CFP Critical Approaches to Horror in Doctor Who (abstracts by 1/4/2021)

Critical Approaches to Horror in Doctor Who - Chapters Sought
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2020/08/03/critical-approaches-to-horror-in-doctor-who-chapters-sought

deadline for submissions:
January 4, 2021


full name / name of organization:
Robert F. Kilker / Kutztown University


contact email:
kilker@kutztown.edu




Although Doctor Who creator Sydney Newman wanted his show to be educational and avoid so-called “bug-eyed monsters,” the popularity of the Daleks in the second serial ensured that it would be better known for scaring kids into hiding behind the sofa. Adaptable as the science-fiction program is to fit a variety of other genres (e.g. the Western, screwball comedy, romance, period drama), horror dominates its cultural memory and ongoing practice. While there have been some critical essays over the years examining this aspect of the show, no book has been devoted to a more sustained examination of the generic work of horror in Doctor Who. This edited collection will remedy that absence.



More specifically, this book will serve as a thoughtful examination of the ways Doctor Who operates in the horror genre, in its complication of generic definitions, its ideological work, and its relation to fandom. Emerging and advanced scholars are invited to submit chapters exploring broadly an aspect of horror in classic and/or modern Doctor Who,as well as in-depth examinations of particular episodes. I am especially interested in having the following subtopics and/or episodes represented within the collection but welcome submissions on other matters as well:

• Body horror
• Fear of technology
• Fan experience (hiding behind the sofa, etc.)
• Folk horror
• Possession stories
• Gothic horror
• Ecohorror
• The monstrous feminine
• Vampires, werewolves, mummies
• Zombies
• Recurring monsters (Daleks, Cybermen, Weeping Angels, etc.)
• Pastiches of classic horror films
• Influence on the horror film tradition
• Alien invasion narratives
• The Terrible Child
• “Terror of the Autons”
• “The Daemons”
• “The Green Death”
• “The Ark in Space”
• “Pyramids of Mars”
• “The Seeds of Doom”
• “The Robots of Death”
• “The Talons of Weng-Chiang”
• “Horror of Fang Rock”
• “Kinda”/“Snakedance”
• “Ghost Light”
• “Blink”
• “Midnight”
• “Night Terrors”
• “The God Complex”
• “Listen”
• “Mummy on the Orient Express”
• “Heaven Sent”
• “Oxygen”
• “The Haunting of Villa Diodati”

Please submit abstracts of approximately 500 words along with a brief bio to Robert F. Kilker at kilker@kutztown.edu by January 4, 2021. Articles will be limited to 6,000 words (this includes notes and bibliography).



Abstracts due: January 4, 2021

Articles due: May 28, 2021

Edited articles due: October 15, 2021

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me (kilker@kutztown.edu).

 

Last updated August 6, 2020 

 

CFP The Automated Body (Spec Issue) (8/15/15)

CFP: ESC—“‘Fear, Love, and Confusion’: A Special Issue on the AUTOMATED BODY” (Deadline: August 15, 2015)
http://accute.ca/2015/05/28/call-for-papers-esc-fear-love-and-confusion-a-special-issue-on-the-automated-body-deadline-august-15-2015/
BY INFOACCUTE ON MAY 28, 2015

ESC—“‘Fear, Love, and Confusion’: A Special Issue on the AUTOMATED BODY”
Deadline for submission of abstracts or completed papers: August 15, 2015

ESC: English Studies in Canada invites submissions for a special issue on the automated body, edited by Cecily Devereux and Marcelle Kosman, to be published Spring 2016. This special issue is situated in response to an expanding range of questions and concerns about humans and automation in early twenty-first-century cultural representation. Such questions and concerns are arguably evident in representation from the earliest days of mechanization and industrialization in the late eighteenth century, and what a scant twenty years ago were referred to as “cybercultures” have been the focus for nearly three decades of academic considerations. Contemporary cultural texts, we suggest, demonstrate a renewed engagement with questions of the implications of the convergence of the biological with the mechanical and the relationships and the limits of what Donna Haraway characterized in her 1985 “Cyborg Manifesto” as “couplings between organism and machine” and the “fear, love, and confusion” they generate. If fear is evident in what a 2014 New York Times op-ed (June 22) characterized as “robot-worriers’” concerns about automation and unemployment in the workplace, to take only one example, love of—and confusion regarding—human-machine convergences is evident in proliferating stories of transformation, connection, and relationship such as the 2014 film Her and Allison de Fren’s 2012 documentary The Mechanical Bride. This special issue of ESC is interested in questions of automated bodies broadly conceived. It undertakes to bring into conversation a range of papers focused on any aspect of bodies and automation in cultural representation across media and disciplines. We are interested in automated embodiment as a distinctively contemporary concern yet also/and as well in the histories and archaeologies of such embodiment across periods and contexts.

