of 200–300 words and a brief biography (100–150 words) to gothicpedagogies@gmail.com by 30th April 2022. Please also send any queries our way: we’d be glad to hear them.

We strongly encourage submissions from a range of teachers and students of the gothic, whether working or studying in secondary, further, higher or any other form of education.

CFP Folk Horror (Spec Issue of Horror Studies 10/3/2022)

FOLK HORROR – SPECIAL ISSUE OF HORROR STUDIES, CFP

POSTED ON JANUARY 17, 2022

source: https://www.horrorhomeroom.com/folk-horror-special-issue-of-horror-studies-cfp/

Horror Studies – Proposed special issue on Folk Horror

Guest editors, Dr. Dawn Keetley, Professor of English and Film, Lehigh University, dek7@lehigh.edu, and Dr. Jeffrey A. Tolbert, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Folklore, Pennsylvania State University – Harrisburg, jat639@psu.edu

This special issue attempts to systematize and formalize the study of folk horror, a subgenre whose meteoric rise (or return?) to popularity in the past ten years or so raises critical questions relating to rurality, “traditional” cultures, nationalism, and place, among others. Folk horror posits a folk as the source of horror, and a body of related folklore as constituting a simultaneously picturesque and horrifying aesthetic/symbolic backdrop to its portrayals of atavistic danger and pre- or anti-modern “heathenism.” Sharing with the increasingly broad cross-media genre of the gothic an obsession with landscape, folk horror tends to abandon dark corridors and windswept mountain fastnesses in favor of agrarian and/or pastoral settings (though even this distinction is often elided in practice, with the genres often becoming entangled). In the end, though, one distinguishing trait is that the peasant folk of the countryside, imagined as preserving earlier ways of life, become the source of fear—or at least provide the context for its encroachment into otherwise “normal” modern life.



Folklorists and scholars of literature, film, and television have taken notice of folk horror, calling out the genre’s resonances with the gothic and noting its reliance on nineteenth-century models of folk cultures. While definitions of folk horror are emerging in the scholarly literature, there is much room for broad and diverse theories of folk horror, including those that position the genre in conversations about nationalism, globalism, tribalism, populism, class and economics, race, and the Anthropocene, as well as the active participation of fan communities. There has, moreover, been a distinct propensity to focus on British texts as virtually constitutive of the genre. Thus the “unholy trinity” of films—The Blood on Satan’s Claw, Witchfinder General, and The Wicker Man—are felt to be uniquely British folk horror, even as they share certain aesthetic concerns and elements of setting and grounding in supposed traditionality with American folk horror films such as The Witch and Midsommar. There is much work to be done, then, not only on national folk horrors beyond Britain but also on transnationality and folk horror.

This issue aims to move beyond the description and cataloging of genre works to a more sustained theoretical engagement with the deep implications of a “horror” of the “folk.” In doing so, contributions will seek to address core questions:

• What counts as folk horror and why?
• Why is folk culture imagined as frightening?
• What are the meanings of the ways in which rural people and rural settings are positioned at the center of this type of horror?
• What is the role of folklore and folkloristics in folk horror?
• What are the political meanings of folk horror?
• What are the effects of replicating nineteenth-century understandings of cultural evolution and center-periphery relationships in a twenty-first century already heavily marked by the reemergence of virulent, destructive nationalism?
• Does folk horror’s focus on landscape speak to politics concerning the environment, the climate, and the Anthropocene?
• Why the resurgence of folk horror criticism and cultural productions now? Why were the late 1960s and 1970s so critical in the folk horror tradition? What periodizations emerge for folk horror beyond Britain?
• How do we understand fans of folk horror as they actively and collaboratively construct meanings of folk horror works, tying key films, books, and other media to an ineffable but deeply felt sense of “folkness” apparently felt to reside at the heart of all cultures?

There are many more potential questions, and we are interested in any and all approaches. But, in general, we seek essays that seek to offer a broad theoretical approach to genre from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives (as well as interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches) and from diverse parts of the globe.

We are more than happy to field questions and inquiries at any time, so feel free to email us: Dawn Keetley at dek7@lehigh.edu and Jeff Tolbert at jat639@psu.edu.

Below is the tentative schedule:

Essays of 6-7,000 words due: Monday October 3, 2022

Decisions / requests for revision by Monday December 19, 2022

Revisions due by Monday April 24, 2023

Manuscript into press by late June / early July 2023

Published summer 2023

CFP Recycling the Gothic: Adaptations in the Romantic-Era Marketplace (Spec Issue of Literature 8/5/2022)

My thanks to Open Grave, Open Minds for the head's up on this and a number of posts today.

