CFP A Warning to the Curious: Ghostly, Supernatural and Weird Tales Conference (4/10/2025; Online 8/23-24/2025)

 

Online Conference: A Warning to the Curious: Ghostly, Supernatural and Weird Tales

deadline for submissions: 

April 10, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

Romancing the Gothic

contact email: 

awarningtothecuriousconference@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/01/06/online-conference-a-warning-to-the-curious-ghostly-supernatural-and-weird-tales.

CFP for A Warning to The Curious: Ghostly, Supernatural and Weird Tales

 

An ONLINE conference on 23rd and 24th August 2025 marking the 100th anniversary of MR James A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 10th April 2025

The conference is fully online and is open to scholars and experts from around the world.

In 1925, M R James published his final collection of ghostly tales: A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories. Often thought of as a writer of ‘ghost stories’, James’ works span a range of supernatural manifestations and generically sit on the cusp of the ghostly and weird. James’ name has become almost synonymous with the ghostly tale and many of his works have been adapted. This conference seeks to explore not only James’ work but also its legacy and it aims to put James’ work within the wider context of ghostly, supernatural and weird writing on both a national and international level. We therefore welcome papers on writers and artists from any historical period and any country.

The year’s conference seeks to mark the anniversary of James’ collection with a conference exploring three key themes:

1)      MR James’ work, its reception, adaptation and legacy

2)      Short form terror – weird fiction, ghost stories, and other short forms traditions (including oral and digital modes)

3)      20th-century supernatural writing

 

We welcome papers focusing on ghostly and supernatural traditions globally as well as papers on the British tradition of which MR James formed such a key part. We do not wish to impose rigid definitions of the weird, ghostly, or ‘ghost story’ and welcome a wide range of approaches. While the conference predominantly focuses on written forms, we also encourage papers that look at oral and non-traditional modes of story production and non-narrative forms e.g. art and music.

Romancing the Gothic seeks to encourage innovative conversations across barriers, bringing together scholarship and research from different countries, traditions, sub-fields and perspectives.

We welcome scholars, researchers and experts from all stages of their career and from every background

What are we looking for?

We welcome:

• 20 minute papers
• 10 minute lightning talks
• Panels (3-4 papers of 20 minutes with or without a suggested panel chair)
• Workshops (cooking, writing, art, music, craft, drama, dance) related to the key themes of the conference

Potential Topics

We welcome papers on a range of topics. The below are suggested areas but we welcome papers from outside these themes.

• The production and dissemination of MR James’ work
• MR James’ short fiction
• Intersections between James’ academic work and his fiction
• Adaptations of James’ work
• Horror and the antiquarian
• Intersections of the archaeological and horror
• James’ legacy
• Fictional representations of MR James
• The Victorian or Edwardian ghost story (focus on any specific author or text welcomed)
• Early Weird Fiction
• Ghost belief in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
• 20th century developments in the ghost story
• Adaptations of 19th and early 20th century ghost tales
• The ghost story as form
• Oral traditions of ghost-telling
• Christmas story-telling and adaptation traditions

 

An abstract of 150-250 words should be sent to awarningtothecuriousconference@gmail.com before 10th April 2025. If you have not written an abstract before, I will be running workshops on abstract writing. Please enquire at the email above. Your abstract should function as a short summary of your paper and demonstrate your expertise in the area. You can also include a short biography (<100 words) but all submissions will be judged solely on the abstract and a biography is not required at this stage.

Accessibility Notes

We want to work with all contributors to make sure that the conference is fully accessible for them. We work entirely online. Subtitles are auto-generated during the conference. Information is provided with alt-text where required and accessibility training is offered to all speakers. For the conference itself, clear information on the timetable, running of the event and what to expect is provided ahead of time. We have a clear code of conduct which is used to maintain a welcoming atmosphere and a comfortable space for all participants. We are explicitly queer friendly and aim to be an inclusive conference for all. If you have any questions, queries or requests at this stage or at a later stage, please do not hesitate to contact me at awarningtothecuriousconference@gmail.com

 

categories

film and television

online conferences

popular culture

twentieth century and beyond

victorian

Last updated January 10, 2025

CFP Romancing the Gothic Conference 2023 – The Supernatural and Witchcraft in belief, practice and depiction (3/31/2023; 8/26-27/2023)

Romancing the Gothic Conference 2023 – The Supernatural and Witchcraft in belief, practice and depiction

