CFP Haunted by Hydrocarbons: Petrogothic and Petrohorror in the Contemporary Imagination (8/31/2025)

 

Edited Collection: Haunted by Hydrocarbons: Petrogothic and Petrohorror in the Contemporary Imagination

deadline for submissions: 

August 31, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

Jennifer Schell (University of Alaska, Fairbanks)

contact email: 

jschell5@alaska.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/01/31/edited-collection-haunted-by-hydrocarbons-petrogothic-and-petrohorror-in-the.

Edited Collection: Haunted by Hydrocarbons: Petrogothic and Petrohorror in the Contemporary Imagination

 

Deadline for proposal submission: August 31, 2025

 

Editors: Madalynn L. Madigar (Cherokee Nation, University of Oregon), Jennifer Schell (University of Alaska, Fairbanks)

 

Contact Email: mmadigar@uoregon.edu, jschell5@alaska.edu

 

For this edited collection, we invite proposals for essays that focus on and engage with petrogothic and petrohorror, emerging fields that examine the textual artifacts of hydrocarbon cultures through the lens of gothic and horror studies.

 

Petrogothic and petrohorror scholarship serves to address the anxiety, terror, and disquiet surrounding “petromodernity,” a term coined by scholar Stephanie LeMenager to describe the role of oil in constructing the material and social culture of contemporary globalized society. While the extraction, production, and combustion of hydrocarbons—primarily coal, oil, and natural gas—has enabled a luxurious standard of living in the Global North, it has also caused widespread destruction on almost every scale. Our premise for this collection is that humanities scholars need to examine the ingrained presence of petrocultures in contemporary cultural artifacts—including those invoke anxiety, fear, revulsion, horror, and terror—in order to counter the continued use of polluting fossil fuels and understand the corrosive influences of contemporary energy regimes. We recognize that over the last several years, some scholars have criticized petrogothic and petrohorror texts for their so-called invocations of “gloom and doom.” However, in this collection, we wish to add nuance to this discussion. Rather than treating these texts as monolithic, we propose to examine their intricacies and complexities so as to learn more about what they have to say about contemporary oil cultures. In so doing, we seek to gain greater insight into the feelings, constructions, and structures of fear (as well as other connected affects) that pervade human interactions with hydrocarbons and manifest themselves in collective and individual petrogothic and petrohorrific expressions.

 

To better address the manifestations of petrohorror and petrogothic in the contemporary imagination, we invite proposals for essays that engage with literature, film, graphic novels, comics, theatre, music, art, or any other oily texts. We are particularly interested in proposals for essays that center marginalized perspectives and address environmental justice issues.

 

Chapters might examine (but are not limited to) any of the following themes as a means of approaching petrohorror and the petrogothic:

• Temporality
• Geology and Fossils
• Extinction
• Monstrosity
• Spectrality
• Apocalypse
• Petromaterialisms
• Infrastructure and Technology
• Vehicular Cultures
• Plastics and Petrochemicals
• Pollution and Toxicity
• Waste Streams
• Illness and Disease
• Climate Change
• Environmental Justice
• Indigenous Epistemologies
• Necropolitics
• Capitalism and Colonialism
• Global and Regional Concerns
• More-Than-Human Perspectives

 

Please send a 300-word abstract and a 100-word bio to editors Madalynn Madigar (mmadigar@uoregon.edu)and Jennifer Schell (jschell5@alaska.edu) by August 31, 2025. Full essays of 6,000 to 7,000 words will be tentatively due by June 30, 2026.

Last updated February 28, 2025

CFP Fungal Horror and Popular Culture (6/1/2025)

 

Fungal Horror and Popular Culture

deadline for submissions: 

June 1, 2025

full name / name of organization: 

Berit Åström, Umeå University

contact email: 

berit.astrom@umu.se

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/04/10/fungal-horror-and-popular-culture.

As editors of the planned Palgrave Handbook on Fungal Horror in Popular Culture, which has 33 commissioned chapters, Dr Katarina Gregersdotter and Dr Berit Åström, Umeå University, Sweden seek approximately 10 additional original essays. 

We are primarily looking for chapters on fungal horror in non-Anglophone material, but also welcome studies of less mainstream Anglophone texts. 

Fungi are entangled in our lives, as food, as medicine or drugs, but also as parasites and agents of destruction, such as black mould, dry rot and cordyceps, the zombie fungus. This entanglement carries over into popular culture, where fungi are used to carry out different kinds of work, articulating deep seated fears and desires, functioning as a threat to, but perhaps also a saviour of, an embattled humanity on the brink of possible extinction.   

This edited volume will be the first full-length scholarly study of fungal horror in popular culture such as, but not limited to, literature, film, television, comics/graphic novels, computer games, art and memes. We invite contributors to approach the topic broadly, both in terms of material analysed and in the themes explored. 

 The chapters should be c. 7 000 words, including endnotes and bibliography.  