Special Issue "Recycling the Gothic: Adaptations in the Romantic-Era Marketplace"

main site: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/literature/special_issues/gothic_literature

Print Special Issue Flyer
Special Issue Editors
Special Issue Information
Keywords
Published Papers

A special issue of Literature (ISSN 2410-9789).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 5 August 2022.

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Franz Potter E-Mail Website SciProfiles
Guest Editor

Arts and Humanities Department, College of Letters and Sciences, National University, San Diego, CA 92123, USA
Interests: Gothic literature; nineteenth-century Gothic chapbooks; trade Gothic; Gothic publishing industry; the author Sarah Wilkinson

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We invite submissions for a Special Issue of Literature focusing on adaptations of Gothic texts in the Romantic-era marketplace. From its inception, the Gothic tradition has been built upon a framework of familiar set themes, motifs and characterizations, such as the use of geographically and temporally displaced settings, an emphasis on terror and horror, the exploitation of the supernatural and, significantly, techniques of literary suspense. This framework was then recycled, imitated, redacted, adapted, manipulated and restructured into new and interesting novels, chapbooks, short stories and serials. As Frederick Frank in The First Gothics observed, ‘the Gothic in all its stages and mutations is a highly parasitic form; Gothics shamelessly feed on the literary remains of previous Gothic, theft of material is a universal law of composition, and the line between crafty imitation and over plagiarism is often so weak that it breaks down entirely…’ (p. xii).

This Special Issue seeks to examine adaptations of the Gothic in all forms, from the novel to the short story, chapbooks and serialized publications. It will explore the recycling of essential elements of the Gothic as a sign of activity and innovation rather than monotony and stagnation. The recycling of the Gothic, whether specific motifs and characterizations or stories themselves, reveals continual interest and engagement between the author and the reader. This distinction is important not only because it allows recycling to be seen as crucial to the growth and sustainability of the Gothic, but also because it allows the Gothic tradition to continue to be viewed in the larger context of evolving discourses.

We are interested in papers that focus on topics such as, but not limited to:

• Adaptation vs. imitation.
• The recycling of Gothic motifs and tropes.
• Chapbook adaptions of Gothic novels.
• Re-examination of authors such as Eliza Parsons, Mary Meeke, Francis Lathom, Sarah Wilkinson and Charlotte Dacre.
• Formulaic Gothic.
• Imitations of Radcliffe and Lewis.
• The critical divide between the Gothic canon and the trade Gothic.
• Gothic short stories.
• Gothic adaptations of dramas.
• Gothic chapbooks to novels.
• The Gothic in periodicals such as Marvellous Magazine or Tell-Tale Magazine.
• Gothic dramas.
• Publishers of Gothic novels and chapbooks, including Ann Lemoine and Thomas Tegg.
• Gothic book trade.
• Female authorship.

Prof. Dr. Franz Potter
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Literature is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

Gothic
adaptations
chapbooks
abridgements
book trade
publishers
terror
female authorship
Ann Radcliffe
Matthew Lewis

Published Papers

This special issue is now open for submission.

Updated CFP Vampire Academic Conference (3/20/2022; 6/15-17/2022)

I came across a more recent CFP for this event. According to the event website, the conference has since been moved to being a fully online program. 

CFP: THE 6TH VAMPIRE ACADEMIC CONFERENCE “VAMPIRES THROUGH THE AGES”. JUNE 15-17, 2022 @ CARDIFF, WALES (UK). DEADLINE: MARCH 20, 2022

source: https://cstonline.net/cfp-the-6th-vampire-academic-conference-vampires-through-the-ages-june-15-17-2022-cardiff-wales-uk-deadline-march-20-2022/


Mar 17, 2022 


Please note there is the option to present in person or virtually.

The International Vampire Film and Arts Festival and University of South Wales present The 6th Vampire Academic Conference ‘Vampires Through the Ages’ 15th-17th June 2022, Insole Court Mansion, Cardiff, Wales.

