CFP Don't Look Away: The Monstrous, the Gothic, and Survivance in the Worlds of Stephen Graham Jones (1/26/2026; ALA Chicago 5/20-23/2026)

American Literature Association Panel | Don't Look Away: The Monstrous, the Gothic, and Survivance in the Worlds of Stephen Graham Jones

deadline for submissions:
January 26, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Billy J. Stratton / Stephen Graham Jones Society

contact email:
billy.stratton@du.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/11/05/american-literature-association-panel-dont-look-away-the-monstrous-the-gothic-and

Don't Look Away: The Monstrous, the Gothic, and Survivance in the Worlds of Stephen Graham Jones

Organized by the Stephen Graham Jones Society

Chair: Dr. Billy J. Stratton, University of Denver

The Stephen Graham Jones Society invites proposals for a panel at the 2026 American Literature Association (ALA) meeting. We welcome submissions from emerging and established scholars investigating the vast, ever-expanding body of work by Stephen Graham Jones. This panel will focus on the recent and ongoing scholarship surrounding his horror fiction, as well as its significant pedagogical value in the contemporary classroom.

We seek proposals that examine any aspect of Jones’s profound literary, philosophical, and cultural engagements with the horrific. While we welcome all critical approaches, we are especially interested in presentations that engage with:

• Monster Theory and the Gothic: How does Jones deploy, deconstruct, or “Indigenize” traditional Gothic tropes (the haunted past, uncanny landscapes, the doubled self)? We invite papers that draw from Monster Studies or Gothic theory (including American, Southern, the Frontier Gothic, and Indigenous Gothic) to explore how his creations—from werewolves and ghosts to human slashers—challenge boundaries, embody social anxieties, and critique settler-colonial histories.
• Genre, Form, and Film Theory: We welcome analyses of his masterful manipulation of horror subgenres (the slasher, the possession narrative, the creature feature) and his deep, career-spanning intertextual dialogue with cinema. How do his narrative techniques force a new reckoning with the tropes we think we know?
• Key Themes and Motifs: Examinations of recurring concerns such as settler-colonial anxiety, Indigenous futurity and Gerald Vizenor’s conception of survivance, intergenerational trauma, the complex politics of land and place, the search for community, and the fluid, often fraught, constructions of identity and masculinity.

We encourage presentations that trace the evolution of these themes in his early experimental works (Demon Theory, All the Beautiful Sinners, The Last Final Girl), as well as his breakout horror novels (Mongrels, The Only Good Indians) to his most recent bestsellers, including the Indian Lake Trilogy (My Heart Is a Chainsaw, Don't Fear the Reaper, The Angel of Indian Lake), The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, and Killer on the Road.

Submission Guidelines:

Please submit a 250-300 word abstract and a brief C.V. to Billy J. Stratton at bstratt4@du.edu by the deadline of January 26, 2026. Include “SGJ Society ALA 2026” in the subject line of your email.

The American Literature Association’s 37th annual conference will meet in Chicago at the Palmer House from May 20-23, 2026. For further information or specific questions, please consult the ALA website at www.americanliteratureassociation.org or contact the conference director, Professor Leslie Petty, at ALA@rhodes.edu., or the Executive Director of the ALA, Professor Alfred Bendixen of Princeton University, at ab23@princeton.edu.



Last updated November 6, 2025