HWA Academics

Deadline: July 1, 2021
Org: Amsterdam University Press
Email: post1970s@gmail.com
Editors: Madelon Hoedt, Marko Lukic

 
While the analysis of the horror genre, particularly its contemporary articulations, uncovers a myriad of different topics (new (and old) theoretical paradigms, alternative interpretations of familiar narratives and tentative readings of new ones, as well as the progressive expansion and relocation of the genre within a larger trans and interdisciplinary context), some of its basic premises remain inadequately explored. One such issue, or concept, is the notion of the victim, and its position, as well as function/purpose, within the larger framework of the genre. While being an unavoidable part of the genre narrative from its earliest endeavors, the ambition of the victim is to embody, articulate, and finally project all the fears and anxieties (introduced by the narrator/author) towards its target audience. The audience in turn catalyzes and identifies with the projected trauma, while simultaneously enjoying the suspension of disbelief. This dynamic, although simplistic in its nature, functions as an extremely prolific interpretative context confirmed through decades of highly focused research. However, the developed binary system bonding the readers/viewers with the imaginary, but nevertheless doomed victim remains, although logical, a rather “unfair” one, with the analytical focus being placed on the thoughts, experiences, and reactions of the viewers. The (fictitious) victims consequently retain a symbolically blank role, prone to inscriptions of meaning in accordance with a more generalized or overarching narrative.

What this call proposes is a possible unsettling of this binarity by challenging the perspective of the target audience through a re-evaluation and therefore re-reading of the concept of the victim(s) as well as their perspectives. Using different theoretical and disciplinary approaches as analytical prisms, the collection aims at reframing the position, role, and meaning of the notion of victim and victimhood within the horror genre ranging from the post-1970s period all the way to current articulations, regardless of the narrative medium (literature, film, theatre, videogames, comics, etc.). The idea here is to move away from existing trends of examining the victim as a reflection of the audience and their responses, and instead to engage the concept of the victim as a category in itself. This opens up questions about who may be regarded as a victim, as well as how they might be defined or how existing types might be (re)categorized.


Essays may explore, but are not limited to, the following topics:

- interpretations of victim and victimhood in different media (literature, film, theatre, videogames, etc.)

- interpretations of victim and victimhood in different horror (sub)genres (Gothic, slasher, torture porn, found footage, etc.)

- definitions of victims: archetypal victims (such as the final girl); victims as characters

- victims and modes of being (dead or alive; victim as protagonist or antagonist)

- structure and viewpoint used in victim narratives in horror

- (overcoming) trauma in horror’s explorations of victims

- the victim and narratives of empowerment and/or helplessness

- framing of victim narratives in relation to audiences in different media

- comparative studies of victims in different periods of horror (for example, the victim in Gothic texts)


The collection is intended for publication with the Horror and Gothic Media Studies imprint of Amsterdam University Press (https://www.aup.nl/en/series/horror-and-gothic-media-cultures). We invite all interested scholars to send their proposal (400-500 words) and short bio (max. 200 words, including author’s academic affiliation) to post1970s@gmail.com by July 1, 2021. Full essays should be 6000-8000 words (incl. references, notes, and citations) and use the MLA style guide.

 

Deadline for abstracts: July 1, 2021.

Notification of acceptance: July 31, 2021.

Deadline for essay submission: November 15, 2021.

Event Date & Location: October 28 and 29, 2021, virtually hosted by Lone Star College-University Park, 20515 TX-249, Houston, TX 77070
Thursday, October 28, 2021, 5:30 pm to 6:30 pm
Friday, October 29, 2021, 10:00 am to 4:00 pm

Deadline for Submissions:  August 29, 2021
Name of Organization: Lone Star College-University Park
Organization Website: https://www.lonestar.edu/popup.htm
Contact Email: Rhonda Jackson Joseph, Rhonda.JacksonJoseph@lonestar.edu

The Conference

The POP-UP academic conference is a two-day, virtual, multidisciplinary gathering of academics whose scholarly research interests include various aspects of global popular culture and the larger conversations surrounding these aspects. Interdisciplinary approaches are also welcome.