The University of South Wales, in association with the IVFAF, calls for papers by scholars interested in presenting their researched essays on vampire literature, film, folklore, theatre, games, graphic novels, lifestyle, fashion, music and wider art in the sixth annual Vampire Academic Conference (VAC) that runs alongside the festival in Cardiff. This Year’s main themes:

Nosferatu 100 years later;

Vampires in Media;

Symphony of Horror: Vampires, Setting, and Folklore


POSSIBLE TOPICS MAY INCLUDE:

• Ghetto or gentrified gore: the vampire and urban space
• (Dis)ability and the monstrous
• Fans’ fangs: Vampire fandom, subcultures, and participatory practices
• Liminal beings: the vampire and teen/young adult media
• Beyond Transylvania: Global and transnational vampires
• Casting shadows: Vampire, acting, and stardom
• Draculaughs: The vampire as comedy monster
• From the coffin to the digital tomb: twenty-first century adaptation of the vampire story
• Race and Vampires
• Season’s greetings: the vampire and cultural festivals
• In the past: Folklore and Vampires
• In the Now: The History of the Modern Vampire
• Feminism and Vampires
• Queer Theory in Vampires
• Don’t go Into the Woods: Eco-Criticism and Vampires

However, the VAC is not limited to these themes. The two overriding criteria for papers delivered at the conference are:

They must be about vampires &

They must be interesting

This major interdisciplinary international conference aims to examine and expand debates around vampires in all their many aspects. We therefore invite researchers from a range of academic backgrounds to re/consider vampires as a phenomenon that reaches across multiple sites of production and consumption, from literature and film to theatre and games to music and fashion and beyond. What accounts for this Gothic character’s undying popular appeal, even in today’s postmodern, digital, commercialized world? How does vampirism circulate within and comment upon mass culture?

We invite papers in genre theory & history, popular fiction, media culture, television theory, adaptation, journalism, comic studies, the transformative arts and other areas of film, literary and cultural studies to explore and expand the significance of the vampire as a figure of fascination across popular culture in shifting historic and social contexts.

We are delighted to announce that our keynote speakers for the event are Professor Stacey Abbott (University of Roehampton) and Kim Newman.

We welcome proposals for conference papers of 20 minutes but also for pre-formed panels (of 3×20-minute papers), roundtable discussions, or formats that allow for the presentation of praxis (installations, lecture performances, for instance). We also want to support undergraduate scholarship: any current UG students interested in attending the VAC would be eligible for special, 10–15-minute presentation panels to facilitate their participation in an international conference at the undergraduate level.

Please send a 300-500-word abstract, along with a short biography and indication of the format of your proposed presentation to: jelinej@scf.edu by Sunday March 20th, 2022. If you are looking for a virtual choice, please state this in your proposal. If submitting a full panel proposal, the moderator should send a 50-word summary statement outlining the panel’s title and central topic, along with all three proposals. Accepted submitters must confirm their commitment to attend and present a finished written paper in a talk lasting approximately 20 minutes at the conference in Cardiff. It must be their own original work.

Presenters must register by purchasing a Delegate ticket. For more information on conference registration and location, visit www.ivfaf.com

The VAC runs in tandem with the Vampire Creative Congress, which focuses on the creative industries and featuring talks about filmmaking, writing, games etc. The wider festival includes literature and film strands and includes guest talks. There’s also a programme of theatre performances and parties, including the spectacular Vampire Ball. For more details, go to www.ivfaf.com.

EXTENDED Ghostbusters – A Companion (7/1/2022)

EXTENDED

Ghostbusters – A Companion

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2021/11/17/ghostbusters-%E2%80%93-a-companion

deadline for submissions:
July 1, 2022

full name / name of organization:
Simon Bacon, series editor; Cathleen Allyn Conway, collection editor; Peter Lang, Oxford

contact email:
conwaycat@gmail.com



Call for Papers: Ghostbusters – A Companion

The release of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the fourth installment coming almost 40 years after the original Ghostbusters film, prompts inquiry into this beloved and oftentimes fraught film franchise. While the original and (and its sequel) was a paean to academics becoming the working class heroes who act as the ghost janitors of New York City, the third and fourth films, reimagined with new casts, have become a battleground for who ‘owns’ nostalgia, and have acted as meta-commentaries on the question. As Charles Bramesco wrote in his Guardian review of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, “Perhaps it’s appropriate and telling that the 2021 incarnation of an 80s artifact would be imbued with all the issues most endemic to the current studio release. Here, we can find a damning summary of modern Hollywood’s default mode – a nostalgia object, drained of personality and fitted into a dully palatable mold, custom-made for a fandom that worships everything and respects nothing.”

We are asking for essays of 2,500 words that frame a theoretical aspect of the cultural role Ghostbusters plays by centering on one text, whether literary or cinematic, to use as a lens to look at the wider topic. The essays themselves should be accessible but address the big ideas, placing Ghostbusters into cultural and historical context.