Main site: https://romancingthegothic.com/2022/11/12/romancing-the-gothic-conference-2023-the-supernatural-and-witchcraft-in-belief-practice-and-depiction/.
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In 1848, William Harrison Ainsworth published his novel The Lancashire Witches based on the real-life witch-trials in Pendle in 1612. Exploring the background of the trials and executions, it was heavily based on Thomas Potts’ Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancashire (1613). 1848 also saw the publication of Catherine Crowe’s The Night-Side of Nature with T. C. Newby. The book purported to unclose something of this ‘night side of nature’ with all its wonders. After all, she tells us, ‘we are encompassed on all sides by wonders, and we can scarcely set our foot upon the ground, without trampling upon some marvellous production that our whole life and all our faculties would not suffice to comprehend.’ The book featured accounts of dreams, wraiths, doubles, ghosts and more. This year, Romancing the Gothic is marking the 175th anniversary of these publications with a conference dedicated to the subjects which lie at the heart of both texts: witchcraft, the supernatural in history, belief, practice and depiction.

We invite individual papers (20 minutes) or panels (3 x 20 minutes) exploring the fictional, factional and factual depiction or discussion of witchcraft and the supernatural from any period. This conference seeks to focus on the changing ways in which practices and beliefs have been understood and depicted as well as mapping the ways in which discourses of witchcraft and of the supernatural have been deployed in different historical, political, theological and social contexts. We welcome papers discussing all traditions of witchcraft and supernatural belief and depiction and would particularly encourage pre-formed panels discussing specific national or cultural traditions.

We welcome papers on topics including:

• The Night Side of Nature and The Lancashire Witches
• The wider work of William Harrison Ainsworth and Catherine Crowe
• The Lancashire ‘witches’
• The depiction of witches in fiction, film, video games etc.
• The depiction of witch trials
• Histories of persecution
• Factual and factional writing on the supernatural
• Occult writers
• The depiction of the supernatural in fiction and film
• Ghost-hunting (historical or contemporary)
• Ghost stories
• Social histories of the ghost
• Real ghosts and hauntings
• Supernatural typologies
• Queering the Supernatural
• Changing theologies of the supernatural
• Brujeria and its depiction in contemporary media
• Fear and the supernatural
• Healing and the supernatural
• Histories of ghost (and other supernatural) belief
• Supernatural dreaming in fiction and fact
• Changing theologies of the supernatural
• Internet subcultures related to witchcraft and the supernatural

The conference will be held entirely online on 26th-27th August 2023. We will be accepting abstracts until March 31st 2023. Please send abstracts of 250-300 words and a short bio. We accept and welcome papers from academics and non-academics, including practitioners. We also welcome pitches for ‘workshops’ or interactive activities. For previous conferences these have included: 18th century dance lessons, cooking with Dracula demonstrations, and creative writing workshops. Please send all pitches to the conference organiser Dr Sam Hirst (University of Liverpool/Oxford Brookes University) at sam@romancingthegothic.com.

To ensure the conference is accessible to the maximum number of people, there is no fee for presenters. Everyone delivering a paper or workshop will be offered a small honorarium. The event is online, using subtitling and will be recorded so that those unable to attend at various times (for example, due to timezones) are able to access all the events. Please contact me with any questions or requirements related to accessibility at the email address above.

If this is your first conference or you would like support with abstract writing, I will be putting on an online workshop on writing abstracts. Please email me at sam@romancingthegothic.com if you would like to attend.

CFP- Depicting the afterlife: morality and religion in contemporary film and media (collection) (abstracts by 11/17/2024)

CFP- Chapter abstracts for the edited collection “Depicting the afterlife: morality and religion in contemporary film and media 

source: https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/10556125/cfp-chapter-abstracts-edited-collection-%E2%80%9Cdepicting-afterlife
 
Announcement published by Angelique Nairn on Friday, July 29, 2022

Type: Call for Papers

Date: November 17, 2022

Location: New Zealand

Subject Fields: Film and Film History, Literature, Philosophy, Popular Culture Studies, Religious Studies and Theology




(For possible inclusion as part of the Routledge Advances in Popular Culture Studies series)

As Garrett (2015) contends, popular cultural representations of the afterlife are a means of imaginatively and creatively grappling with the unknown. These representations can offer explanations about life after death or the in-between, to rationalize the existential, support and challenge religious doctrines, and entertain and educate so that society might live life to the fullest or feel assured that there is something more.