Send your abstract, of no more than 300 words, together with a brief biography to Berit Åström berit.astrom@umu.se and Katarina Gregersdotter katarina.gregersdotter@umu.se by 1 June, 2025. Notification of acceptance will be given no later than June 27, 2025.  

Deadline for submission of completed manuscripts is 15 January, 2026.

Last updated April 10, 2025

CFP Dinosaurs in Film, Literature, and the Arts Collection (9/25/2024)

Dinosaurs in Film, Literature, and the Arts

deadline for submissions:
September 25, 2024

full name / name of organization:
Rachel Carazo

contact email:
rachel.carazo@snhu.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/05/01/dinosaurs-in-film-literature-and-the-arts

This collection seeks essays on dinosaurs in film, literature, and the arts. The Jurassic Park franchise solidified the presence of dinosaurs in the pop cultural imagination, but there have been other media and dinosaur portrayals that have captured the public's imagination. Topics can include, but are not limited to:

-Studies of specific films

-Studies of specific novels

-Studies of special effects renderings of dinosaurs

-Artwork with dinosaurs

Chapters will be due in April 2025. Chapters should be approximately 5,000 to 7,000 words, with Chicago-style endnotes and a bibliography page.

Abstracts and a brief bio should be submitted by September 25, 2024, to Rachel Carazo: rachel.carazo@snhu.edu



Last updated August 1, 2024

CFP Gothic Studies Area (6/30/2023; MAPACA Philadelphia 11/9-11/2023)

MAPACA: Gothic Studies

deadline for submissions:
June 30, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association: Gothic Studies Area

contact email:
wsmcmasters@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/05/10/mapaca-gothic-studies



Gothic Studies CFP for MAPACA 2023: The Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association is accepting proposals until June 30 for their 2023 conference, Nov 9 - 11, in Philadelphia, PA. General guidelines can be found at mapaca.net and below. Please consider submitting to the Gothic Studies area: https://mapaca.net/areas/gothic-studies



The Gothic Studies area invites proposals which engage with the genre and culture of the Gothic as it is represented in film, television, literature, art, and society. We are especially interested in ways that the Gothic aesthetic defines itself against other predominate modes, or genres, of storytelling or culture. We also invite proposals concerned with subgenres of the Gothic across media, like the American Gothic, southern Gothic, feminine Gothic, the “weird tale,” and the ecoGothic as represented film, television, literature, music, fashion, art, and culture.

For more information and for the general CFP, visit mapaca.net



Last updated May 11, 2023

CFP Casas Tomadas: Monsters and Metaphors on the Periphery of Latin American Literature (7/30/2023)

Call for Book Chapters: "Casas Tomadas: Monsters and Metaphors on the Periphery of Latin American Literature"

deadline for submissions:
July 30, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Carlos A. Gonzalez

contact email:
cgonzalez@g.harvard.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/04/24/call-for-book-chapters-casas-tomadas-monsters-and-metaphors-on-the-periphery-of-latin

Vernon Press invites book chapters for an edited volume on the subject of "Casas Tomadas: Monsters and Metaphors on the Periphery of Latin American Literature."

Editor: Carlos A. González (Harvard University)

Monsters have always played an important role in the literature of Latin America, and have managed to persist in the national imaginations from which hispano- and lusophone writers draw their own source material. Dictators, strongmen, and organized crime roam the peripheries of language and history side by side with monsters, specters, and creatures horrible to behold.
This edited volume will draw together scholarship exploring the ways in which monsters, of the imagination and of history, persist in the literature, politics, language, and culture of Latin America, drawing from a wide array of sources and disciplines. It will also explore the role of literature in ensuring, processing, and reimagining the ongoing survival of the monstrous, with perhaps surprising results. It aims to explore the several manifestations of monsters and monstrosity in literature, arts, film and other Latin American media, by investigating the ever-changing forms they assume from early modernity to the present.
We welcome submissions that examine the ways in which monsters and monstrosity have been, and continue to be, depicted across temporal and geographical lines.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Monsters and monstrosity in myth and folk-lore
• The literary and artistic representation of monsters through time
• The subversion of the monster trope in contemporary art and literature
• The representation of monstrous Others
• The intersection of race, class, sexuality, and gender in the representation of monsters and monstrosity
• The ethics of monsters or monstrous others

We encourage submissions from scholars of all backgrounds and levels of experience. Particularly welcome are interdisciplinary and transcultural contributions which highlight the subversive power of monsters, as well as challenging the category of monstrosity as a whole.

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief biography to Carlos A. González, cgonzalez@g.harvard.edu, by July 30th, 2023.

Full papers should be no longer than 8.000 words and will be due by Nov 30th, 2023. All submissions will be peer-reviewed.

We look forward to receiving your submissions and engaging in a rich and thought-provoking exchange on the topic of monstrosity and monsters in Latin American culture, literature, and the arts.



Last updated April 27, 2023