We are specifically interested in the intersections of gender, race, class, disability and LGBT+ concerns with the franchise, its tie-ins and extended universe. We are particularly interested in hearing from scholars from marginalised groups. We prioritise Own Voices and encourage you to self-identify in your bio for this purpose.

The proposed Companion will be divided into several sections. The topics in each section may include but are not limited to the following, with understanding there is room for crossover:

Films

• Ghostbusters (1984)
• Ghostbusters 2 (1989)
• Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (2016)
• Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)
• Plus:
• All soundtracks, trailers, deleted scenes, directors’ commentaries, and tie-in shorts related to the theatrical and home video release of all four films.

Extended Universe

• Animated series
• Comics and graphic novel adaptations and new series
• Multimedia tie-ins
• Gaming: board games, video games, handhelds, card games, role playing
• Fan fiction: film, art, music

Fandom

• Live meetups and regional fan groups
• Cosplay, costume and prop makers
• Model builders and automobile restoration enthusiasts
• Small business tie-ins
• Ghost hunters

Merchandising/licensing

• Food tie-ins and merchandising
• Vintage toy collectors
• Licensing
• Pin Trading
• Ghostbusters cameos/callbacks/references in other media

Please send 300 word abstracts and a 50-word bio to editor Cathleen Allyn Conway (conwaycat@gmail.com) by 1 July 2022 for consideration in the collection, which will be part of the Peter Lang, Oxford Genre, Literature and Film Companion Series.




Last updated April 1, 2022

EXTENDED Literary Monsters (5/31/2022; SAMLA Jacksonville, FL 11/11-13/2022)

Literary Monsters

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/03/15/literary-monsters

deadline for submissions:
May 31, 2022

full name / name of organization:
Speculative Fiction Association

contact email:
tracie.provost@mga.edu



In today's culture, it's almost impossible to avoid "monsters." Straight from mythology and legend, these fantastic creatures traipse across our television screens and the pages of our books. Over centuries and across cultures, the inhuman have represented numerous cultural fears and, in more recent times, desires. They are Other. They are Us. This panel will explore monsters--whether they be mythological, extraterrestrial, or man-made--that populate fiction and film, delving into the cultural, psychological and/or theoretical implications.



Please submit a 250-300 word abstract, a brief bio, and any A/V needs by May 31, 2022 to Tracie Provost, Middle Georgia State University, at tracie.provost@mga.edu.

SAMLA’s 94th annual conference, Change, will be held at the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville Riverfront Hotel in Jacksonville, FL this year from November 11-13. Those accepted must be members of SAMLA to present.


categories
fan studies and fandom
film and television
gender studies and sexuality
interdisciplinary
popular culture

Last updated March 30, 2022

CFP Classic Horror (Spec Issue Horror Homeroom; 4/25/2022)

Classic Horror

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/04/01/classic-horror

deadline for submissions:
April 25, 2022

full name / name of organization:
Horror Homeroom

contact email:
dek7@lehigh.edu



CLASSIC HORROR - abstracts due April 25, 2022

2022 is the 90th anniversary of the numerous amazing classic horror films that were released in 1932, among them Freaks, Island of Lost Souls, The Most Dangerous Game, The Old Dark House, The Mummy, and White Zombie. To mark this anniversary, we are soliciting abstracts for a special 'journal' issue of the website Horror Homeroom on classic horror. This special issue, which will come out in 2022, will certainly honor those films that have their anniversary this year, but we also want to broaden what classic horror looks like and are interested in essays that explore other national cinemas and lesser-known films.

So, what is classic horror? We’re suggesting that it’s any film released prior to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film, Psycho--the film that saw the birth of ‘modern’ horror (although we're interested in abstracts that contest those designations!)

Emerging and advanced scholars, popular writers, and fans are invited to submit abstracts on any aspect of the subgenre. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Body horror and 1930s mad scientists
• Comedy-horror franchises
• Intersectional readings of Universal monsters
• Undead iconography and the Gothic
• Spencer Williams’ Son of Ingagi and early Black horror
• Horror film as historical document
• Otherness and paranoia
• Film aesthetics
• Influence of the ‘Code’ on US horror
• Pre-Hollywood horror
• Classic horror adaptations of literary works
• Contemporary cinematic adaptations of classic horror (e.g., Universal’s new monster films)
• Disability and classic horror
• Race, ethnicity, and nationalism in early horror

Please submit abstracts of no more than 500 words and a brief bio to Dawn Keetley and Elizabeth Erwin at horrorhomeroom@gmail.com and dek7@lehigh.edu by April 25, 2022. Articles will be limited to 2,500 words and should be written for a general audience. Completed essays will be due June 17, 2022. We welcome all questions and inquiries!




