CFP New Approaches to Teaching the Gothic (11/10/2026)

New Approaches to Teaching the Gothic

deadline for submissions:
November 10, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Bridget Marshall and Jen Baker

contact email:
Bridget_Marshall@uml.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/07/13/new-approaches-to-teaching-the-gothic


Diane Long Hoeveler and Tamar Heller’s Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction: British and American Traditions (MLA Options for Teaching) was published in 2003; Anna Powell and Andrew Smith’s Teaching the Gothic (Palgrave) was published in 2006. While both texts are excellent guides for teachers of the Gothic, quite a lot has happened in the twenty years since these texts appeared, not the least of which was a Gothic-infused global pandemic and the insidious rise of artificial intelligence in daily life. Academics today are and have been teaching the Gothic at a time when the world’s problems – rising fascism, global conflict, climate change, the devaluation of Higher Education, among many others – make the world itself seem downright Gothic. This collection will seek to provide updated reflections, evaluations, and strategies on teaching the Gothic and utilising or creating Gothic pedagogy in the contemporary moment and beyond.

Courses on or including the Gothic are taught in a wide variety of venues within and outside academia; settings include community colleges, traditional undergraduate programmes, graduate programmes, community centres, prisons and reformatories. Classrooms themselves vary greatly, from giant lecture halls to small upper-level seminars to fully online virtual spaces. Students of the Gothic come from all ages and backgrounds, and include native speakers of English and students acquiring English later in life. These contexts, venues, and audiences present different challenges for the instructor, and require unique approaches to make for successful learning experiences.

We are seeking contributions from a range of scholars at different ranks and types of institutions (as well as outside of them) to present a broad understanding of the diversity of how we study and teach the Gothic today, and to provide new directions for the future. We already have interest from an academic press.

Potential topics might include but are not restricted to one or a mixture of the following:

• Teaching the Gothic in the midst of a crisis (e.g. pandemic, war, from a distance or physically within such spaces)
• Teaching the Gothic outside of the university / in non-traditional settings
• Challenges of AI to teaching the Gothic
• The use of various digital platforms in teaching / student research
• Gothic and the archives in contemporary times
• What texts (and which editions) absolutely must be on any Gothic syllabus (and why)?
• Gothic forms (teaching beyond traditional formats, for instance)
• Gothic theory as pedagogy (in times of crisis particularly)
• Syllabus organizational strategies and rationales: Chronological? Thematic? Canon?
• Decolonizing the Gothic syllabus
• Preparing for and managing class discussions about violence, sexual violence, trauma, discrimination, or other tough topics that arise in the Gothic?
• Strategies for teaching a Gothic course for an audience unfamiliar with the Gothic / unfamiliar with academia / non-traditional students.
• Gothic and public engagement / school outreach
• Opportunities for service learning / personal and professional development in the Gothic course
• Creative forms of assessment in the Gothic classroom
• Neurodivergence and the Gothic
• Designing assignments with AI in mind
• Cancel culture and the Gothic

Co-editors Bridget Marshall (University of Massachusetts, Lowell) and Jen Baker (University of Warwick, UK) seek abstracts of 300-500 words for chapters which will demonstrate innovative approaches to teaching the Gothic or engaging with or creating new Gothic pedagogies, particularly situated within recent contexts. We are open to a variety of forms, including case studies, reflective essays, theoretically informed essays, and other formats that can best showcase pedagogical insights. If your proposed essay includes samples of work by students/participants we will require written permissions before publication.

Please also include a brief professional bio of 300 words (max) with your abstract.

Please send your abstract and bio by 10 November 2026 to Bridget_Marshall@uml.edu and J.Baker.5@warwick.ac.uk We are happy to answer questions at the same address.

CFP New Perspectives on Creature Features (additional chapters) (9/30/2026)

New Perspectives on Creature Features (additional chapters)

deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns

contact email:
monstersfilms@yahoo.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/07/24/new-perspectives-on-creature-features-additional-chapters

New Perspectives on Creature Features (additional chapters)

Edited by

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (Universidad de Buenos Aires)



Once dismissed as lowbrow entertainment, creature features have proven to be one of horror cinema's most enduring and adaptable traditions. From giant insects, sharks, spiders, snakes, crocodiles, parasites, cryptids, and mythological beasts to genetically engineered organisms and hybrid creatures, non-human beings have long embodied cultural anxieties surrounding nature, science, technology, colonialism, environmental collapse, and the limits of the human. Recent scholarship in eco-horror, Animal Studies, Monster Theory, Environmental Humanities, Posthumanism, and the Blue Humanities has further demonstrated the richness of creature cinema as a subject of critical inquiry.

This edited collection, currently under contract and well underway for Peter Lang's New Perspectives series (edited by Simon Bacon), seeks additional chapters to complete the volume. We are particularly interested in essays examining creature-centred horror films from any period, country, or production context—from Hollywood blockbusters to regional, independent, exploitation, and cult cinema.

For the purposes of this collection, “creature feature” is understood in its broadest sense. We welcome studies of films featuring monstrous or threatening non-human creatures of any size, whether natural, supernatural, mythical, extraterrestrial, or artificially created. Our particular interest lies in horror films centred on dangerous animals, insects, reptiles, aquatic creatures, cryptids, folkloric beings, and other non-human entities. Creature features are not simply monster movies. They are films that imagine encounters between humans and threatening non-human beings, revealing changing anxieties about nature, ecology, technology, evolution, and the boundaries of the human.

Because the volume is already substantially developed, we are no longer accepting proposals on the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World franchise or kaiju cinema, as these topics are already well represented.

Contributions may examine films from any historical period, provided they offer original critical perspectives and engage with contemporary theoretical approaches. Comparative, transnational, interdisciplinary, and global perspectives are especially encouraged.

The collection welcomes proposals on topics including, but not limited to:

• Creature features and eco-horror
• Environmental crisis and the Anthropocene
• Animal Studies and non-human agency
• Posthumanism and the limits of the human
• Monsters and biodiversity
• Creature cinema and climate anxiety
• Sharks, crocodiles, snakes, spiders, insects, and other animal horrors
• Aquatic horror and the Blue Humanities
• Cryptids and folkloric creatures
• Mythological beings in horror cinema
• Parasites, mutations, and biological contagion
• Hybrid and genetically engineered creatures
• Alien life forms
• Folk horror and non-human beings
• Exploitation and B-movie creature features
• Cult and trash creature cinema
• Horror-comedy and creature features
• Creature franchises and remakes
• Global creature cinema
• Latin American, African, Asian, and Oceanian creature features
• Gender, race, colonialism, and creaturehood
• Queer readings of creature films
• Children, adolescence, and creature narratives
• Streaming-era creature horror
• Understudied creature films and forgotten national traditions

We are also open to proposals addressing other topics relevant to creature features.

Please submit a 300–500-word abstract together with a short biographical note (including current position, institutional affiliation, and contact details) in a single Word document to Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns at monstersfilms@yahoo.com.

Deadline for abstracts: 30 September 2026.

Authors whose proposals are accepted will be expected to submit their completed chapters within three months of acceptance. Contributors should note that chapters are intentionally concise, approximately 3,000–3,500 words, in keeping with the format of Peter Lang's New Perspectives series.

Please circulate this call among colleagues who may be interested.

Acceptance of an abstract does not guarantee acceptance of the completed chapter.