According to O’Neil (2022), at their crux, these representations hinge on hope and the prospect of happiness, permeable boundaries that see a blurring of ‘here’ and ‘there,’ self-determination as key to understanding the afterlife, and acts of sacrifice and love that forge the conditions of eternal happiness. These ideas about the afterlife construct perceptions of morality and religion: what one must do now to reap the benefits once one has passed over.

These popular cultural representations, then, present “a range of narratives, consumer choices, moral dispositions and selected rituals of conduct” (Saenz, 1992, p. 43), which people “may adopt, adapt, criticize or reject as components in our implicit knowledge” (Dant, 2012, p. 24). With media such as The Good Place, Upload, The Inbetween, Afterlife of the Party, Coco, Soul, Reaper, Elsewhere, If I Stay, and Boo Bitch (to name but a few), focused on the afterlife, it seems timely to explore the messages promulgated in such texts about morality and/or religion. This is especially given media can prompt questioning and reasoning that aids self-reflection (Hawkins, 2001) and integrates people into an established order offering models of appropriate ways of being (Krijen & Verboord, 2016).

Therefore, this collection aims to explore representations of morality and/or religion in 21st-century popular cultural texts that feature and emphasize the afterlife. It asks how the afterlife is understood but moreover, how are people encouraged to live their lives? Such aims will inevitably consider what place (if any) religion has in shaping popular cultural texts and understandings of the beyond, and what perceptions of morality are favoured and guide character story arcs. Ultimately this edited collection will contribute to a continued and growing discussion on the representations of morality, religion, and the afterlife in contemporary society.

Please send 300- word abstracts, including a title and short biography to Angelique Nairn angelique.nairn@aut.ac.nz by November 17th 2022.

Please note that the edited collection will not be published before 2024.

Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Moral motivation/reasoning and life after death
• Dichotomies of Heaven and Hell
• Representations of the ‘soul’
• Cultural differences in constructions of the afterlife
• Depictions/constructions of the spiritual realm
• Ghosts, the paranormal, and the afterlife
• Religious motifs in texts that feature the afterlife
• Representations of Supreme Being(s)
• Notions of suffering and reward in the afterlife

Contact Info:


Dr Angelique Nairn

Auckland University Technology
Contact Email:
angelique.nairn@aut.ac.nz

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 DEADLINE EXTENDED - 03/18 - EDITED COLLECTION: The Palgrave Handbook to the Ghost Story (3/18/2022)

DEADLINE EXTENDED - 03/18 - EDITED COLLECTION: The Palgrave Handbook to the Ghost Story

Source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/01/28/deadline-extended-0318-edited-collection-the-palgrave-handbook-to-the-ghost-story

deadline for submissions:
March 18, 2022

full name / name of organization:
Joan Passey, Jen Baker, Henry Bartholomew

contact email:
joan.passey@bristol.ac.uk

The Palgrave Handbook to the Ghost Story

This handbook seeks to open new conversations about the ghost-story form. It is open to all media, genre, and disciplines - fiction, nonfiction, theatre, cinema, video games, podcasts, graphic novels, musicals, and so forth - as well as spaces and time periods (antiquity to the present).

Chapters will provide a new angle, intervention, or perspective on various aspects of the ghost-story tradition. These can be thematic, author-based, chronologically centred, or narrative-based.

We anticipate chapters to be c. 4000 words. We hope to organise chapters under the following potential sections, though anticipate overlap. We have provided some suggestions for topics, but these are not prescriptive nor exhaustive – we welcome your ideas.



Section 1: Folklore and Legends

• Including creepypasta, urban legends, global folktales, antiquarians, mythologies, folkhorror.

Section 2: Haunted Environments

• Cities, coasts, moors, gardens, the non-human, animals, insects, seascapes, colonial space.

Section 3: Ghostly Bodies and Objects

• Paintings, ruins, jewellery, dolls, bodies, psychometry, illness, malady, diagnosis, pathology, injury, corporeal ghosts, seances.

Section 4: Ghostly Experiences

• Psychical investigation, haunted houses, haunted funfairs, children as audience, audience in theatre, video gamers playing ghostly games.

Section 5: Anxious Inheritance and Legacy

• Influence, legacy, adaptation, inheritance, bloodlines, family inheritance (ie, Dacre Stoker, Joe Hill), steampunk, rewriting medieval ghosts, ghosts of antiquity, the canon.