Last updated April 7, 2022

EXTENDED Carmilla’s Sisters – Female Vampires in Literature, Film and Popular Culture (4/15/2022; Bordeaux, France/online 10/7-8/2022)

EXTENDED DEADLINE 

Carmilla’s Sisters – Female Vampires in Literature, Film and Popular Culture

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2021/12/20/carmilla%E2%80%99s-sisters-%E2%80%93-female-vampires-in-literature-film-and-popular-culture

deadline for submissions:
April 15, 2022

full name / name of organization:
Université Bordeaux Montaigne

contact email:
nicolas.labarre@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr



International conference, to be held in Bordeaux, France, on October 7-8, 2022

While the format is not set in stone, we will strongly consider holding online panels.



Nearly thirty years after the publication of Nina Auerbach’s seminal study Our Vampires, Ourselves, we felt the 150th anniversary of J. S. Le Fanu’s Carmilla provided an opportunity to revisit vampire fictions centred on female figures – as yet a largely unchartered territory. Despite a few pages devoted to Carmilla and queer vampires – in The Vampire Book by Gordon J. Melton, 1999, Le miroir obscur. Histoire du cinéma des vampires, by Stéphane du Mesnildot, 2013, or the catalogue of the 2019 exhibition at the Cinémathèque Française –, the centrality of Dracula and male vampires still remains prevalent in critical literature.

Yet, contrary to a received notion, female vampires abound in literature, film, television series, comics, as an unsettling presence that undermines the majestic supremacy of the vampire count, thus perhaps testifying to the latter’s “obsolescence” (to borrow Robin Wood’s formula).

With its multiple film adaptations, Le Fanu’s text still challenges readers in many ways, contemporary readers being sensitive to LGBTQI+ issues and to the aftermath of the #MeToo wave. The historical Countess Báthory also haunts literary and filmic memories, and calls for still other questions, as a power figure that already inspired Bram Stoker himself in Dracula’s Guest, the first chapter of Dracula, later suppressed by the author.

The vampire-woman is omnipresent in art cinema (Les lèvres rouges, Harry Kümel, 1971; Leonor, Juan Luis Bunuel, 1975), blockbusters (the Underworld franchise), European classics (Hammer films, Roger Vadim), Hollywood classics (Near Dark, Kathryn Bigelow, 1987). In a recent study on gender in vampire films, Claude-Georges Guilbert – commenting on the prevalence of women writers in vampire literature – claimed that the female vampire embodies the « future » of the genre. Will participants in this conference prove him right?

The organizing committee will welcome all propositions about female vampires in literature, cinema, comics, with particular attention to those addressing the following issues:

¤ The female vampire figure, between exploitation and empowerment. 

From Carmilla onwards, female vampires have fulfilled apparently conflicting functions. They are often young, eroticised vampires, and they announce all manner of transgression. In the same movement, they are often at the centre of narratives, they initiate action and are autonomous and admired characters, worshiped by devoted fans – one can think of Vampirella in Warren comics or Lady Dimitrescu in the Resident Evil Village video game. How do authors and publics negotiate this tension? Does this amount to reading the texts against the grain or is this reading actually inscribed in the cultural objects themselves?

¤ Isolated figure or serial type. 

Dracurella and the several other daughters of Dracula suggest that many female can be seen in terms of variants of a dominant male type – as an instance of the minimal differentiation that defines the culture industries. Do serial types actually predominate over isolated figures? Is there a way to measure this? Can the female vampire exist independently from this logic of derivation?

¤ The female vampire and gender stability. 

Even more so than her male counterpart, the female vampire is characterised by sexual ambiguity. Oversexualised, often hyperfeminised, she is nevertheless also a creature who seduces, penetrates, rarely without violence. The lesbian romance of Carmilla – but also the ambiguous fascination exerted by the historical figure of Countess Élisabeth Báthory – once more offers a prototype of this subversion of gendered roles. How does this uncertainty manifest itself in the texts or in their reception? Is the female vampire necessarily queer?

¤ Global figure v. local figures. 

Along the 20th century, the English-speaking cultural industries have largely colonised the visual imaginations of fantasy and horror. How does the female vampire feature in this tension between a globalised culture and local variations with their specific traditions? What are the histories and media specificities? Should we view the female vampire as a figure of the glocal?