CFP Gothic Nature, Issue VI (7/25/2026)

**Gothic Nature, Issue VI: Call for Papers**

deadline for submissions:
July 25, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Gothic Nature

contact email:
gothicnaturejournal@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/05/06/gothic-nature-issue-vi-call-for-papers

**Call for Papers, Reviews, and Creative Pieces**

Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic

Issue VI: Unthemed Issue

Deadline for abstracts and pitches: 25th July 2026

‘You cannot adapt to extinction’. —Vanessa Nakate

‘The development of ecocriticism itself can been read as a type of Gothic story. If imagined figuratively as if it were a horror film, the field of ecocriticism is at a point where it is confronting the monster that has been hidden in the basement’. —Tom J. Hillard

The Gothic Nature journal offers a unique space in which critical and creative writers, thinkers, and artists alike can come together to productively engage with the anxieties arising from our increasingly troubled co-existence with the more-than-human world. Since its inaugural publication in 2019, the journal has showcased a multitude of wide-ranging explorations into ‘Gothic Nature’, moving in 2022 to an alternately themed model, with our first Special Themed Issue on Haunted Shores, and our most recent on Decolonising the EcoGothic. Our next issue, Issue VI, will be open, meaning that there is no specific theme beyond interrogating the dark entanglements between ‘Gothic’ and ‘Nature’—and so we are excited to hear from potential contributors on all things to do with ecoGothic and ecohorror.

Interdisciplinary and transmedia approaches are welcome, including analyses of literature, film, television, digital media, and visual culture. We are keen, too, to include and celebrate a diversity of new and more established voices alike in these materials.

For Gothic Nature VI, we invite proposals for papers of 6-8,000 words that critically reflect, engage with, and explore any aspect and interpretation of ‘Gothic Nature’.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following: 

• Gothic activism and environmental justice
• Regional and transnational ecoGothic and ecohorror
• Gothic ecology, Gothic geology, Anthropocene Gothic
• Extinction
• Eco apocalypse
• Themes of rot, ruin, and decay
• Climate crisis
• Gothic diets and 'Frankenstein food': meat eating, vegetarianism, and veganism
• Gothic guilt and the environment
• Heavy weather
• Queer ecology
• Ecofeminism
• Eco-Marxism
• Religion, cults, and the ecoGothic
• Decolonising ecohorror and the ecoGothic
• Unearthing dread: Gothic land
• Horror and ecocentrism
• Haunted and spectral environments (seas, skies, swamps, wildernesses, etc.)
• Genre and ecocriticism
• Ecophobia
• Animal, vegetal, and mineral monstrosity
• Re-enchantment through darkness
• Tropical Gothic
• Petrogothic
• EcoGothic tourism
• Plastics and pollution
• Trans-corporeality, toxic sublime, polluted bodies, and ecological grotesque

For articles, please send abstracts of 500 words, as well as a brief biography of 150 words, to Dr Harriet Stilley at gothicnaturejournal@gmail.com by Thursday 25th July 2026 (or feel free to contact me informally should you wish to talk through ideas or have any queries). Full drafts papers will be due late 2026/early 2027 and we intend to publish Summer 2027.

If you are interested in writing a review or submitting a creative piece, please send in any pitches or expressions of interest to us by Thursday 25th July. Our Book Review Editor, Dr Jimmy Packham, and Film, TV, & Game Review Editor, Emma Davies, will support our review contributors, and first drafts will be due in November 2026.



About the Gothic Nature Journal

Gothic Nature is an interdisciplinary and peer-reviewed open-access academic journal seeking to explore the latest evolutions of thought in the areas of ecohorror and the ecoGothic. It publishes articles, reviews, interviews, and original creative pieces united in their interrogation of the darker sides of our relationship with the nonhuman and provides a space for all scholars working at the intersections of ecocriticism, Gothic and horror studies, and the wider environmental humanities. Gothic Nature aims to provide deeper understandings of the importance and implications of our monstrous, sublime, spectral, and uncanny constructions of Nature in the cultural imagination and productively explore how Gothic and horror might factor in our conceptions and experiences of contemporary real life ecological crisis.

Website: Gothic Nature Journal – New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic
Instagram: @gothicnaturejournal
X: @gothicnaturejo



Founding Editor: Dr Elizabeth Parker
Editors-in-Chief: Dr Elizabeth Parker and Dr Harriet Stilley
Book Review Editor: Dr Jimmy Packham
Film, TV & Game Review Editor: Emma Davies
Blog Editor: JJ Mokrzewski
Website Designer: Michael Belcher
Editorial Board: Professor Stacy Alaimo, Professor Eric G. Anderson, Dr Scott Brewster, Dr Kevin Corstorphine, Dr Rachele Dini, Professor Simon C. Estok, Dr Tom J. Hillard, Professor Kim D. Hester Williams, Professor William Hughes, Dr Derek Johnston, Professor Dawn Keetley, Dr Ian Kinane, Dr Ashley Kniss, Dr John Miller, Professor Jennifer Schell, Professor Matthew Wynn Sivils, Professor Andrew Smith, Dr Samantha Walton


Last updated May 7, 2026

CFP Indigenous Gothic / Indigenous Horror: A Companion (10/1/2026)

Indigenous Gothic / Indigenous Horror: A Companion

deadline for submissions:
October 1, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Valerie L. Guyant / Montana State University - Northern

contact email:
valerie.guyant@msun.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/06/22/indigenous-gothic-indigenous-horror-a-companion

Call for Chapters

Horror has long been described as a genre about the unknown — the thing lurking just beyond the edges of civilization. But as Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet Nation) has written, horror uniquely allows "two timelines — the past and the present, the legacy of colonialism and the world of the story — to simultaneously exist. Not just exist, but intersect."[1] It is this capacity for temporal and cultural intersection that has made horror and the Gothic not merely accessible to Indigenous writers, but essential.

Scholars and critics have begun to recognize the emergence of what many term "Rez Gothic" — a mode of storytelling that deploys horror and the supernatural to illuminate inequity, cultural trauma, and Indigenous survival. Yet despite a proliferation of landmark texts and a genuine resurgence of Indigenous voices, the field lacks a comprehensive academic companion that accounts for the full breadth of this tradition across Nations, media, and forms. Indigenous Gothic / Indigenous Horror: A Companion aims to address that gap.

This edited collection will draw on examples from fiction, film, television, poetry, and comics to examine the ways Indigenous authors, filmmakers, and artists have engaged with and transformed the conventions of Gothic and horror across multiple traditions. We understand "Indigenous Gothic" and "Indigenous Horror" as interrelated but distinct modes, and welcome submissions that engage with either or both.

The collection is transnational: it will center the voices and creative traditions of a broad range of Native Nations within the United States, First Nations and Métis peoples of Canada, and Pacific Islander and Māori communities, among others.

In addition to academic chapters, the collection aspires to intersperse interviews with Indigenous elders and authors, allowing their voices to speak alongside and sometimes against critical interpretations. This structural choice is a form of intellectual and ethical

responsibility, one that positions community knowledge not as raw material for scholarly analysis but as expertise.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

· Fiction by Indigenous authors working in horror or Gothic modes: Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet Nation); Cherie Dimaline (Métis Nation of Ontario), Empire of Wild (2019); Waubgeshig Rice (Wasauksing First Nation / Anishinaabe), Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018); Darcie Little Badger (Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas), Elatsoe (2020); or A.A. Carr (Navajo/Laguna Pueblo), Eye Killers (1995); Witi Ihimaera (Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki and associated iwi); Patricia Grace (Ngāti Toa, Ngāti Raukawa, Te Āti Awa); and Keri Hulme (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Māmoe),

· Horror and Gothic representation in Indigenous film and television, including Prey (2022, dir. Dan Trachtenberg, featuring a nearly all-Comanche cast), Reservation Dogs (FX/Hulu, co-created by Sterlin Harjo, Seminole/Muscogee Nation), Taika Waititi's (Māori/Te Whānau-ā-Apanui) work in horror-comedy including Wellington Paranormal (TVNZ, 2018–2022) and What We Do in the Shadows (2014), and Māori-inflected Gothic in New Zealand cinema.

· Comics, graphic novels, and sequential art with Indigenous Gothic content, including contributions to Marvel's Indigenous Voices anthology (featuring work by Jones and others).

· The use of ceremony, land, and the non-human as sites of horror or uncanny dread in Indigenous poetic traditions.

