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 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 Haunted Modernities Conference (3/17/2025; Cornwall, UK 7/16-18/2025)

 

Haunted Modernities

deadline for submissions: 

March 17, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

Falmouth University, 16-18 July 2025

contact email: 

DESA@falmouth.ac.uk

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/12/03/haunted-modernities.

This conference explores haunted modernities and spectral futures of all sorts. Looking back to the past as a haunted space and forward to the ‘spectres’ of the future, we want ‘Haunted Modernities’ to be indicative of wide open spaces and fruitful intersections in scholarship and practice. Whether work is hyper-local, global, or interstellar we welcome imaginative, creative, ethical, and diverse discussions from all disciplines and subject areas. As well as traditional papers, creative practice work is also invited in whatever form - written, film, audio, performance, exhibitions etc. 

 

Hosted by Falmouth University, and co-sponsored by Northeastern University, the Haunted Modernities conference will be held in Cornwall on the Falmouth Campus, which is set in lush tropical gardens a few minutes’ walk from its picturesque town and beaches.

 

Following on from our other international conferences which included Folk Horror in the Twenty-First Century and Haunted Landscapes I & II, please come and join us for this latest conference for the annual conference of the Dark Economies Scholarly Association (DESA).

 

Keywords/Possible Topics include (but are not bound by):

 

AI (affects and effects)

Architecture

Art      

Comics           

Climate Disaster

Consciousness

Crip Pasts/Futures

Cyber Spirituality

Data

Fugitivity

Futurism

Film

Games

Gender (of all and any sorts)

Gentrification

Ghosts

Heritage

Hauntology

Hyperconnection

Home/shelter/house/development

Infrastructure

Literature

Lots, allotments

Machines

Magic

Manifestos

Maps

Micro landscapes

Migration

Mobility/Stasis

Neuroscience

Nostalgia

(Post)colonial, (Post)apartheid

Queer geographies

Racial Capitalism

Reverberations and Echoes

Slippage

The Subterranean

Space - the interstellar

Traces

Trauma

Translocal, Transurban, Transnational

The Uncanny

Urban geographies

Vacancy/Vagrancy

The Weird

Work

 

 

Please send 250 word abstracts and a short bio (and any questions) to:

DESA@falmouth.ac.uk and, k.saxton@northeastern.edu

 

 

Deadline: March 17 2025

categories

cultural studies and historical approaches

ecocriticism and environmental studies

ethnicity and national identity

gender studies and sexuality

popular culture

Last updated December 5, 2024

CFP Special Section: Monstrous New Orleans (6/15/2023; Popular Culture Association South, New Orleans 9/28-30/2023)

Monstrous New Orleans

deadline for submissions:
June 15, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Popular Culture Association South

contact email:
pcavampires@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/05/05/monstrous-new-orleans


New Orleans is known as one of the most haunted cities in the U.S. and as a haven for vampires (thank you, Anne Rice), but there are so many more monsters there than ghosts and vampires. With such a rich tradition of magic and the paranormal, New Orleans dazzles artists and scholars alike, inviting us all into the mysteries. To celebrate the dark depths of the city, PCAS welcomes papers or presentations that explore the monsters and the monstrous that roam the streets and psyches of New Orleans.



To have your proposal/abstract considered for this special session, please submit your proposal/abstract of approximately 250 words to pcavampires@gmail.com



NOTE: In order to be considered for the Special Section: Monstrous New Orleans 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 Monstrous New Orleans should be submitted as outlined above; the PCAS/ ACAS website has an online submission form for the General Call.



The conference will be held in New Orleans, Sept. 28-30, 2023.



Last updated May 9, 2023

CFP Nightmare/s in the Long Nineteenth Century Collection (3/15/2023)

Nightmare/s in the Long Nineteenth Century (CFP for edited volume)

deadline for submissions:
March 15, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Frances Clemente/University of Oxford; Greta Colombani/University of Cambridge

contact email:
nightmaresconference@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/12/19/nightmares-in-the-long-nineteenth-century-cfp-for-edited-volume.

Nightmare/s in the Long Nineteenth Century

(CFP for edited volume)

Building on the exciting multidisciplinary conference held last May 2022 at King’s College, University of Cambridge, funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership, we would like to invite proposals for essays to be included in an edited collection titled Nightmare/s in the Long Nineteenth Century.

The collection aims to explore the rich and multifaceted theme of nightmare in the arts, thought, and culture of the long nineteenth century. From Johann Heinrich Füssli’s 1781 oil painting The Nightmare, which was to become the iconic image of a newly emergent sensibility, to the first psychoanalytic investigations culminating in the Freudian study On the Nightmare by Ernest Jones (first published in 1911), the nineteenth century was characterised by a pervasive fascination with nightmares both as frightening dreams and, in their personified form, terrifying creatures or spirits (like the incubus).