Submissions

The POP-UP academic conference is seeking 15-minute-long individual presentations and 45-minute-long panel presentations on popular culture and how the aspects examined affect the broader culture we live in. Our theme for this conference is “What brings you joy in popular culture?”
Please provide the following in your submission (for panel presentations, please submit all requested information for each panel member):

    • 300-word abstract
    • Preliminary bibliography
    • 50-word biography (should reflect academic credentials)
    • Indication of independent scholar or institution affiliation
    • Indication of undergraduate student, and if so, name of college attending

Email your submissions and/or questions to Rhonda Jackson Joseph at: Rhonda.JacksonJoseph@lonestar.edu

Deadline: May 1, 2021
Editor: Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns
Contact: citeron05@yahoo.com

Editors:

Subashish Bhattacharjee (Jawaharlal Nehru University),
Ananya Saha (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina)

http://artes.filo.uba.ar/pagnoni-berns-gabriel

 
We, the editors, are looking for four additional chapters for our book on Japanese horror. The deadline for the full manuscript to Lexington Press is May 10, 2021, so potential contributors must have in mind the process will be quickly as possible. Below, our original CFP.

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. These include classifications of ghosts as the yuurei and the youkai; the plight of the suffering individual in modern, industrial society, and the lack thereof to fend for oneself while facing circumstances beyond comprehension, or when the features of industrial society themselves produce horror (Ringu, Tetsuo, Ju on); settings such as damp, dank spaces that reinforce the idea of morbid, rotten return from the afterlife (Dark Water)—these are features that have now been rather unconsciously assimilated into the canon of Hollywood or western horror cultures, and may often be traced back to Japanese Horror (or J-Horror) cultures. Besides the often de facto reliance on gore and violence, the psychological motif has been one of the most important aspects of Japanese Horror cultures. Whether it is supernatural, sci-fi or body horror, J-Horror cultures have explored methods that enable the visualising of depravity and violent perversions, and the essence of spiritual and material horror in a fascinating fashion, inventing the mechanics of converting the most fatal fears into visuals.

The proposed volume will focus on directors and films, illustrators and artists and manga, video game makers/designers and video games that have helped in establishing the genre firmly within the annals of world cinema, popular culture and imagination, and in creating a stylistic paradigm shift in horror cinema across the film industries of diverse nations. We seek essays on J-Horror sub-genres, directors, illustrators, designers and their oeuvre, the aesthetics of J-Horror films, manga, and video games, styles, concepts, history, or particular films that have created a trajectory of J-Horror cultures. Works that may be explored in essay-length studies include, but are not limited to, Kwaidan, Onibaba, Jigoku, Tetsuo: The Iron Man and its sequels, Audition, Fatal Frame, the Resident Evil game franchise, Siren, Uzumaki, Gyo, Tomie, besides the large number of Japanese horror films that have been remade for the US market, including Ringu, Ju on, Dark Water, and Pulse among others, and a host of video games with Western/American settings (such as the Silent Hill franchise) and film adaptations (Resident Evil franchise)—analysing the shift from the interactive game form to consumable horror in the cinematic form. For adaptations, we are also looking for essays that analyse the shift from the interactive game form or image-and-text form to consumable audiovisual horror in the form of cinema and vice versa. Analyses of remakes could also focus on the translatability of Japanese horror vis-à-vis American or Hollwood-esque horror, and how the Hollywood remakes have often distilled western horror cinematic types to localise the content.

Directors, designers and manga artists working in the ambit of Japanese horror cultures who may be discussed include, but are not limited to, Nobuo Nakagawa, Kaneto Shindo, Masaki Kobayashi, Hideo Nakata, Takashi Miike, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Ataru Oikawa, Takashi Shimizu, Hideo Kojima, Junji Ito, Kazuo Umezu, Shintaro Kago, Katsuhisa Kigtisu, Gou Tanabe and others. Other issues that may be explored in J-Horror cultures may include the issue of violence and gore, gender and sexuality, sexual representation, the types of the supernatural, cinematic techniques and narrative techniques and others.

At this stage we are looking for both, submission of complete articles of up to 7000 words or abstracts for proposed chapters up to 500 words. 