• Bodies and/as machines; anthropomorphized machines; mechanical enhancement; prosthetics
• Cybernetics, biomedical engineering, genetic engineering; new eugenics and reproductive technologies
• Science fiction, fantasy, speculative and dystopic fiction and film; genres and subgenres: cyberpunk, biopunk, steampunk; automated bodies in comics media
• Fictions of transformation across media: Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” Coppélia, The Nutcracker
• Fictions of male reproduction; parthenogenesis; auto-generation; cloning
• Mechanical bodies and televisual media: The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Dark Angel, Aeon Flux; media and mechanization
• Mechanical bodies in dance; dancing machines; machine music; music and automatism; karaoke; Dance Dance Revolution
• Mechanical bodies and fitness; sports and automation
• Robots as themes and instruments in contemporary music: Daft Punk, Ladytron, Kraftwerk, Radiohead, Robyn; Auto-Tune
• Avatars; gaming bodies (bodies in games, players’ bodies); virtual automation; virtual companions; intimate operating systems: Her; Siri; artificial intelligence
• Humans and computers; computer automation; machine dependency; devices, appliances, watches, glasses; brain-computer interface
• Social media and automatism
• Robot, robotics, fembot, cyborg, cylon, clone, replicant; robots as “immigrants from the future” (The Economist)
• Anthropomorphized robots; robots and affect; robots and love; robots we love; robots we fear; human/robot hybrids; roboethics
• Donna Haraway: reading organisms and machines since “The Cyborg Manifesto”
• Gender and automation; automation and patriarchy; fantasies of automation; housewives and mechanization
• Femininity and living dolls; Mechanical Brides, Stepford Wives, Windup Girls
• Masculinity and living dolls; Lars and the Real Girl, My Living Doll, Metropolis
• Automation, capital, and labour; automation and exhaustion; robots and dirty human work; overwork and automation; automation and unemployment
• Bodies in industry; factory bodies; Taylorism; Fordism; factory girls, typewriter girls; modernism, modernity, Modern Times
• Automated monsters (Chucky); zombies and/as automated bodies; Frankenstein; bodies and/as weapons; automation and monstrosity
• Automatic writing; computer-generated poetry; hypnotism and performing bodies
• Animals and automation; robot animals; cinema and mechanical creatures; technologies of 3D animation
• Automobility, automaticity, bodies and cars; killer cars (Christine, Killdozer)
• Automated toys and other things; sex toys; future toys
• Talking to machines: everyday life and automated systems
• Machines without humans: self-parking cars, self-flying planes, drones, drone photography; killing machines
• Surveillance and security systems; facial recognition technology; NSA monitoring; bio-identification

Please forward either a 500-word abstract OR a completed paper (6000-8000 words, in MLA format) and a 50-word biographical statement to Marcelle Kosman (mkosman@ualberta.ca) and Cecily Devereux (cecily.devereux@ualberta.ca) by August 15, 2015. Final revisions to accepted papers will need to be completed by December 15, 2015.

ESC: English Studies in Canada is a quarterly journal of scholarship and criticism concerned with the study of literature and culture. Recent special issues include “Hysteria Manifest: Cultural Lives of a Great Disorder” (40.1: 2014), edited by Derritt Mason and Ela Pryzbylo); “The Global Animal” (39.1: 2013), edited by Karyn Ball and Melissa Haynes), and “Childhood and Its Discontents” (38:3-4: 2012), edited by Nat Hurley. For more information visit ESC Digital at www.arts.ualberta.ca/~esc ESC normally accepts black and white images, up to a limit of six per article. Contributors are responsible for providing image files in black and white with a resolution no less than… and for securing permissions in advance of publication. The journal’s style sheet is available at http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~esc/submit.php.

CFP Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities (Spec Issue) (3/1/16)

This sounds promising:

Call for Papers for Medical Humanities
Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities
http://scifimedhums.glasgow.ac.uk/journal-issue/

The BMJ Group journal Medical Humanities will be publishing a special issue: ‘Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities’.

Themes

We invite papers of broad interest to an international readership of medical humanities scholars and practising clinicians on the topic ‘Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities’.

Science fiction is a fertile ground for the imagining of biomedical advances. Technologies such as cloning, prosthetics, and rejuvenation are frequently encountered in science-fiction stories. Science fiction also offers alternative ideals of health and wellbeing, and imagines new forms of disease and suffering. The special issue seeks papers that explore issues of health, illness, and medicine in science-fiction narratives within a variety of media (written word, graphic novel, theatre, dance, film and television, etc.).

We are also particularly interested in articles that explore the biomedical ‘technoscientific imaginary’: the culturally-embedded imagining of futures enabled by technoscientific innovation. We especially welcome papers that explore science-fiction tropes, motifs, and narratives within medical and health-related discourses, practices, and institutions. The question – how does the biomedical technoscientific imaginary permeate the everyday and expert worlds of modern medicine and healthcare? – may be a useful prompt for potential authors.

Subject areas might include but are not limited to:

• clinicians as science-fiction writers
• representations of medicine, health, disability, and illness in science-fiction literature, cinema, and other media
• the use and misuse of science fiction in public engagement with biomedical science and technology
• utopian narratives of miraculous biomedical progress (and their counter-narratives)
• socio-political critique in medical science fiction (via cognitive estrangement, critical utopias, etc.)
• science fiction as stimulus to biomedical research and technology (e.g. science-fiction prototyping)
• science-fiction tropes, motifs and narratives in medical publicity, research announcements, promotional material, etc.
• the visual and material aesthetic of science fiction in medicine and healthcare settings

Publication

Up to 10 articles will be published in Medical Humanities in 2016.

All articles will be blind peer-reviewed according to the journal’s editorial policies. Final publication decisions will rest with the Editor-in-Chief, Professor Deborah Bowman.

Important Dates

Please submit your article no later than 1 March 2016

Submission Instructions

Articles for Medical Humanities should be a maximum of 5,000 words, and submitted via the journal’s website. Please choose the special issue ‘Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities’ during the submission process.

If you would like to discuss any aspect of your submission, including possible topics, or the possibility of presenting your work under the auspices of the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities’, please contact the Guest Editor in the first instance:  Dr Gavin Miller (gavin.miller@glasgow.ac.uk)

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.