Section 6: Spectral Theories and Epistemologies

• Theories within and without the text, religions, theologies, queer, Marxist, gender, science and technology, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, economics, psychology, hysteria, paranoia, madness, ecocritism, methodologies and frameworks.

Section 7: Paranormal Paraphernalia

• Archives, letters/interviews, found footage, paratext, prefaces, epigrams and epigraphs, magazines, pamphlets, posters, illustrations.

Abstracts should be 150-300 words, 3-5 keywords, and be accompanied by a biographical note of 100 word (max) [this can include a link to a research profile]. These should be sent to

Jen Baker j.baker.5@warwick.ac.uk, Joan Passey at joan.passey@bristol.ac.uk and Henry Bartholomew henry.bartholomew@plymouth.ac.uk by 18th March 2022. We welcome questions and inquiries. Please send either in the body of the email or as one PDF or .doc attachment.




Last updated March 7, 2022

CFP Southern Gothic Area at PCAS/ACAS 2022 (6/1/2022; New Orleans 10/13-15/2022)

CFP: Southern Gothic Area at PCAS/ACAS 2022

Source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/03/03/cfp-southern-gothic-area-at-pcasacas-2022

deadline for submissions:
June 1, 2022

full name / name of organization:
Popular Culture/ American Culture Association in the South

contact email:
SouthernGothicPCAS@gmail.com

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: THE SOUTHERN GOTHIC AT PCAS/ ACAS 2022

Submission deadline: June 1, 2022; Notification of acceptance by July 1, 2022



Despite the difficulty in defining what exactly the Southern Gothic is, it nevertheless is one of the most prominent ways the South is represented in media and culture. From Flannery O’Connor to The Originals, Truman Capote to True Detective, and William Faulkner to The Walking Dead, whether categorized as a form, a style, or a genre, the Southern Gothic is bound up with regional cultural anxieties regarding shifting discourses of race, class, gender, sexuality, and geographic identity itself. From its most stereotypical depictions to more nuanced, complex interpretations, the Southern Gothic shapes the wider perception of regional identities in ways that invite our contemporary scholarly engagement.

To this end, the Southern Gothic area of the Popular Culture / American Culture Association in the South (PCAS/ ACAS) invites proposals for individual presentations, roundtable discussions, or full panels of 3-4 papers at the 2022 PCAS/ ACAS Annual Conference, to be held October 13 - 15, 2022 in New Orleans, LA.

Topics might include (but are in no way limited to):

• the Southern Gothic in film, TV, and literature
• adaptation(s) of Southern Gothic literature
• the Southern Gothic in new media (games, podcasts, graphic novels, etc.)
• the emergence of “Southern noir” as a subgenre
• race, class, gender, and/ or sexuality in the Southern Gothic
• Southern true crime as a cultural phenomenon
• documentary and the Southern Gothic
• Global elements of/ approaches to the Southern Gothic
• Southern Gothic tourism
• monsters in the Southern Gothic: vampires, zombies, ghosts, etc.
• mental health narratives in the Southern Gothic
• specificity—or generality—in Southern Gothic geographies
• the Southern Gothic in popular music
• pedagogical approaches to/ uses of the Southern Gothic
• the spectre of history in the Southern Gothic
• sites of intersection between the Southern Gothic and other genres/ modes

PCAS/ ACAS is dedicated to working toward equity, diversity, and inclusion both within our organization and in academia at large. As such, we encourage submissions by underrepresented and marginalized scholars based upon race, gender, sexuality, and employment status (e.g., graduate students and non-tenure track or unaffiliated/independent scholars).



To propose a presentation (of 20 minutes or less) or a roundtable discussion for the Southern Gothic Area, please send the following to Area Chair Stephanie Graves at SouthernGothicPCAS@gmail.com by June 1:
Name of presenter(s), institutional affiliation (if any), & email address for each presenter
Type of submission (individual paper, roundtable, or full panel)
Presentation abstract (250 words or fewer)
Indication if you need access to A/V (not all rooms have A/V available)

Submission deadline is June 1, 2022; notifications of acceptance will be sent by July 1, 2022.



NOTE: In order to be considered for the Southern Gothic Area, please follow the instructions above rather than submitting through the PCAS/ ACAS website.

Everyone is invited to submit one academic paper and can, in addition, participate in a round-table discussion or creative session. Only those proposals intended for the Southern Gothic area should be submitted as outlined above; the PCAS/ ACAS website has an online submission form for the General Call.