Enquiries and submissions are to be directed to Fernando Pagnoni Berns at citeron05@yahoo.com

 

 

Date: Friday the 13th / Saturday the 14th / August 2021

Confirmed Keynote Speakers
Professor Vera Dika (New Jersey City University, USA)
Dr Steven Jones (Northumbria University, UK)

Call for Papers

Slasher, a disreputable offcut of the horror genre, has been the subject of intense criticism over the last 40 years. Despite an emergent body of scholarship that closely examines this subgenre across various forms and periods, seminal works from the 1980s and early 1990s still continue to monopolise the field, heavily referenced and applied to contemporary texts. It is undeniable that critics in film studies such as Robin Wood, Carol J. Clover, Vera Dika, Linda Williams and Barbara Creed provide us with important theoretical foundations that are still useful today. However, more needs to be done to examine the ways in which their works have been interpreted, developed and innovated by recent scholarship to create a critical discourse that appears to situate itself in “slasher studies,” a seemingly distinctive branch of horror studies that has gradually emerged over the last 20 years.

By collating papers that consider the relationship between slasher theory, history and practice, this online conference interrogates the very notion of “slasher studies” and its potential definition(s). Indeed, this conference fundamentally asks if “slasher studies” is an academic discipline in its own right, distinctive from horror studies, and if so, how did it become? Alternatively, if “slasher studies” is not its own academic discipline, why not and what are the disciplinary politics at play?

In asking these questions, this conference is the first of its kind and provides a safe and supportive interdisciplinary space for scholars to present their research, share their ideas and build a network with others working in the field, questioning and rectifying a plethora of theoretical, historical and practical assumptions in the process.

We welcome abstracts of 250 words for papers to be presented as part of this online conference to be held on Friday 13th and Saturday 14th August 2021, addressing any topics that develop theoretical, historical and practical traditions and analyses of the slasher subgenre.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

slasher and the (inter)disciplinary politics of theory
style and form, aesthetics and narrative
film and the mechanics of cross-media platforms (television, video games, novels, music, etc.)
characterisation and identification
national cinema(s) and (trans)national reception
Hollywood, production and distribution
audience and reception
gender and sexuality
race and ethnicity
disability and the politics of representation
class and the politics of representation
psychoanalytic and cultural readings

Please email abstracts of no more than 250 words, and a short bio, to Daniel Sheppard (daniel.sheppard@bcu.ac.uk) and Dr Wickham Clayton (wickscripts@gmail.com) by Friday 30th April 2021.

For more information and regular updates, follow us on Twitter @SlasherStudies or visit our website: https://slasherstudiesmassacre.weebly.com

The Moon has been a powerful presence in all human cultures since the beginning of time. Linked to femininity and death; witchcraft and the occult; ghosts and shapeshifters, the Moon was the focus of fears and superstitions. A constant element in fairy tales and pagan rituals, the Moon was seen as the dark, mysterious, and dangerous opposite to the Sun.

With the development of astronomy, the Moon, our planet’s satellite, figured prominently in early science fiction as the locus for speculations about the possibility of life on other planets. From Poe to Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, the Moon became both the symbol of scientific progress and a warning of its dangers; a penumbra of the Gothic falling across the face of science and reason.

Lunar horror and the Lunar Gothic exists on the intersection of these two trends: pagan mythology and scientific aspirations; the deep past and the near future. It is unique among other horror sub-genres in drawing upon both “hard” sci-fi and folk horror.
With the revival of the space program and possibility of building a base on the Moon, lunar horror is experiencing a renaissance as popular culture responds to the renewed interest in our satellite.

Possible topics might include, but are it limited to:

• Lunar Gothic/Horror in the Victorian Age: lunar hoaxes, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells (The First Men in the Moon).
• The Moon in Eastern Europe:  Jerzy Żuławski (The Lunar Trilogy); Soviet movies and the era of the sputnik; the Cold War; Lem’s stories of Commander Pirx.
• Lunar Gothic/Horror and the Apollo mission (Apollo-13)
• The Moon in folk horror (Ramsay Campbell’s The Hungry Moon)
• Lunar Gothic/Horror and the poetics of monstrosity (werewolves, vampires, zombies)
• Lunar Gothic/Horror and generic hybridity (dark SF, lunar noir): Sharman DiVono’s Blood Moon; Johan Harstad’s 172 Hours on the Moon; Ian McDonald’s Luna.
• Lunar Gothic/Horror and fairy tales: Meredith Pierce’s Darkangel;  Marissa Meyer’s The Lunar Chronicles; Cinderella Moon
• Lunar Gothic/Horror and conspiracy theories