· Anthology fiction and the construction of an Indigenous horror canon — including Never Whistle at Night (2023, ed. Shane Hawk), Zegaajimo: Indigenous Horror Fiction (2024, ed. Nathan Niigan Noodin Adler and Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm), and related collections.

· Intersections with gender, queerness, and disability within Indigenous horror including the centering of Indigenous women and Two-Spirit characters as protagonists rather than victims.

· Pedagogical questions: how do we teach Indigenous Gothic responsibly in university classrooms, and what do Indigenous horror texts demand of non-Indigenous readers and instructors?

OF NOTE

We particularly welcome abstracts from Indigenous scholars, community members, elders, and artists.

Proposals for interview contributions in lieu of traditional academic chapters are also welcome; please include a brief note on the proposed interview subject and their community affiliation.

Ideally, the finished collection will be organized geographically. Therefore, preference will be given to a variety of texts and approaches, especially if the subject text is placed geographically near the proposer, since land and place are often important.

Strong interest has been expressed by Bloomsbury Publishing

Finished chapters will be approximately 5,000–7,000 words and should adopt a primary text or a set of closely related texts to discuss the broader subject of Indigenous Gothic and horror.

Please submit abstracts of 300–400 words, alongside a short biographical note (75–150 words), to Valerie Guyant at Valerie.guyant@msun.edu by October 1, 2026. Draft chapters will be expected by May 30, 2027.

---

[1] Stephen Graham Jones, foreword to Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, ed. Shane Hawk (Random House Canada, 2023).



Last updated June 22, 2026

CFP Giant Monsters All-Out Attack: Kaiju Culture in the Twenty-first Century (10/31/2026)

Giant Monsters All-Out Attack: Kaiju Culture in the Twenty-first Century

deadline for submissions:
October 31, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Alex Adams, Independent Scholar

contact email:
c21kaijucollection@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2026/07/09/giant-monsters-all-out-attack-kaiju-culture-in-the-twenty-first-century



GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK: Kaiju Culture in the Twenty-first Century

Edited by Alex Adams, independent scholar



The kaiju genre has never been so healthy. Godzilla, now an Oscar-winner thanks to the world-leading VFX of Godzilla Minus One (2023), stars in two global movie franchises at once, with the Legendary MonsterVerse expanding into TV, print media, and video games whilst a freshly announced ‘Godzilla Universe’ promises to deliver a comparable slate of output from Japanese originators Toho. Gamera, Ultraman, and Evangelion too, have been rejuvenated in recent years; giant monsters have made prominent appearances in both the MCU (Galactus in Fantastic Four: First Steps [2025]) and DCU (Kaiju in Superman [2025]); Chinese cinema has given us Abyssal Spider (2020) and The Monster is Coming (2024), South Korean The Host (2006). Broadening its territory from the conventional US-Japan B-movie axis, the giant monster movie has entered a new golden age, but we scholars are yet to catch up.

While Godzilla’s symbolic associations with nuclear weapons, Japanese historical trauma, and Cold War tensions are well-known, scholarship has yet to fully reckon with the multifaceted implications of the contemporary re-emergence of giant monsters as major cultural figures. How, for example, can we reconcile Godzilla’s progressive antinuclear political credentials with Adorno’s claim, in Minima Moralia (1951), that the fascination with giant monsters is a sublimated form of fascination with sovereign power – or indeed, how do we reckon with Shinzo Abe’s attempts to appropriate Shin Godzilla as an icon of his right-wing neoliberal government? How do we read the MonsterVerse’s conception of violently enforced natural hierarchy in a time of global fascist solidarities? There was much twentieth century talk of Cold War monstrosity, but are we yet able to talk of a post-9/11 kaiju? Kaiju stories have offered powerfully liberatory narratives and images to queer and neurodivergent people, but in the west at least they remain marked by the whiteness that characterizes so much mainstream science fiction; (how) is this complicated by the genre’s Japanese origins? To what extent is critical discourse on the kaiju genre marked by an implicit embarrassment about ‘unserious’ cultural production?

Explicitly connecting contemporary giant monsters to the twenty-first century political and social histories from which they emerge, this edited collection will critically explore the kaiju as an international cultural figure, analysing its capacious symbolic potentials and its ambiguous political promise. Essays on any kaiju text are welcome as long as they refer clearly to twenty-first century political and/or critical contexts. A range of formats and methods are welcomed: conventional academic analysis, experimental/creative methods, personal/autoethnographic essays, and more. Contributions from minoritized writers are actively encouraged.

Customary very long yet necessarily incomplete list of suggested topics:

• Power, violence, justice
• Neoliberalism and political spectacle
• Antifascism & anticapitalism
• Contemporary warfare
• Climate disaster, the Anthropocene, eco-politics, eco-fascism
• Monster Theory, animality, the more-than-human
• Nostalgia: genre prehistory, historical revision, rebooting
• The future: time travel, the end of the world, hope
• Race, racialisation, racism: simianisation, noble savages, slavery, biological determinism, white supremacy, whiteness, techno-orientalism, afrofuturism
• Kaiju & imperialism: alien civilisations, invasion, self-defence, emergency ethics
• Utopia: internationalism, geopolitics, perfected societies, class, the city
• Sex, gender: reproduction, transformation, parenthood, family
• The body and difference: neurodiversity, disability, embodiment
• Disreputable epistemologies and ontologies: occultism, conspiracism, para-archaeology, ufology, post-truth, etc.
• Mythology, classics, folklore
• Oceans, marine life, the planetary
• Religion, eschatology, apocalypse
• Robots, Mechas, AI, transhumanism, technology
• Genre fluidity: the relation of kaiju movies to science fiction, comedy, horror (particularly J-horror), children’s media, fantasy, wrestling, dance, sports, comedy
• Parody, mockbusters, badfilm
• Form crossover: kaiju in video games, comics, literature
• Franchise-building, intertextuality, sequelization
• Material culture: collecting, toys, physical media, advertising
• Audience reception & fan cultures: podcasts, social media, fan scholarship, conventions

300-word abstracts and short bios should be sent to c21kaijucollection@gmail.com by 31st October 2026. Queries and questions are welcome. Completed chapters will be in the 7500/8000-word range, although depending on the nature of the submission other lengths will be considered. Anything composed using any form of AI will not be considered.



About the editor: Alex Adams is an independent scholar writing a comprehensive intellectual history of Godzilla, Godzilla: A Critical Demonology, which is under contract with Headpress Books. They also co-edited an anthology of short stories and poetry about kaiju called Devastation Songs with Aaron Kent in 2024. In addition to Godzilla, they write on the representation of contemporary political violence. They have published four monographs, most recently Kill Box: Military Drone Systems and Cultural Production(Rowman & Littlefield, 2024). Read more at www.atadamswriting.com, and follow on social media at @gdemonology on Bluesky and Instagram.


Last updated July 9, 2026

CFP Haunting Revisions: The Female Gothic Across Time and Media (3/1/2026)

Haunting Revisions: The Female Gothic Across Time and Media

deadline for submissions:
March 1, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Special Issue of Women's Studies on the Female Gothic

contact email:
Haunting_revisions_submissions@mailfence.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/12/12/haunting-revisions-the-female-gothic-across-time-and-media

Call for Publications

Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Taylor & Francis)

**Special Issue on

Haunting Revisions: The Female Gothic Across Time and Media**

Guest Editors:
Dr. Cindy Murillo, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Dr. Jennifer Nader, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Overview

The Female Gothic has long served as a vibrant site of cultural critique and imaginative resistance. From its eighteenth-century origins to its twenty-first-century reinventions, the mode has provided women—and now feminist, queer, trans, and nonbinary creators across media—with narrative tools for exploring domestic captivity, gendered violence, racial haunting, queer desire, environmental dread, and the uncanny dimensions of embodiment. Foundational scholarship by Ellen Moers (1976), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979), and later Diana Wallace (2009) and Andrew Smith (2009) has shaped the field, while more recent work increasingly examines the Female Gothic’s global, intersectional, and multimedia transformations.

