A mixture of CFPs, calls for articles, and events concerning the Gothic and the fantastic.
1. Gothic in a Time of Contagion, Populism and Racial Injustice, Online March 2021 (date to be confirmed), Simon Fraser University (SFU), Vancouver, Canada. Deadline: 31 October 2020
call for proposals for papers on how forms of the Gothic deal with the critical issues arising from racism, social injustice, populism, mass infection, and the relation of each of these to contagion in at least one of its many forms – the most pressing issues of our current moment — now and throughout world history.
2. Call for Papers: Fantasy, Theology, and the Imagination, collection edited by Austin M. Freeman, Andrew D. Thrasher, and Fotini Toso. Deadline: 15 November 2020.
In the world of High Fantasy, authors create fictional worlds that often reflect human religiosity and theological themes in new and creative ways. Through theological and religious analyses of high fantasy and fantasy series, the editors invite paper proposals for a volume on the intersection of fantasy and theology.
3. CFP for The 5th Vampire Academic Conference, 30-31 October 2020 (online), hosted by International Vampire Film and Arts Festival. Deadline: 14 September 2020.
This major interdisciplinary international conference aims to examine and expand debates around vampires in all their many aspects. We therefore invite researchers from a range of academic backgrounds to re/consider vampires as a phenomenon that reaches across multiple sites of production and consumption, from literature and film to theatre and games to music and fashion and beyond. What accounts for this Gothic character’s undying popular appeal, even in today’s postmodern, digital, commercialized world? How does vampirism circulate within and comment upon mass culture?
4. Call for articles: Supernatural Studies, Spring 2021 Special Issue on Disease. Deadlines: 31 October.
Supernatural Studies invites submissions for a special issue, inspired by the current crisis, on supernatural engagements with disease, broadly conceived. We welcome essays that explore this theme through explicitly monstrous tropes, e.g. zombies, vampires, parasitism, haunting, and other uncanny embodiments of sickness and contagion. We also invite investigations of narratives that deploy the supernatural to engage existing cultural “maladies” that infectious diseases routinely expose and exacerbate: e.g., economic precarity, healthcare inequities, media mis/disinformation, science skepticism and denial, environmental challenges, and experiences of alienation
5. Finally, we’d like to welcome and congratulate the new Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow. To launch the Centre, there will be ‘a lecture by acclaimed fantasy author Ellen Kushner, and a discussion panel on fantasy with Terri Windling, Professor Brian Attebery, and Dr Robert Maslen.’ This is an online event on 16 September 2020–use the link above to book.