Last updated March 8, 2022

CFP Stranger Worlds: H. G. Wells, Transgression and the Gothic (8/15/21, virtual UK 11/13/21)

2021 Conference Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Stranger Worlds: H. G. Wells, Transgression and the Gothic 

Saturday, 13 November 2021  

Source: http://hgwellssociety.com/statementofobjects/2021-conference-call-for-papers/

There you touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination. We see our world fair and common … By our daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger and death. But did he see like that?

H.G. Wells, The Door in the Wall

This year marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Wells’s death. In a career that spanned fifty years and over a hundred books, Wells invited his readers to step across the threshold of human consciousness and to venture into realms beyond space, time and morality. His scientific romances expose the fragility of the human body and the thinness of humanity’s separation from the animal (The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau). A reviewer of The Time Machine felt that Wells’s imagination was ‘as gruesome as that of Poe’ and his short stories often dramatize gothic transgressions between the living and the dead. Later works such as The Croquet Player and The Camford Visitation see consciousness slipping its moorings and inhabiting or possessing other bodies.     

Once considered an annexe or niche in literary studies, the Gothic is now firmly established as a key mode of understanding research in, and the enormous global popularity of, genres such as horror, science fiction and fantasy. We invite applications for papers that consider the importance of the Gothic in the work of H. G. Wells. Papers need not be exclusively confined to Wells, but may also consider Wells’s gothic afterlife, reception and influence.  

Presentations will take the form of 20-minute papers, given via Zoom.   

Topics may include, but are not limited to:  

• Wells and Gothic genres and his relationship to his Gothic predecessors including Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mary Shelley 
• Wells’s use of horror and terror in for instance, The War of the Worlds
• Gothic bodies; the Gothic across species  
• Gothic geographies  
• Returns from the dead; buried secrets; Gothic histories  
• Ghosts, monsters, apparitions and vampires  
• Transgressive behaviour and crime in Wells’s work
• Wellsian afterlives in science fiction, the graphic novel, cinema, TV, and computer games  

Please send a 250-word abstract to Dr Emelyne Godfrey juststruckone@hotmail.com by 15 August 2021.

Members: Free

Non-members: £10 Applicants will be notified by 31 August 2021. We encourage attendees to become members of the H.G. Wells Society and look forward to seeing you there.   

Weird Fiction Review 8

Now available from Centipede Press:

Weird Fiction Review #8
http://www.centipedepress.com/anthologies/wfreview8.html

Edited by S.T. Joshi
Artwork gallery by Erol Otus.
Lengthy interview with Patrick McGrath.
History of the small press: Shasta Press by Stefan Dziemianowicz.
Several new essays and stories.
Sewn paperback.
Nearly 400 pages.

pricing: $35, on sale for $19.

 
The Weird Fiction Review is an annual periodical devoted to the study of weird and supernatural fiction. It is edited by S.T. Joshi. This eighth issue contains fiction, poetry, and reviews from leading writers and promising newcomers. This issue features fiction by John Shirley, Flannery O’Connor, Lynne Jamneck, Michael Washburn, and others, and articles by Stefan Dziemianowicz (an illustrated history of Shasta Publishing), Michael Shuman (on horror films and garage and surf music), Adam Groves (on the golden age of speculative erotic fiction), John C. Tibbetts (on John M. Barrie), Forrest J Ackerman (on Robert Bloch), as well as verse and other essays and fiction. The feature of the issue is Chad Hensley’s terrific interview with Erol Otus, the iconic artist that did so much of the Dungeons & Dragons artwork of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The front and back cover, and inside covers, are by artist Grant Griffin. The list price on this item is $35 and it is on sale for $19.

Full contents details available by visiting Centipede Press's page for the book at http://www.centipedepress.com/anthologies/wfreview8.html.

CfP: Monsters of Film, Fiction, and Fable Collection (4/30/15)

Courtesy the IAFA site:

NOTE EXPIRED DEADLINE

http://www.fantastic-arts.org/2015/cfp-monsters-of-film-fiction-and-fable-edited-collection/

CfP: Monsters of Film, Fiction, and Fable — Edited Collection
Posted on April 4, 2015 by Public Information Officer
Monsters of Film, Fiction, and Fable: The Cultural Links between the Human and Inhuman