This special issue, Haunting Revisions: The Female Gothic Across Time and Media, emerges from the panel “Unhomely Heroines: Rewriting the Female Gothic in American Fiction,” presented at the American Literature Association Symposium on the Female Gothic (October 17, 2025). The panel’s high attendance, lively discussion, and subsequent scholarly inquiries demonstrated a pressing need for renewed interdisciplinary engagement with the Female Gothic—especially given the profound cultural upheavals that have reshaped feminist discourse since the last major collected study in 2009 (Wallace & Smith).

Why Now?

Although scholars continue to publish monographs and articles on Gothic women’s writing, there has not been a recent special issue of Women’s Studies dedicated to revisiting the Female Gothic in light of the past decade’s cultural, political, and technological shifts. These include:

• The global #MeToo movement and feminist protest cultures
• Potential rollbacks of women’s voting and property rights through revived coverture frameworks
• Legal assaults on reproductive rights following the overturning of Roe v. Wade
• Rising visibility of trans and queer identities amidst escalating backlash
• Renewed racial justice movements and examinations of colonial hauntings
• Fictional and nonfictional digital Gothic forms (podcasts, TikTok horror, glitch aesthetics, AI-generated Gothic, virtual hauntings)
• Climate crisis, domestic precarity, and post-pandemic isolation reconfiguring the home as both sanctuary and site of terror

In this context, the Female Gothic has not faded—it has expanded, taking on new forms to express contemporary anxieties, desires, and resistances. Recent scholarship by Monica Germanà (2022), Gina Wisker (2016), and Maisha Wester (2012) highlights the evolving forms of the Female Gothic across global, racial, queer, and intersectional frameworks, making a 2027 special issue both timely and necessary.

Aims of the Special Issue

This special issue seeks to:Re-examine the Female Gothic through transnational, intersectional, and multimedia lenses.
Investigate how contemporary social and political pressures reshape Gothic tropes.
Explore the ways women and gender-minority creators use the Gothic to articulate trauma, agency, resistance, and radical imagination.
Highlight global, queer, racial, environmental, and posthuman approaches that extend the boundaries of Female Gothic scholarship.
Foster interdisciplinary conversations across literature, film, television, digital media, music, art, and performance.

We welcome full-length scholarly articles (approximately 20–30 pages), shorter essays, interviews, creative-critical forms, and interdisciplinary approaches.

All submissions will undergo a rigorous double-blind peer review process.

Topics May Include, but Are Not Limited To:

• Historical and Global Female Gothic Traditions
• Race, Coloniality, and Haunting
• Queer, Trans, and Nonbinary Gothic
• Digital, Virtual, and AI Gothic Media
• Domesticity, Intimacy, and Reproductive Futures
• Environmental and EcoGothic Perspectives
• Posthuman, Abject, and Embodied Gothic
• Female Gothic in Film, Television, Music, and Games
• Archival, Historical, and Recovery Work



Key Dates

Abstract Submission Deadline: March 1, 2026
Notification of Acceptance: April 10, 2026
Full Article Submission: August 10, 2026
Peer Review Decisions: October 10, 2026
Revisions Due: January 10, 2027
Final Copy Deadline: February 20, 2027
Publication: Mid-2027

Submission Guidelines

Please email a 250-word abstract (with 3–5 keywords) and a short bionote to:

Haunting_revisions_submissions@mailfence.com by March 1, 2026.

Completed manuscripts will be submitted through Women’s Studies’ editorial system after abstract approval.


Last updated December 12, 2025

CFP Romancing the Posthuman (Special Issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies; 11/30/2025)

CfP "Romancing the Posthuman" - Special Issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies

deadline for submissions:
November 30, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Journal of Popular Romance Studies

contact email:
j.e.m.hoorenman@uu.nl

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/10/06/cfp-romancing-the-posthuman-special-issue-of-the-journal-of-popular-romance-studies

The Journal of Popular Romance Studies is calling for papers for its Special Issue “Romancing the Posthuman” focusing on romance, critical love studies and posthumanism.

The posthuman is many things: the cyborg, the monster, the zombie, shapeshifters, and vampires (Herbrechter 2018: 94; McLennon 2017). Primarily, though, it is a challenge to Cartesian and humanist understandings of the human both as an independently agentic, biologically uniform being and as a privileged category: male, white, able. As a state of being, the posthuman changes how we define humanity and its relationship to the planet and its other species (Braidotti 2013: 1-2). Critical posthumanism thus interrogates default binaries (such as organic/inorganic, human/animal etc.) and established hierarchies, and deconstructs the categories that make racial, gender, ethnic, sexual, and species othering possible: the ‘human’, ‘sub-human,’ ‘inhuman,’ and ‘non-human.’ Posthumanism thus offers a critical lens through which we can conceptualize human embeddedness in technoscientific naturecultures, past, current and future embodiments, and alternative conceptions of what it means to be human.

Inevitably, posthumanism has fully embraced science fiction literature and, to a lesser extent, fantasy, horror and Gothic literature, seeing affinities between the posthuman and futuristic imaginings of the human, the zombie and the vampire. But as Falkenhayner (2020: 10) explains, the posthuman is no longer the other that troubles but the similar: “[a]s fictions, posthuman similars appear as desire and as a danger […] Analyses of posthuman fictions reflect their respective contemporary imaginaries of inclusion and exclusion into conceptions of self and other, of similarity and difference, equality and hybridity.” Popular romance is therefore a perfect candidate for the exploration of posthuman imaginaries: for example, little attention has yet been paid to the figure of the posthuman in love and in romance, to critical posthumanism as an approach to popular romance and critical love studies, or what Pettman (2017: 8) terms creaturely love: “to rejoice in the miraculous singularity of the being that one is with.” Love, romance, desire and eroticism offer a uniquely productive vantage point from which to approach the posthuman. Popular romance, as Kamblé (2023: 2) argues, maintains a consistent investment in “seeking the truth of [the] unknown, suppressed, fragmented, or embattled self” of the heroine. How is that self re-configured within the posthuman condition? If, as Roach (2016: 175) posits, “the romance story is a reparation fantasy of the end of patriarchy” that affirms its belief in the power of erotic faith within the sacred guarantee of a HEA, what do such fantasies look like away from “the blood, earth, and origin of the classical social contract” (Braidotti 2011: 104). What alternative human and non-human embodiments does romance offer or foreclose?

There are many more questions to explore at the intersection of critical love/ popular romance studies and posthumanism, and to that effect, the special issue of JPRS “Romancing the Posthuman” is interested in creating, for the first time, a dedicated academic space for that work. With this special issue, we invite popular romance scholars and scholars of posthumanism to engage with the posthuman in their reading of romance and to bring posthuman theory to bear on popular romance texts.

Topics of interest may include but are not limited to:

• Representations/cultural expressions of love in a posthuman world
• Technologically mediated love in global popular culture
• Creaturely love, humanimality and interspecies intimacies
• The posthuman in and/or a posthumanist reading of paranormal, science fiction, fantasy, dystopian, post-apocalyptic, steampunk and speculative popular romance
• Posthuman love, sexuality and desire
• Alternative imaginings of human subjectivities, embodiments and love
• Transhumanist and/or tranimacy fantasies in romantic media
• Critical posthumanist and new materialist understandings of love, romance and kinship
• The mediation of these cultural/theoretical considerations in a variety of media, including but not limited to: genre fiction, literary texts, autobiography/memoir, screen media, music, performing arts, or in the teaching of these media/texts.

We are inviting submissions for the Special Issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies: “Romancing the Posthuman.” The Special Issue is jointly edited by Hanna Hoorenman and Evvie Valliou. Please submit abstracts in MS Word of no more than 300 words and bios of no more than 100 words to j.e.m.hoorenman@uu.nl and e.k.valiou@sheffield.ac.uk by 31 October 2025. See also https://www.jprstudies.org/submissions/special-issue-call-for-papers/.