Please send a 300-words abstract and a bio by August 31st, 2021 to:
Elana Gomel egomel@tauex.tau.ac.il and Simon Bacon baconetti@googlemail.com
Final essays of 6,000 words will be due October 31st, 2023.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: GOTHIC NOW

A round-table discussion at the 2022 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention sponsored by the MLA CLCS Gothic Studies Forum (deadline 3/15/21; convention 6-9 January 2022)

What are the driving forces behind and recurring conceits of the twenty-first-century Gothic? Why has the Gothic assumed such a position of prominence in contemporary literature and media?

The Gothic Studies Forum of the Modern Language Association invites proposals for short presentations (7-8 minutes) addressing these questions for a round-table discussion at the 2022 MLA Convention in Washington, DC.

200-word proposals focused on a specific keyword or theme and abbreviated CVs, as well as questions, may be directed to Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock at Jeffrey.Weinstock@cmich.edu. The deadline for submissions is March 15th. Those selected for the round-table must be MLA members or join by April 7th, 2021.

Ron Riekki and Kevin Wetmore, editors, call for abstracts for consideration for inclusion in a volume with the working title The Many Lives of The Purge.

We seek essays analyzing any and all parts of Blumhouse’s Purge Universe: The Purge (2013), The Purge: Anarchy (2014), The Purge: Election Year (2016), The First Purge (2018), The Purge TV series (2018-2019), The Forever Purge (2021), or other aspects of the franchise, including parodies of and references to in contemporary politics. 

Proposals due by: February 28, 2021

Accepted proposals will be informed immediately on March 1 and sent a style sheet.
First drafts are due June 15.  The draft will be 5-6K words (all inclusive of notes and works cited).

The editors will return edited drafts to contributors by July 4.  Final drafts will be due in early October. 

Email proposals and/or any questions to kwetmore@lmu.edu.  Thank you.

Deadline: February 28, 2021
Contact: pcavampires@gmail.com

Virtual conference

The co-chairs of the PCA/ACA Vampire Studies area are soliciting papers, presentations, panels and roundtable discussions that cover any aspect of the Vampire for the Annual National Popular Culture Association Conference to be held in Boston, MA from June 2-5, 2021. You must be a member of the PCA to submit a proposal.

This year is a return to the aborted theme from Philadelphia, the legacy of Dracula. Anyone who was accepted last year may resubmit their proposal for an automatic acceptance.  As well as Dracula, we are particularly interested in papers, presentations, and panels that cover:

      Vampires at the end of the world and beyond

      The vampire on legacy television shows (i.e. Dark Shadows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Moonlight, The Vampire Diaries, The Originals)

      The vampire on recent television shows (i.e. What We Do In the Shadows, From Dusk Till Dawn, Castlevania)

      Legacy Cinematic vampires (i.e. Nosferatu, Interview with the Vampire, Near Dark, Twilight etc.)

      Recent Cinematic Vampires (i.e. Carmilla, Hotel Transylvania, Therapy for the Vampire etc.)

      The Non-Western Vampire (i.e. Korean, Chinese, Latino/a/x, African)

      Vampire Cultures and Contexts (i.e. vampire RPGs or other gaming universes, fan studies, graphic novels)

      Vampires and the Marginalized (i.e. race, gender, sexualities, national origin)

      Genres such as Gothic Horror, Urban Fantasy, Steampunk, Young Adult, Erotica, Comedy

      The relationship between vampires and zombies or werewolves and/or other monstrous beings

      Vampire studies (i.e. the vampire in the classroom, vampire scholarship)

      Historic and contemporary vampiric locations and geographies (i.e. cemeteries, castles, cities)

And anything and everything in between!

To have your proposal/abstract considered for presentation, please submit your proposal/abstract of approximately 250 words at the Popular Culture Association Website. We also welcome complete panel proposals of 3-4 people.

Visit www.pcaaca.org to see examples of papers from recent PCA conferences.

If you have questions, contact us at pcavampires@gmail.com.  Also, follow us on Twitter @pca_vampires or join our Facebook group Vampire Scholars.