¤ The Carmilla hypothesis. 

Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella haunts every question addressed in this call for papers. We will then welcome propositions examining the specific place of Carmilla in the emergence of the figure of the female vampire, through the circulation of the original text but also through the elaboration of an “adaptation network” (Kate Newell). Could we map out the apparitions of the female vampire in popular culture? How would Carmilla feature in that space?

¤ The figural approach: imagining the female vampire. 

Female vampires and related figures (harpies, sirens, sphinges, animal-women) : genesis and transformations of such figures in the pictorial tradition since the XIXth century (Munch, Khnopff, Mossa, Philip Burne-Jones), circulation of forms. Variants and typologies in literature from John Keats (Lamia) and Rudyard Kipling (“A Fool There Was”) to Tanith Lee (Sabella or the Blood Stone, 1980), Anne Rice (Pandora, 1998) and Octavia E. Butler (Fledgling, 2005) – through Paul Féval (La Vampire, 1856).

Communication proposals (about 200 words, along with a brief biographical note) should be sent to Jean-François Baillon (Jean-Francois.Baillon@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr) and Nicolas Labarre (nicolas.labarre@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr) by March 31, 2022.



Scientific committee:

Mélanie Boissonneau (Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle) – Marjolaine Boutet (Université de Picardie Jules Verne) – David Roche (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3) –– Yann Calvet (Université de Caen) – Matt Jones (De Montfort University, UK) –– Hélène Frazik (Université de Caen) – Jean-François Baillon (Université Bordeaux Montaigne) – Nicolas Labarre (Université Bordeaux Montaigne) - Dr Matt Melia (Kingston University London, UK)




Last updated April 5, 2022

CFP Performing Tutankhamun: One Hundred Years of Retellings (4/25/2022; Birmingham, UK/online 7/1/2022)

Of interest: 

Performing Tutankhamun: One Hundred Years of Retellings

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/03/21/performing-tutankhamun-one-hundred-years-of-retellings

deadline for submissions:
April 25, 2022

full name / name of organization:
Dr Eleanor Dobson and Dr Leire Olabarria (University of Birmingham)

contact email:
e.c.dobson@bham.ac.uk



The year 2022 marks the centenary of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, unearthed by a team of Egyptian excavators led by Howard Carter and financed by the fifth Earl of Carnarvon. In the hundred years that followed, in what ways have media and performance contributed to the retelling and reshaping of this historic moment and the discovery’s cultural aftermath? Whose voices have been amplified, and whose marginalised? Where has historical accuracy given way to creative license? What audiences have been catered to, and what does this tell us about the ways in which Egyptology is ‘consumed’?

This event will showcase the work of researchers working on these issues in short papers, after which will follow a roundtable of invited speakers: Dr Elizabeth Frood, Dr Fatma Keshk, Dr Daniela Rosenow, and Prof. Richard Bruce Parkinson. The day will conclude with an original performance based on the tomb discovery informed by archival sources held at the Griffith Institute.

The organisers invite proposals for 15-minute papers that are interested in examining ‘retellings’ of the tomb’s discovery, and are especially keen to hear from researchers who would like to present on the story of the tomb discovery as (re)told for Egyptian and non-Anglophone audiences.

Please send abstracts to L.Olabarria@bham.ac.uk and E.C.Dobson@bham.ac.uk by 25 April 2022. We have planned for the event to be accessible to in-person and online attendees, and it would be useful if you could indicate if possible whether you have a preference in terms of presenting in Birmingham or remotely when submitting your abstract. More information is available on the conference website: https://performingtutankhamun.wordpress.com/performing-tutankhamun/. We look forward to hearing from you!



Last updated March 23, 2022

CFP Recovering the Vampire Conference (6/17/2022; UK/online 11/4-5/2022)

Recovering the Vampire

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/03/16/recovering-the-vampire

deadline for submissions:
June 17, 2022

full name / name of organization:
Edge Hill University

contact email:
madeline.potter@york.ac.uk




Speakers

Professor Catherine Spooner (Lancaster University)

Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes (Manchester Metropolitan University)

and featuring a Q&A and dramatic reading by Dacre Stoker

How can vampires help us heal?

In the 125th anniversary year of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this interdisciplinary project examines the continuing history of the vampire from the 19th century to the present and explores how the vampire can function as a cultural figure of recovery, community, and regeneration.