*** Note: Deadline extended to 30 November 2025 ***

Suggested bibliography:

Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

—-. The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013.

Christmas, A.J. “Augmented Intimacies: Posthuman Love Stories in Contemporary Science Fiction.” PhD Dissertation Leeds University, 2013.

Falkenhayner, N. “The Ship Who Sang: Feminism, the Posthuman, and Similarity.” Open Library of Humanities, 6(2): 21 (2020), pp. 1–24.

Herbrechter, Stephan. “Critical Posthumanism.” In Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Kamblé, Jayashree, Eric Murphy Selinger, and Hsu-Ming Teo, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction. Routledge, 2021.

Kamblé, Jayashree. Creating Identity: The Popular Romance Heroine’s Journey to Selfhood and Self-Presentation. Indiana University Press, 2023.

MacCormack, Patricia. “Posthuman Sexuality.” In Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

McLennon, Leigh. “Contemporary Vampire Genre Fiction: Ethical Feeding and the Posthuman Vampire in Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance.” PhD Dissertation. University of Melbourne, 2017.

Ostalska, Katarzyna. “Dystopias in the Realm of Popular Culture: Introducing Elements of Posthuman and Postfeminist Discourse to the Mass Audience Female Readership in Cecelia Ahern’s Roar (2018).” Text Matters, no. 11 (2021): 204–21.

Pettman, Dominic. Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less than Human. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Roach, Catherine M. Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture. Indiana University Press, 2016.


Last updated October 13, 2025

CFP Unfaithful Adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde: Essays on Hybridity and the Gothic Double (3/5/2025)

Unfaithful Adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde: Essays on Hybridity and the Gothic Double

deadline for submissions:
March 5, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Eric Riddle

contact email:
UnfaithfullyHyde@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/09/11/unfaithful-adaptations-of-jekyll-and-hyde-essays-on-hybridity-and-the-gothic-double


Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one of the most adapted, parodied, and referenced works of Gothic fiction. Even those who have never read the novella know the “story,” or at least the twist: Henry Jekyll becomes Edward Hyde to live a double life, disconnected from societal pressures and expectations. Many, if not all, of these media adaptations add, edit, or remove elements from the story, making it a hybrid narrative, one part Stevenson’s and one part the adapter’s.



This hybridity will be the focus of this proposed edited collection with McFarland, under their new “Studies in Liberal Adaptation” collection with Dr. Kyle William Bishop as the series editor. This book will analyze unfaithful adaptations of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in various media formats including television, film, video and board games, and comics, and the edited collection will ultimately argue why the novella works so well as an artifact to be adapted to address modern societal concerns and remains an important touchstone more than a century after its original publication.

Following is a non-exhaustive list of potential themes and works the collection is interested in approaching. Chapters should be academically researched while also being accessibly written for a non-academic audience.



THEMES

• Addiction and Aggression
• Anonymity / Secret Identities
• Class struggles
• Comics and Superheroes
• Gender and Sexuality
• “Inappropriate” love, Prostitution, etc.
• Pride and Hubris
• Race

TEXTS (in no particular order)

• Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953)
• Batman (As hero with secret identity and/or the comic villain Hyde)
• Cartoon Adaptations (Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, Mighty Mouse)
• Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype (1980)
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920, 1931, 1941 versions, as well as any others)
• Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde (1995)
• Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971)
• Fight Club
• Jekyll (2007 BBS series)
• Mary Reilly (1996)
• Once Upon a Time
• Penny Dreadful
• The Incredible Hulk (various)
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)
• The Mummy (2017)
• The Nutty Professor (all versions)
• The Pagemaster (1994)
• Van Helsing (2004)

Please send an abstract of 300-500 words describing your proposed chapter and thesis, along with a short author bio, to Dr. Eric Riddle at UnfaithfullyHyde@gmail.com before March 5th, 2026. Final chapters of 5,000-6,000 words will be due late 2026.


Last updated September 12, 2025

CFP EXTENDED DEADLINE: Fearful Performances: Stardom, Skill, and Style of Acting in the Horror Film (10/1/2025)

EXTENDED DEADLINE: Fearful Performances: Stardom, Skill, and Style of Acting in the Horror Film

deadline for submissions:
October 1, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Steffen Hantke

contact email:
steffenhantke@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/05/04/extended-deadline-fearful-performances-stardom-skill-and-style-of-acting-in-the

CFP: Extended Deadline, October 1, 2025





Edited Collection of Critical Essays

“Fearful Performances: Stardom, Skill, and Style of Acting in the Horror Film”



Appearing in a horror film is likely to make high demands on even the most seasoned members of the acting profession. No matter if a horror film features characters in extreme states of mental or physical distress or characters who embody abject states of monstrosity or alterity, actors are facing obstacles unlike those in other cinematic genres. Just being rendered invisible under extensive make-up and prosthetics is a formidable challenge. Hence, the genre’s lore is rife with tales of actors pushing themselves—or being pushed—to the edge of mental and physical endurance in pursuit of a memorable performance. Performances in horror films can be notable for being cool and understated, or hotly and hysterically pitched. Amateurs are praised for impressive performances, as professionals are lambasted for making bad choices, chewing the scenery, or phoning it in. Actors have immersed themselves in the Method, or planted their feet squarely and simply delivered their lines. Styles vary, as horror subgenres do, as do actors’ bodies and faces and voices, as do actors’ collaborations with cinematographers and lighting technicians, makeup artists and voice coaches. Not surprisingly, then, the success of many horror films stands and falls with the intensity and credibility of an acting performance. Actors ruin horror films, or rescue them.



With the notable exception of the genre’s most enduringly popular stars, as well as the genre’s emblematic Final Girls and Scream Queens, critical analysis of actors and acting performances in horror films have largely been limited and sporadic. Is there an idiosyncratic aesthetic or performative approach to horror film acting that distinguishes it from working in other genres? How does horror film acting position itself within the larger field of professional acting on film? What are the evaluative criteria of assessing an actor’s performance in a horror film? How does an actor’s performance in a horror film engage with prosthetic or digital effects? How does an actor’s unique performance seize and interpret a character in a literary source text? At the intersection of horror film studies, star studies, and performance studies, this collection of critical essays aims to map out horror film acting in individual performances and across entire career arcs, illuminate it in larger trends and recurring tropes, and provide a cogent critical discussion that allows readers to grasp the horror film in this crucial performative dimension.



Possible topics can include, but are not limited to:


- Horror films as gateways into acting careers (first films, first performances)

- The Professionalism of horror film actors and acting

- Techniques, skills, requirements, routines, tricks, and shticks

- The aesthetics of horror film acting

- Going Slumming: “serious” actors and their forays into the horror genre

- Typecasting/casting-against-type

- Stardom and the horror film as star vehicle

- Performance styles (Method Acting, silent film acting, etc.)

- Iconic performances and performers (individual films, individual performances)

- Embodying and interpreting characters from non-cinematic source texts

- Acting performances on the edge of discomfort, for viewer and/or performer

- Underplayed and muted performances

- Acting in “quiet horror” films

- Self-conscious performances

- Acting in digital environments

- The prosthetic and make-up enhancement of the actor’s body

- Child actors

- Amateur actors

- Digital actors

- Invisible Actors (voice actors, body doubles, stunt workers)

- Embodying genre functions: “monstrosity”

- Embodying genre functions: “victimization”

- Embodying genre functions: “normality”

- The politics of evaluating horror film actors and acting

- Canonizing: the “best/worst” horror film acting performances

- Awards and accolades: acting as cultural/social/professional capital

- Polarizing/scandalizing horror film performances

- Acting in horror film subgenres (silent films, splatter films, found footage horror, torture porn, etc.)

- Representing horror film actors and acting: interviews, appearances at screenings and cons, documentaries, etc.

