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
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)
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