This proposed collection will explore the cultural implications of and the societal fears and desires associated with the literal monsters of fiction, television, and movies. Long tied to ideas of the Other, the inhuman have represented societal fears for centuries. While this depiction of inhuman as Other still persists today, postmodern times also saw a radical shift in the portrayals and long-held associations. The postmodern monster is by no means soft and cuddly; nevertheless, its depiction has evolved. Veering from the traditional, “us vs. them” dynamic, many contemporary works illustrate what posthuman theorists refer to as the “them” in “us” correlation. These new monsters, often found in urban fantasy, eradicate the stark separation between human and inhuman as audiences search for the similarities between themselves and their much beloved monster characters. The shifted portrayal also means that these select, postmodern monsters no longer highlight cultural fears, but rather cultural hopes, dreams, desires, and even humanity’s own inhumanity. This does not mean that the pure monsters of horror are eradicated in contemporary renderings. Instead, they too have evolved over the course of the 20th and 21st century, highlighting everything from socioeconomic anxieties to issues related to humanity and human nature.

Given the many and varied implications of the inhuman in media and their long and diverse history, this volume will examine the cultural connotations of the monstrous, focusing specifically on the monsters of modernism and postmodernism.

In particular, we are looking to fill in certain gaps, and welcome articles related to the following monsters:

– Ghosts
– Leviathons/behemoths—anything from Mothra to Dragons
– Science Fiction related monsters such as artificial intelligence and cyborgs

The proposal for this collection is in progress, and will be submitted once selections are made.

Please email the following to Lisa Wenger Bro (lisa.bro@mga.edu) by Thursday, April 30:
– a 300-350 word abstract
– a brief biography
– the estimated length of the full article
– the number of illustrations, if any, you will use (note, it will be up to individual authors to secure rights to images)

Full articles will be due by June 30. All accepted articles will be peer-reviewed.

CFP 2014 Victorians Institute Conference (6/15/14; Charlotte, NC 10/24-25/14)

CFP DEADLINE EXTENDED: 2014 Victorians Institute Conference
Location: North Carolina, United States
Conference Date: 2014-06-15 (in 4 days)
Date Submitted: 2014-05-14
Announcement ID: 213763
The Mysteries at Our Own Doors

The 43rd Meeting of the Victorians Institute

Proposals Due: 6/15/2014 (NEW DEADLINE)

Conference Dates: October 24-25, 2014
Location: Charlotte, NC

Sponsored by Winthrop University

 Please send 300-500 word proposals for papers and a 1-page c.v. to Casey Cothran via email at viconf@winthrop.edu  by June 15, 2014.

 Henry James once said of Wilkie Collins: “To Mr. Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.” Indeed, through the fiction of Collins (and others) the Victorian Era saw the rise of the detective novel as an art form.  Moreover, it also produced a wealth of poems, novels, and prose works that concerned themselves with mysteries, secrets, enigmas, and the unknown. Sensing that they stood on a threshold, that the shadowy borders of new knowledge and understanding lay almost within reach--at their “own doors,” as James said--Victorian authors struggled with a variety of mysteries arising from their interests in science, religion, the occult, mesmerism, identity, sexuality, race, class, and the Empire. We invite papers on any of these topics. Papers or panels on poetry, prose, nonfiction, or visual art are welcome, as are presentations on the pedagogy of teaching Victorian literature.

Possible topics might address detective fiction; poetic mysteries; spiritualists and mesmerists; mysteries of gender and sexuality; the mysterious Other; death; crime; ghosts, vampires or monsters; religion; Victorian science and medicine; industry and technology; archeology and paleontology; illustrations and media adaptations; language and hybridity; history and discovery; new worlds and cultures; travel and empire; pseudonyms; biography; photography; music; journalism; the mysteries of unveiling Victorian literature and culture to undergraduates; how Victorian mysteries can be discovered and solved in online classrooms, and other topics related to Victorian studies.

The keynote speaker is Marlene Tromp, Professor of English and Women’s Studies and Dean of Arizona State University’s New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. https://newcollege.asu.edu/directory/marlene-tromp

Selected papers from the conference will be refereed for the Victorians Institute Journal annex at NINES.

Limited travel subventions will be available from the Victorians Institute for graduate students whose institutions provide limited or no support. More information about the travel awards and the application process will be posted to www.vcu.edu/vij.

Please visit www.vcu.edu/vij for information about the conference, the Victorians Institute, and the Victorians Institute Journal.


Casey A. Cothran
Winthrop University
Rock Hill, SC

Email: viconf@winthrop.edu
Visit the website at http://www.vcu.edu/vij