- The discourse on horror film acting (acting manuals and guidebooks, anecdotal writing about horror film production, autobiographical and professional writing by actors and directors, past critical writing in its canonizing function, etc.)



Given the nature and breadth of the topic, the internal organization of the anthology is not predetermined but will develop in dialogue with submitted and accepted proposals. Broadly, however, the anthology aims at a foreword and afterword, as well as four or five thematically differentiated sections, each featuring three to five essays, each at a length of 5000-7000 words. The anthology aims at covering a wide historical scope, with essays starting as early as the silent film era and including recent horror film production. Thematically, the anthology has a wide international scope, but is expected to gravitate toward U.S. and anglophone productions. The anthology does not exclude contributions that cover canonical films and performers. However, in order to avoid overlap with already existing research, it strongly favors contributions that cover either overlooked films and performers or films and performers of recent years that have not yet received critical recognition. While individual proposals on Final Girls and Scream Queens are evaluated on their individual merits, these topics are in themselves not of any primary interest given the wealth of already existing research.



Please submit a proposal/abstract of 500-1000 words, and a brief biographical blurb that lists specific examples of your published work (or a professional CV). Please email your proposal/abstract, or any questions or suggestions you might have, to Steffen Hantke at steffenhantke@gmail.com before October 1, 2025.



Steffen Hantke has edited Horror, a special topic issue of Paradoxa (2002), Horror: Creating and Marketing Fear (2004), Caligari’s Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear after 1945 (2007), American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (2010), and, with Agnieszka Soltysik-Monnet, War Gothic in Literature and Culture (2016). He is also author of Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Literature (1994), Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America after World War II (2016), and Cloverfield: Creatures and Catastrophes in Post-9/11 Cinema (2023).



Last updated June 13, 2025

CFP To Be Loved by Death: Afterlives of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles Collection (10/15/2025)

Edited collection - To Be Loved by Death: Afterlives of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles

deadline for submissions:
October 15, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Deanna Koretsky

contact email:
dkoretsk@spelman.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/07/24/edited-collection-to-be-loved-by-death-afterlives-of-anne-rices-vampire-chronicles

With the recent and highly acclaimed AMC adaptation of Interview with the Vampire and AMC’s broader acquisition of Anne Rice’s literary corpus, The Vampire Chronicles have found renewed cultural relevance. As Season 3 enters production, we invite reexaminations of the legacy and transformation of Rice’s vampiric work across media, genres, and generations.

We are seeking scholarly essays that critically engage the many adaptations, appropriations, and afterlives of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles for an edited volume in Palgrave’s Studies in Monstrosity series. We invite contributions from scholars across disciplines. 

Topics may include, but are certainly not limited to:

• AMC’s Interview with the Vampire (2022- ): approaches to race, queerness, temporality, and trauma; departures from and faithfulness to Rice’s canon; cultural impact as seen in fan engagements, rewatch podcasts, and public writing; place within AMC’s Immortal Universe.

• Of particular interest: in addition to the reimagining of Louis and Claudia as Black and expressly queer characters, we are also keen to see critical work that addresses the reimagining of Armand as Brown, as well as the show’s addition of Dubai as a touchstone setting

• Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994): performance, aesthetics, reception, and the film’s place in gothic cinema.
• Michael Rymer’s Queen of the Damned (2002): casting, music, race, cult status.
• Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s Lestat (2006): Broadway reception, musical form, queer gothic sensibilities, status as commercial and critical failure.
• Adaptations and appropriations in other media: comics/graphic novels, theater, ballet, visual art, body art, etc.
• Comparative interpretations: Rice's vampires (in any iteration) in dialogue with other vampire narratives (e.g., Sinners, Suicide by Sunlight, The Originals, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Only Lovers Left Alive, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, etc.); vampires and authors that inspired Rice (e.g., Blacula, Carmilla, Dracula’s Daughter, Byron, Polidori, Stoker, etc.)
• Tourism and cultural geographies: vampire tours in New Orleans and beyond, the commodification of Rice’s legacy, intersections of fiction, space, and local/global histories.
• Fandom and community: fan fiction, online forums, cosplay cultures, conventions, and the evolving role of fan labor in sustaining Rice’s mythos.
• Vampire Balls and immersive fan events: performance, ritual, identity play, and the gothic carnivalesque.
• Sexuality, gender, race, colonial histories and legacies, queer and trans embodiments, illness and disease, disability, neurodivergence, youth and age/ageing, world religions/religious feeling, and other key thematic preoccupations in Rice’s fiction and/or its adaptations.
• Adaptation as translation, revision, or resistance to Rice’s politics or aesthetics.

Submission Guidelines

• Abstracts of 300 words due: October 15, 2025
• Complete first draft (7,000–9,000 words, MLA style) due: May 30, 2026
• Revised final draft due: October 31, 2026

Submit abstracts to: Deanna Koretsky (dkoretsk@spelman.edu) and Alex Milsom (amilsom@hostos.cuny.edu). Please include a short bio (50–100 words) with your abstract.


Last updated August 1, 2025

CFP Haunted Cities: Spaces, Spectres, and Urban Hauntologies (7/1/2025)

 

Haunted Cities: Spaces, Spectres, and Urban Hauntologies

deadline for submissions: 

July 1, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

Editors - Marko Lukic and Irena Jurkovic/University of Zadar

contact email: 

hauntedcityspaces@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/05/26/haunted-cities-spaces-spectres-and-urban-hauntologies

Call for Papers

Haunted Cities: Spaces, Spectres, and Urban Hauntologies

Edited Collection

Cities are palimpsests of the living and the dead, spaces where, as Derrida’s concept of hauntology reminds us, the past continues to loom over the present, unsettling linear time. At the same time, these urban spaces illustrate what Henri Lefebvre calls the production of space as an always-unfinished process of conflict and memory. These spectral tensions find some of their most creative and thoroughly -explored expressions in the realm of fiction. In works such as Henry James’s The Jolly Corner (1908) and China Miéville’s The City & the City (2009) imagined haunted urban spaces reveal what David Harvey describes as spaces of uneven development, where suppressed histories seep back as phantoms. By contrast, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000)transforms a suburban home into an unnavigable space—an infinite labyrinth that echoes Jameson’s postmodern urban disorientation.

These literary haunted spaces establish a narrative and conceptual framework that cinema both inherits and expands. Film, as a visual medium, transforms abstract urban anxieties into embodied and sensory experiences, intensifying the spatial logic of literary hauntings.  From the stigmatized Cabrini-Green in Candyman (1992/2021) to the cursed Tokyo apartment blocks of Ring (1998) or Dark Water (2002), cinematic cities stage Foucault’s heterotopias, hosting parallel realities that rupture everyday geographies. Digital and alternative media intensify these hauntings with narrative forms that blur the boundaries between fiction, film, and real-world space. Silent Hill, a horror video-game franchise, reimagines rust-stained streets as psychic cartographies of guilt; urban-exploration channels like The Proper People and Exploring with Josh broadcast real-time descents into abandoned malls and hospitals, creating participatory hauntologies; Instagram “ruin porn” and TikTok ghost-hunting micro-videos circulate affective geotags that turn everyday viewers into curators of the uncanny.

Drawing on Anthony Vidler’s architectural uncanny, Mark Fisher’s weird and the eerie, and Judith Butler’s notion of grievability, this collection asks how such literary, cinematic and digital spectres animate contemporary cities, mediate collective trauma, and reconfigure the politics of place—inviting scholars to map these restless urban phantoms. We seek proposals from interested scholars from across the disciplines that critically engage with haunted and/or haunting urban spaces from the modernist period to the present-day metropolises, including imagined urban spaces of the future. Submissions may explore cities across diverse global and transnational contexts, engaging with a variety of media—from literature and film to video games and other digital platforms.

