A batch of conference calls for papers and calls for chapters:
1. Reimagining the Gothic 2020: Bodies and Genders, University of Sheffield, 1-3 May 2020. Deadline: 2 December 2019.
Reimagining the Gothic is an ongoing project that seeks to explore how the Gothic can be re-read, re-analysed, and re-imagined. We encourage both public interest and new academic avenues from students and scholars who wish to present on the Gothic using interdisciplinary and creative methods. Bodies and genders have long been a key focus for Gothic texts and creators: either through positive, powerful self-identification with the Other or the expression of repressed fears and prejudices manifested in monstrosities.
Papers for ‘Reimagining the Gothic: Bodies and Genders’ should explore the way in which the Gothic mode has constructed and deconstructed physical and metaphorical bodies across various .
2. Politics and Horror, University of Stirling, 31 July – 1 August 2020. Deadline: 28 February 2020.
The University of Stirling invites paper, panel, and poster proposals focused on the role of horror and fear tactics in political commentary, political policy, and in film, literature, video games, comics, web series, and other media that demonstrate a clear connection to political sensibilities using horror imagery or affect.
3. Byron: Wars and Words: The 46th International Byron Conference, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, 29 June-5 July 2020. Deadline: 31 December 2019.
The aim of this conference is to look at how war in all its meanings, symbolisms, and manifestations influenced Byron’s words and worlds, and shaped his poetic and political sensibility. Drawing on recent scholarship in Romantic studies, it will also explore Romantic authors’ preoccupations with war, and how these intersected with Byron’s.
4. Folklore, Learning and Literacies: The Annual Conference of the Folklore Society, London, 24-26 April 2020. Deadline: 12 January 2020.
Lore is learning: folklore is a body of knowledge and a means of transmission. Vernacular knowledge, and vernacular transmission, each rooted in language. [. . .] Formal education and training is no more – or less – formative than the informal, everyday vernacular literacies that we absorb from our peer groups or families. A proverb is a condensed lesson; a ballad or a fairy-tale has a moral more often than not; a rite of passage may encapsulate a trade’s culture. And the landscape, whether rural or urban, is a theatre of memory and the backdrop of local legend.
So yes, lore is learning. But how do we learn folklore? How do we learn about folklore?
5. Critically Reading “The Vampire Diaries” – call for Papers/Abstracts: edited collection. Deadline: 1 March 2020.
Contributions can cover television studies, intertextuality, the role of social media in the TVD fandom, gender, adolescence, mind control, the Gothic, and can also relate to the original novels, the spin-off novels, or either or the television spin-offs.
6. Call for Chapters: Japanese Horror: New Critical Approaches to History, Narratives and Aesthetics (Extended Deadline). Deadline: 25 November 2019
The cultural phenomenon of Japanese Horror has been of the most celebrated cultural exports of the country, being witness to some of the most notable aesthetic and critical addresses in the history of modern horror cultures. Encompassing a range of genres and performances including cinema, manga, video games, and television series, the loosely designated genre has often been known to uniquely blend ‘Western’ narrative and cinematic techniques and tropes with traditional narrative styles, visuals and folklores. Tracing back to the early decades of the twentieth century, modern Japanese horror cultures have had tremendous impact on world cinema, comics studies and video game studies, and popular culture, introducing many trends which are widely applied in contemporary horror narratives. The hybridity that is often native to Japanese aestheticisation of horror is an influential element that has found widespread acceptance in the genres of horror.
