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

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

Deadline for Submissions is September 30, 2025

Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

March 5-8, 2026, Pittsburgh, PA

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

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

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

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

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

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

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

Kafka's Fiction (Panel)

Primary Area / Secondary Area
Comparative Literature / German

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

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

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

Abstract

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

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

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

Description

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