Essays may explore but are not limited to the following topics:

• Urban Hauntologies: theorizing spectral temporalities, ruins, and palimpsestic geographies
• Media & Mediation: film, television, podcasts, video games, VR/AR, and YouTube series that (re)construct urban hauntings
• Literary Ghostscapes: gothic, weird, speculative, or realist narratives that map haunted streets and buildings
• Spectral Infrastructures: abandoned transit lines, sewers, data centres, smart-city dead zones, and digital afterlives
• Memory & Trauma: post-conflict or post-disaster ghosts, memorial architecture, dark tourism circuits
• Sound & Haunting: sonic ecologies, urban field recordings, auditory hauntings
• Embodied Haunting: flânerie, psychogeography, paranormal investigations, affective mapping of fear
• Decolonial & Queer Hauntings: counter-memories, suppressed histories, marginalized presences in the city
• Climate & Eco-Hauntings: rising waters, toxic ruins, and environmental spectres in urban futures
• Methodologies of the Uncanny: digital humanities (GIS, XR), ethnography, archival excavation, art practice as research

 We invite all interested scholars to send their proposal (400-500 words) and short bio (max. 200 words, including author’s academic affiliation) to hauntedcityspaces@gmail.com . Full-length essays should be 6000-8000 words (including references, notes, and citations) and follow the Harvard style guide. University of Wales Press has expressed interest in the volume as part of their Horror Studies series.

Deadline for abstracts: July 1st 2025

Notification of acceptance: July 15th 2025

Deadline for essay submission: October 15th 2025

Last updated May 31, 2025

CFP Horror Videogames - A Companion (8/31/2025)

 

Call for Papers: Horror Videogames - A Companion

deadline for submissions: 

August 31, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, Surrey, UK

contact email: 

ewan.kirkland@uca.ac.uk

Call for Papers: Horror Videogames: A Companion

Editors: Dr Connor Jackson and Dr Ewan Kirkland

 

This publication – which is planned for submission to Peter Lang’s Genre Fiction and Film Companions series – aims to provide readers with an accessible yet scholarly overview of the historical, cultural, technological and aesthetic dimensions of the horror videogame, organised around an extensive series of short case studies. Accordingly, we are seeking abstracts for a series of shorter chapters presenting critical analyses of key titles in the genre’s history.

Videogames should be chosen for their popular cultural impacts, uniqueness and innovative contributions to the horror genre and videogame medium. The collection will cover a variety of time periods, platforms, development contexts, countries of origin and sub-genres. It will also feature various manifestations of horrific content; from monsters, zombies, ghosts, and eldritch abominations to psychological horror, jump scares, and fourth wall-breaking cult games. Each chapter will justify its selected case study as a noteworthy horror videogame, while also embedding its chosen text within academic discussions of genre, storytelling, design and/or affect.

The collection will be divided into several sections, which are detailed below alongside suggested entries. We welcome submission on the suggested videogames, as well as submissions on videogames that are not on our list of suggested entries. Please note that we do not require submissions on Left 4 Dead (2008) or Five Night’s at Freddy’s (2014), as these titles will be covered by the editors.

 

Sections and Suggested Entries

Early Horror Videogames: 3D Monster Maze (1981), Haunted House (1982), Carmageddon (1997), Clock Tower (1995), Alone in the Dark (1992), Doom (1993)

Canonical Horror Videogames: Resident Evil (1996), Silent Hill (1999), Fatal Frame (2001), Dead Space (2008), Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (2002)

Horror Videogame Sequels: Silent Hill 2 (2002), Alan Wake 2 (2023), Little Nightmares II (2021), Amnesia: Rebirth (2020), Resident Evil 4 (2005)

Adaptation in Horror Videogames: Alien: Isolation (2014), Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (2017), The Walking Dead (2012), Dead Rising (2006)

Multiplayer Horror Videogames: The Outlast Trials (2024), Dead by Daylight (2016), Phasmophobia (2020)

Indie Horror Videogames: Mouthwashing (2024), Carrion (2020), Signalis (2022), Mundaun (2021), Murder House (2020)

 

Please send chapter abstracts of around 200 words (excluding references) alongside bios of up to 100 words to Connor Jackson (jacksoc1@hope.ac.uk) and Ewan Kirkland (ewan.kirkland@uca.ac.uk) by Sunday 31st August 2025 with the subject heading: “Horror Videogames Abstract”.

Abstract titles should follow the same format, with the game title and a subheading indicating the area/focus of horror to be addressed. For example, “Left 4 Dead (2008) – The Horror of Abandonment” and “Five Nights at Freddy’s (2014) - Service Industry Horror”. Full chapters should be 2,500-3,000 words (excluding references).

If you are interested in covering more than one videogame, feel free to add a list of up to 3 other titles alongside your submission. Should your submission entry be in high demand, the editors may contact you to discuss your secondary options.

Also, if you have any questions, please send them to the above-mentioned email addresses. 

 

Provisional Timeframe

CFP Deadline: Sunday 31st August 2025 

CFP Feedback by end of September 2025 

Completed Chapters by end of January 2026

Feedback with potential edits by end of April 2026 

Chapters returned by end of June 2026

Submission of final draft to editors by end of August 2026

Last updated May 29, 2025

CFP Experimental Horror (7/15/2025)

 

Call for Essays: Experimental Horror Edited Volume

deadline for submissions: 

July 15, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

Erica Tortolani, Ph.D.

contact email: 

etort.phd@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/05/24/call-for-essays-experimental-horror-edited-volume

Please direct any general inquiries to Erica Tortolani at etort.phd@gmail.com.  

In Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde, Joan Hawkins observes that avant-garde and experimental cinema oftentimes trade “the same images, tropes, and themes that characterize low culture” (3); low culture, in this instance, pertaining to genres like horror. Indeed, many experiments in film in video, like the horror genre, have banked on “uncomfortably visceral reaction(s)” (5), exploiting the physical limits of the body on screen. Moreover, in works like Possibly in Michigan (Condit, 1983), The Scary Movie (Ahwesh, 1993), and The Fourth Watch (Geiser, 2000), artists often utilize visual, aural, and narrative horrific elements (sometimes even referencing earlier horror films altogether) to further interrogate representational strategies in mainstream media and explore themes including bodily agency and autonomy, trauma, and memory. Conversely, the horror genre, in the hands of visionary, transgressive filmmakers, becomes experimental by design, pushing narrative, representational, and spectatorial boundaries in the process. Veronica Dolginko asserts that horror more broadly “can be seen as experimental by nature. Trying to find and craft excellent, full-force scares is a form of experimentation, and the trial and error that follows is really the only way to produce results” (n.p.). Recently, films like The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (Cattet and Forzani, 2013), The Wolf House (León and Cociña, 2018), Friend of the World (Butler, 2020), Skinamarink (Ball, 2022), and Enys Men (Jenkin, 2022) have deliberately broken from aesthetic and narrative convention, expanding the boundaries of the genre in the process.  The experimental mode and horror genre, while widely studied as two separate entities, therefore have a significant, symbiotic relationship.

The proposed volume welcomes essays that consider any of the following topics:

1) Experimental films, videos, and/or interactive/multimedia installations that incorporate visual, aural, and/or narrative elements that relate to the horror genre;

2) Experimental films, videos, and/or interactive/multimedia installations that elicit adverse affective responses or uncomfortable visceral reactions, in the same manner as films belonging to the horror genre;

3) Feature-length (either released theatrically or via streaming video on demand) horror films that challenge linear narrative, points of identification, and/or generic tropes

Contributors are encouraged to consider the function and value of merging experimental film, video, and other visual media with the horror genre. How can we best operationalize experimental or avant-garde horror? For what purpose do filmmakers utilize horrific elements in their experimental works? How and with what impact do they manipulate horror-specific generic conventions? Why construct non-conventional horror films? What future lies ahead for experimental horror filmmaking?

Likewise, contributors may submit essays focusing on topics spanning temporal and geographic boundaries, with specific preference given to those writing about understudied and overlooked media texts. Essays on those films and other media crafted by BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and international artists (outside the US/Hollywood) are also strongly preferred.

