The deadlines for these are all in January–some very close indeed!
1. GIFCon 2024: Conjuring Creatures and Worlds
Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow (on line), 15-17 May 2024. Deadline: 5 January 2024 (11:59pm)
How do academics, creative practitioners, and fans conjure (and understand the conjuration of) fantasy, creatures and worlds? Fantasy and the fantastic have the capability to conjure the ephemeral and the horrific, the indefinable and the real, the Other and ourselves, but how do we understand these creations? And how do these encounters with creatures, magic, and worlds conform or challenge our understanding of the fantastic?
2. Heavy Childhoods Conference
University of Huddersfield (in person and on line), 10-11 February 2025
Deadline: 10 January 2024
Ingrained social constructs of the child and childhood as a time of innocence, imagination, and wonder limit our understanding of other aspects that constitute childhood’s representations and experiences. [. . .] “Heavy Childhoods Conference” February 2025 invites delegates to explore “heaviness”, broad y defined, in relation to childhood. We explicitly encourage contributions from outside the global north, as well as transcultural research. [. . .] Creative, short form, and other alternative methods of engagement with the topic are welcome.
3. HI PhD Conference 2024: ‘Cannibal Consumption: Culture, Capitalism, Critique’
UCD Humanities Institute, Dublin, 1 March 2024
Deadline: 12 January 2024
The term ‘cannibalism’ evokes images of horror, violence, and taboo. It is a provocative and unsettling theme, often eliciting fear, disgust and fascination. Historically, colonial and imperial projects deployed racialised discourses of cannibalism in order to legitimise violence on allegedly ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ populations [. . .] However, the resurgence of cannibalism in contemporary fiction and film has subverted these traditional narratives, offering nuanced perspectives that challenge established norms, societal taboos, and questions of identity [. . .] Responding to the provocations raised by cannibalism today, the conference intends to expand the ways in which it can be conceptualised.
4. The Shelley Conference: ‘Posthumous Poems’, Posthumous Collaborations
Keats House Museum, London. 8-29 June 2024
Deadline: 29 January 2024
Two years after the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the summer of 1822, Mary Shelley, after a painstaking editorial process, published Posthumous Poems (1824). The volume contained much of Shelley’s major poetry, including the hitherto unpublished ‘Julian and Maddalo’, together with translations of Goethe and Calderón, and unfinished compositions such as ‘The Triumph of Life’ and ‘Charles the First’.
The Shelley Conference 2024 celebrates the first collected volume of Shelley’s poetry. Posthumous Poems is the product of collaborations. The most significant of these is between Mary Shelley as editor and Shelley as poet, but they also occur between Shelley and the guarantors of the volume, including Bryan Waller Procter (‘Barry Cornwall’) and Thomas Lovell Beddoes. The conference also addresses ideas of posterity and reception more generally in Shelley scholarship, the range of literary forms collected in a single volume, and the complex collaborative literary relationships that shaped Shelley’s life and endured after his death.
5. “Desire, Imagination and Dream” – Angela Carter in Portugal
Angela Carter Society, University of Lisbon, Portugal, 27-29 June 2024
Deadline: 31 January 2024
This international conference under the aegis of the Angela Carter Society seeks to explore the complex and multi-layered relationships between art, politics, place, and sexuality in the writings of Angela Carter. Taking place at the University of Lisbon, the conference takes inspiration from Carter’s visit to Portugal in the summer of 1977 [. . .]
This conference presents us all with an opportunity to reflect on the intersections of art, sexuality, politics and place in the writings of Angela Carter [. . .] 2024 is also an important year for Portugal, as it marks the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution which re-established democracy in the country. We therefore invite speakers to connect Carter’s writings about politics and place with the recent history of Portugal