Described by Samuel T. Coleridge as “not a mere Dream” but a peculiar oneiric phenomenon taking place “during a rapid alternation, a twinkling as it were, of sleeping and waking”, in the course of the nineteenth century the nightmare raised fundamental questions about conscience, the mind, fear, the Other, and the fear of the Other.

It occupied a special place in “the mythology of the Gothic imagination” (Philip W. Martin) not only because nightmares abounded in Gothic texts but also, and more significantly, because some of the most famous works in this genre – such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) – allegedly had their origins in their author’s nightmares. As “a phenomenon of passivity, self-effacement, irrationality, terror, and erotic excess” (Lisa Downing), the nightmare also conveyed cultural anxieties about repressed and deviant aspects of sexuality, as exemplified by another Füssli’s painting, the sapphic An Incubus Leaving Two Sleeping Girls (c. 1793), and by Louis Dubosquet’s definition of the nightmare as a nervous illness similar to hysteria in his medical thesis Dissertation sur le cauchemar (1815). Additionally, the age of imperialism witnessed the rise of ‘colonial nightmares’ which haunted Western imagination and gave voice to fears of racial otherness, as can be seen in “Lukundoo”, an American short story written in 1907 by Edward Lucas White about an explorer cursed by an African witch doctor and based on the authors’ own nightmares.

We invite proposals for contributions from various disciplines across the arts & humanities, with different methodological approaches and different geographical focus areas. Topics may include but are not restricted to:



● 19th-century literary and artsitic representations of nightmares

● 19th-century psychological and medical understanding of nightmares;

● nightmares and sleep

● nightmares and the unconscious

● nightmares and the Gothic;

● nightmares, inspiration, and the creative mind;

● nightmares, eroticism, and sexuality;

● nightmares and spectral apparitions;

● nightmares and hallucinations

● nightmares, altered states of consciousness, and psychoactive substances;

●nightmares and madness;

●prophetic nightmares;

●nightmares and the fear of (racial, ethnic, social, sexual…) Otherness;

●19th-century non-Western conceptions and depictions of nightmares.



Abstracts of 500 words, together with a short bio (max. 200 words), due March 15 2023 (notification of outcome by May 2023).

Final essays of 7.000-10.000 words, due September 15 2023.



All materials to be submitted to nightmaresconference@gmail.com.



With all best wishes,



The editors,

Frances Clemente (University of Oxford)

Greta Colombani (University of Cambridge)



Last updated December 20, 2022

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 Things That Go Bump In The Night: Premodern Narratives and Depictions of Spirit Visitation (9/1/19; IMC Leeds 2020)

Things That Go Bump In The Night: Premodern Narratives and Depictions of Spirit Visitation
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2019/06/04/things-that-go-bump-in-the-night-premodern-narratives-and-depictions-of-spirit

deadline for submissions: September 1, 2019
full name / name of organization: MEARCSTAPA
contact email: tmtomaini@gmail.com

Things that go Bump in the Night: Premodern Narratives and Depictions of Spirit Visitation



IMC Leeds 2020

Sponsor: MEARCSTAPA

Organizers: Asa Simon Mittman and Thea Tomaini



MEARCSTAPA seeks papers for the 2020 International Medieval Congress at Leeds on the varietal experiences of spirit visitation in premodern narratives and art. In accordance with the conference theme of “Borders”, we are especially concerned with liminal spaces and states of being. In contemporary ghost narratives there is a clear distinction between spirits of the dead who communicate with the living directly (by appearing in the material world to a human being who is awake and alert) and those who communicate with the living indirectly (by appearing in dreams to people who are asleep, or in visions to people who are in a trancelike state). In medieval and early modern literature, art, and theological narratives about spirits of the dead, this distinction is far less clear. Waking experiences in premodern narratives indicate the same sense of validation as non-waking experiences. The sensory reaction and emotional state of a person in the aftermath of a dream or vision (as in The Vision of Barontus) differs from that of a person (or people) experiencing the sensory shock of seeing, hearing, or speaking to a ghost in the material world, in real time (as in The Ghost of Beaucaire). Nevertheless, a ghost, phantom, or spectre appearing in a dream or vision is purported to be as “real,” its message to be as consequential and as meaningful, as one that manifests in the material world (whether is it seen, as a spectral figure, or unseen, as an invisible presence). We are looking for papers that explore issues of validation and experience in communication with the spirit world. In the premodern world, what is a “real” ghost experience where “crossover” is concerned?



Send proposals of 250 words maximum to tmtomaini@gmail.com and asmittman@asuchico.edu.

Deadline: September 1, 2019


Last updated June 5, 2019