The cultural history of the vampire has been conventionally one of degeneration, illness, contagion, and variously embodied metaphors of anxiety. This event moves critical discourse from degeneration to regeneration, asking how the vampire functions as a metaphor for recovery (whether physical, emotional, or economic), community (fandoms, gamers, ‘goth culture’), identification and self-expression (racial identities, spirituality and religion, neurodivergence/-diversity, disability, gender and sexuality).

We welcome proposals for 15-20-minute papers, and panels. We also welcome practical or industry approaches to reinterpreting the vampire through collaborative, creative, or playful research, as well as contributions to a creative industries panel by publishers, authors, artists, heritage professionals and film-makers who work on the figure of the vampire. Topics can include but are not limited to:

• Healing, trauma, recovery
• Gothic tourism / regeneration / international relations / economic growth
• Vampires and the creative economy
• Vampires and community: gaming, goth culture, fashion
• Medical humanities and the vampire
• Addiction recovery, nutrition, attitudes to feeding
• Reclaiming the vampire and neurodivergence/-diversity
• Selfhood, belonging, and ‘the outsider’
• Spiritual growth and religious experience
• Race and inclusivity / representation
• Child vampires / vampires for children
• Pedagogy and the vampire
• Laughter, comedy and Catherine Spooner’s ‘Happy Gothic’
• Adaptation

Thanks to the generosity of BAVS, BARS and Edge Hill University, we are delighted to be able to offer several PGR/ECR fee-waived bursary places for this event. If you would like to be considered, please indicate on your abstract and include a short statement (100 words max) about how the conference relates to your research.

Please send 300-word abstracts or panel proposals to Dr Madeline Potter (madeline.potter@york.ac.uk) and Dr Laura Eastlake (Laura.Eastlake@edgehill.ac.uk)

This conference will be fully accessible, with a primarily online component. Please check our website https://recoveringthevampire.wordpress.com and follow us on Twitter @VampireRecovery for updates on conference format and further info.

Deadline: 17 June 2022

Conference dates: 4-5 November 2022




Last updated March 18, 2022

First Notice: NEPCA 2022 Virtual Conference CFP (8/1/2022; remote 10/20-22/2022)

NEPCA 2022 Virtual Conference CFP

Source: http://nepca.blog/2022/04/06/nepca-2022-virtual-conference-cfp/


The 2022 Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will host its annual conference this fall as another virtual conference from Thursday, October 20-Saturday, October 22 in a similar structure to last year (Thursday evening, Friday late afternoon, Saturday morning).

We all want to be back together again face-to-face but without a campus to host us, we decided virtual would be ideal for access and affordability. We are looking forward to another engaging and rewarding conference for new and seasoned members alike. We are seeking proposals for panels and presentations for this year’s conference.

NEPCA prides itself on holding conferences that emphasize sharing ideas in a non-competitive and supportive environment. We welcome proposals from graduate students, junior faculty, and senior scholars. NEPCA conferences offer intimate and nurturing sessions in which new ideas and works-in-progress can be aired, as well as completed projects.

We have several dozen areas for you to submit your proposal to, so be sure to check out our Conference Areas to determine the best place for your proposal. If you have questions about a particular area, reach out and ask the appropriate Area Chair.

The call will be open until August 1, 2022. You can submit your proposal at this link, which will ask the following questions about your proposal:

• Proposal Type (Single Presentation or Panel)
• Subject Area
• Working Title
• Academic Affiliation (if any)
• Abstract (250 words)
• Short bio (50-200 words)

If you have any questions about the conference, please reach out to Lance Eaton, the Executive Secretary (northeastpopculture@gmail.com). 

Out Now: Lovecraftian Proceedings No. 4

Lovecraftian Proceedings No. 4 

Edited by Dennis P. Quinn and Elena Tchougounova-Paulson 

Purchase from Hippocampus Press: https://www.hippocampuspress.com/journals/lovecraftian-proceedings/lovecraftian-proceedings-no.-4

ISBN 9781614983613


February 2022

304 pp 

$20.00

Cover art by Pete Von Sholly




This fourth volume of selected papers from the Dr. Henry M. Armitage Memorial Scholarship Symposium, delivered at NecronomiCon Providence 2019, contains an array of groundbreaking articles on Lovecraft’s life, work, and thought. Papers by Kyle Gamache and Thomas Schwaiger, focus on Lovecraft’s relations with his brilliant young friend R. H. Barlow, whose story “The Night Ocean” is one of the finest weird tales of its era. Elena Tchougounova-Paulson and Christian Roy address connections between Lovecraft’s work and that of the philosophers Alexander Blok and Georges Bataille.

