Some exciting conferences coming up!
1. Gothic Manchester Festival Conference 2019 ‘Gothic Times’, Manchester Metropolitan University, 26 October 2019. Deadline: 30 July 2019.
In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, with Trump in the White House and Brexit on the horizon, Angela Carter’s famous assertion of 1974 that ‘we live in Gothic times’ has never been more apt.
This year’s Gothic Manchester Festival Symposium picks up on these concerns, inviting twenty-minute papers on the theme of ‘Gothic Times’ that are accessible to a non-specialist audience. These may focus on any aspect of Gothic culture – literature, film, television, music, graphic novels, games, Goth subcultures, etc.
2. The Gothic Nature journal is being launched, with CFPs for a symposium ‘Gothic Nature II: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic’, University of Roehampton, 14 September 2019. Deadline: 20 July 2019.
Gothic Nature is a new interdisciplinary and peer-reviewed academic journal seeking to explore the latest evolutions of thought in the areas of ecohorror and the ecoGothic. It welcomes articles, reviews, interviews, and original creative pieces from researchers and artists interrogating the darker sides of our relationship to the nonhuman.
3. Gothic Realities: A Postgraduate and Early-Career Researcher Symposium, University of Stirling, 24-25 October 2019. Deadline: 30 August 2019.
Since its inception, Gothic has had a complex and fascinating relation to the real. Its origins in the mid and late-eighteenth century are imbued with the socio-cultural emergence of modernity, yet the Gothic Romances of this period, such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and those of Ann Radcliffe, playfully offset any historical veracity through fakery, phantasy and terror. The genre’s resurgence as a mode in the nineteenth century, and as an ever-increasingly plastic substance or style in the twentieth and twenty-first, has resulted in an explosion of Gothic literature and media. From its narratives and counter-narratives of property ownership, Empire, Queerness, technology, and life itself, Gothic has produced a multitude of metafictional realities –political and ontological.