Please submit essay abstracts (not exceeding 300 words in length) as well as a brief bio (not exceeding 150 words in length) to etort.phd@gmail.com no later than Tuesday, July 15 at 5:00 PM EST.

*** 

Some suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

Blood of the Beasts (Franju, 1949)

Dementia (VeSota, 1955)

Ursula (Williams, 1962)

Invocation of My Demon Brother (Anger, 1969); or, any works by Kenneth Anger

The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (Brakhage, 1971)

The Third Part of the Night (Zulawski, 1971)  

Ganja & Hess (Gunn, 1973)

Tape #1 1974 (Circa) (Maughan, 1974); or, any works by Cynthia Maughan

The Virgin Sacrifice (Lawrence [as J.X. Williams], 1974)

House (Obayashi, 1977)

Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977)

Altered States (Russell, 1980)

Secret Horror (Smith, 1980)

Beneath the Skin (Condit, 1981)

Grand Mal (Ourlser, 1981)

Cherie, mir ist schlecht (Kiss, 1983)

Possibly in Michigan (Condit, 1983)

Ghost (Takashi, 1984); or, any works by Takashi Ito

Where Evil Dwells (Turner and Wojnarowicz, 1985)

Begotten (Merhige, 1989)

Secrets of the Shadow World (Kuchar, 1988-99); or, any works by George Kuchar

Santa Sangre (Jodorowsky, 1989)

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shin’ya, 1989)

The Scary Movie (Ahwesh, 1993)

His Master’s Voice (Gibbons, 1994); or, any works by Joe Gibbons

Don’t – Der Österreichfilm (Arnold, 1996)

Tuning the Sleeping Machine (Sherman, 1996)

Within Heaven and Hell (Cantor, 1996)

Nocturne (Ahwesh, 1998)

The Amateurist (July, 1998)

Ice from the Sun (Stanze, 1999)

The Fourth Watch (Geiser, 2000)

Hollywood Inferno (Episode 1) (Parnes, 2001-03)

Evokation of My Demon Sister (Cantor, 2002)

Hans und Grete (de Beer, 2002); or, any works by Sue de Beer

Bataille (Provost, 2003)

Ani(fe)mal(e) (Scheurwater, 2005); or, any works by Hester Scheurwater

Monster Movie (Takeshi, 2005); or, any works by Takeshi Murata

Amer (Cattet and Forzani, 2009); or, any works by Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani

Antichrist (von Trier, 2009)

Long Live the New Flesh (Provost, 2009)

Ghost Algebra (Geiser, 2010)

Disease of Manifestation (Tzu-An, 2011) 

Berberian Sound Studio (Strickland, 2012)

A Dream of Paper Flowers (Jarman, 2015)

My House Walk-Through (PiroPito, 2016)

Hauntology Film Archives (Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, 2018-22)

The Wolf House (León and Cociña, 2018); or, any works by Cristobal León and Joaquin Cociña

Atlantics (Diop, 2019)

Friend of the World (Butler, 2020)

Enys Men (Jenkin, 2022)

Skinamarink (Ball, 2022)

Stone Turtle (Woo, 2022)

The Great Curdling (Thomas, 2022); or, any works by Jennet Thomas

Last updated May 28, 2025

CFP Mothers, Mothering, and Motherhood in the King Universe (8/31/2025)

Mothers, Mothering, and Motherhood in the King Universe

deadline for submissions: 

August 31, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

Dr Conner McAleese

contact email: 

cmcaleese@dundee.ac.uk

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/05/24/mothers-mothering-and-motherhood-in-the-king-universe

Dr Conner McAleese invites proposals on representations of motherhood in any of Stephen King’s fiction.

Over the past fifty years, King’s works have been adapted, discussed, academically investigated, and, of course, read to an extent that few authors have ever been before. However, one aspect of King’s writing has yet to be given scholastic attention – the mothers of Stephen King’s fiction.

From Margaret White’s religious fanaticism in Carrie (1974) and Piper Laurie’s terrifying portrayal of the same character in Brian de Palma’s 1976 adaptation of King’s debut novel, King has obsessively and consistently employed mothers, and the tropes of motherhood, within his novels and short stories. Rachel Creed’s obsessive fear of death, and its realisation in her young son, Gage, is indicative of how generational trauma plays a significant role in Pet Sematary (1983) and in King’s wider representations of motherhood. Donna Trenton’s tragic defence of son, Tad, in Cujo (1981) demonstrates how a mother’s guilt of past betrayals can become horrific karmic punishments, at least to a mother’s mind. Wendy Torrance, and her bond with her son, Danny Torrance, in King’s The Shining (1977) and Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the same name in 1980, have become synonymous with how King balances gender, motherhood, and the role of wife as a source of horror.

However, King’s writings on mothers and motherhood is not limited to the 20th century. New takes on mothers and mothering abound in his 21st century works. Holly Gibney’s prominence in King’s recent writings, shows King’s understanding of how the role of ‘mother’ has changed in the past twenty years. Mrs Sigsby and Maureen Alvorson of King’s The Institute (2019), too, demonstrate new and competing paradigms in which King’s mothers transcend the binary of being either wholly good or wholly evil (a common criticism of King’s writing), as more dynamic and competing representations of motherhood are shown in his works (patriotism, and mental illness in the case of Sigsby and Alvorson respectively).

This collection seeks to break new ground in our understanding of King’s prolific contributions to literature. In focussing on mothers, motherhood, and the desire to ‘mother’, this collection aims to demonstrate the compelling and deliberate use of gendered ‘nurturing’ tropes within King’s works and how their reinforcement and subversion informs his horror. Suggested topics include, but are in no way limited to:

-        Motherhood and Trauma

-        Creating horror from the need to ‘mother’ (e.g. Annie Wilkes in Misery)

-        Familial relationships/dynamics in King’s fiction (with mothers being included)

-        Generational Trauma and its effects on the mothers in King’s works (e.g. Rachel Creed’s fear of death in Pet Sematary)

-        Depictions of mothers in King’s adapted works

-        Religion and its influence on Mothering Strategies (e.g. Margaret White in Carrie and Mother Abigail in The Stand)

-        Pregnancy in King’s Fiction

-        The rejection of motherhood in King’s fiction (e.g. Holly Gibney)

-        Mental Illness in the mothers of Stephen King

-        Navigating gender through motherhood (e.g. Wendy Torrance in The Shining)

-        The recuperative function of motherhood

-        Resilience and Motherhood (e.g. Annemarie in Salem’s Lot)

-        Queer Coding mothers in King’s fiction

-        Motherhood, fear and loss (e.g. Donna Trenton in Cujo)

-        Defending children in King’s fiction (e.g. the Loser’s Club in IT)

-        Villainy and the ‘doubly deviant’ female

-        Motherhood and control (e.g. Sonia Kaspbrak from IT)

-        Incest, Sexuality and Motherhood (e.g. Deborah Hartsfield in Mr Mercedes)

-        Any writing on the mothers in Stephen King’s Fiction

 

Chapters should be between 2,500 and 4,500 words long (including endnotes and bibliography) and this proposal will be initially submitted to the Genre Fiction and Film Companions at Peter Lang (Oxford).

Please send a proposal of 250 words, together with a brief biography to Conner McAleese via cmcaleese@dundee.ac.uk by the 31st of August, 2025. All decisions will be communicated no later than the 20th of September, 2025. 

Full chapters will be due in mid-2026.

If you have any questions, no matter how informal, please do not hesitate to communicate those as early as possible.

 

About the Editor

Dr Conner McAleese is an early career researcher, currently working at the University of Dundee. He has published works on American Folk Horror, 21st Century American Horror Literature, and 21st Century Horror films. His Ph. D thesis deals with issues of American identity, trauma, and anxiety in horror literature written after 9/11 and the creation of the Homeland Security and PATRIOT Acts.

Last updated May 28, 2025