Benjamin Davis studies contemporary views of Tibet in reference to Lovecraft’s citation of that obscure realm. Heather Poirier traces the relationship of Lovecraft’s work with the Southern literature of his time, while Jeremiah Dylan Cook probes the influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herbert S. Gorman on “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Other papers discuss the Necronomicon, such seminal tales as “The Outsider,” “Pickman’s Model,” “The Colour out of Space,” and At the Mountains of Madness, and other vital topics. In all, the essays in this volume constitute cutting-edge scholarship on one of the most provocative authors of his time.



TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Niels-Viggo S. Hobbs



Introduction: Haunting Phantasms—A Bookworm Edition

Elena Tchougounova-Paulson and Dennis P. Quinn



Zahhak Beside Cthulhu: Philosophizing with Monsters in Persian Mythology and American Horror

Robert Landau Ames



The Influence of The Great Game on the Writings of H. P. Lovecraft: The Opening of Tibet and the Creation of Leng

Benjamin Davis



The Necronomicon Yalensis and Lovecraft in Connecticut

Edward Guimont



Lovecraft’s Archive: Materiality and Readership in Lovecraft’s Fiction

Cole Donovan



The Outsiders: Mapping Lovecraft’s Loathing

Paul Neimann



The Ebb of Sanity: “The Night Ocean” and Bipolar Disorder

Kyle Gamache



The Weird Within the Real: Common Territories in Lovecraft’s Fiction and Southern Literature

Heather Poirier



A Lover of Past Phantoms: Lovecraftian Reflections in R. H. Barlow’s Life and Work

Thomas Schwaiger



American Frankensteins: George Porter and George Poe, and Their Attempts to Reanimate the Dead in New England

Michael J. Bielawa



Encounters in the Mountains of Madness: H. P. Lovecraft and Werner Herzog at the World’s End

Lúcio Reis-Filho, Laura Cánepa, and Jamer de Mello



Fear and (Non) Fiction: Agrarian Anxiety in “The Colour out of Space”

Antonio Alejandro Barroso



Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herbert S. Gorman’s Shadows over Innsmouth

Jeremiah Dylan Cook



Neo-Gothic Decadence as a Pervasive Challenge in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, and Alexander Blok

Elena Tchougounova-Paulson



Lovecraft’s Accursed Share in Bataille’s General Economy: Antiutilitarian Cosmologies and Anti-capitalist Social Visions

Christian Roy



A Sequence of Paintings So Horrible: Montage in Visual Adaptations of “Pickman’s Model

Nathaniel R. Wallace



Contributors



Appendix: Abstracts from the Fourth Biennial Dr. Henry Armitage Memorial Scholarship Symposium of New Weird Fiction and Lovecraft-Related Research Providence, RI, 23–25 August 2019

Dennis P. Quinn, Chair



Index

CFP Update SCMLA Gothic (4/15/2022; Memphis/Hybrid 10/13-15/2022)

Gothic Panel

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/02/26/gothic-panel

deadline for submissions: April 15, 2022


full name / name of organization: South Central Modern Language Association (SCMLA)


contact email: julieanngarza@gmail.com



The Gothic Panel with SCMLA's 79th Annual Hybrid Conference held in Memphis, Tennessee from October 13-15, 2022 is accepting proposals/abstracts for the Fall 2022 Conference. The virtual conference offers options for both In Person and Virtual presentations. (Extension granted for proposals. New Deadline: April 15, 2022.)

Location: Sheraton Downtown Memphis in Memphis, Tennessee

Days: October 13-15, 2022

URL: https://www.southcentralmla.org/conference/

Contact: Professor Julie Garza-Horne, Gothic Panel Secretary, julieanngarza@gmail.com


 
Last updated March 28, 2022 

 

NEPCA 2022 Advance Notice

The latest from NEPCA:

The 2022 Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will host its annual conference this fall as another virtual conference from Thursday, October 20-Saturday, October 22. We will be announcing the CFP in early April.

We are looking forward to another engaging and rewarding conference for new and seasoned members alike. We are seeking proposals for panels and presentations for this year’s conference.

NEPCA prides itself on holding conferences that emphasize sharing ideas in a non-competitive and supportive environment. We welcome proposals from graduate students, junior faculty, and senior scholars. NEPCA conferences offer intimate and nurturing sessions in which new ideas and works-in-progress can be aired, as well as completed projects.