* Hurry! Some of these deadlines are very soon!
1. Contemporary Folk Horror in Film and Media, Leeds Beckett University, 30-31 July 2020. Deadline: 30 December 2019.
The 1960’s and 70s folk horror canon brought the ‘Unholy Trinity’ of Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973), establishing a platform for rural horror and isolated cults. There is a current folk horror revival, with films such as Kill List (2011), A Field in England (2013), The Witch (2015), and Midsommar (2019) heading the film and media popularity. But what does this mean? What cultural, political and social reflections are part of the folk horror renaissance?
This conference aims to represent folk horror in today’s film and media, to delve into theories and critical thoughts on the genre.
2. Call for Submissions: Articles, creative writing and reviews relating to the work of Prof. Bill Gray in folklore, fairy tales and the fantastic.
The next deadline for submissions is 21 September 2019
The Chichester Centre for Fairy Tale, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction seeks articles, book reviews and creative writing relating to literary and historical approaches to folklore, fairy tales, fantasy, Gothic, magic realism, science fiction and speculative fiction for a special issue of Gramarye, its peer-reviewed journal published by the University of Chichester, celebrating the life of its founder Prof. Bill Gray (1952-2019). We are particularly interested in articles on fairy tales, fantasy literature and the work of C.S. Lewis, Robert Louis Stevenson, Philip Pullman, J.R.R. Tolkien, George MacDonald and ETA Hoffman.
3. Enchanted Environments: one-day symposium, University of Worcester, March 2020. Deadline: 6 December 2019.
We invite proposals for papers of 20 minutes as well as proposals for exhibiting practice based work exploring ‘enchanted environments’. For papers, please send abstracts of no more than 300 words; for practice based work, please send a brief outline detailing the work you’d like to exhibit.
4. The British Society for Literature and Science Winter Symposium 2019, University of Liverpool, 16 November 2019. Deadline: 23 September 2019.
In 2019, extinction is no longer the province of dinosaurs, the Dodo, or species far away in space and time. As Greta Thunberg argued in her Davos speech earlier this year, and as the ongoing socio-political efforts of the Extinction Rebellion suggest, extinction of the human (as well as the non-human) is an immediate concern and a very possible outcome of the climate crisis, unless significant action is taken by all. With this in mind, the ‘Extinctions and Rebellions’ symposium will think about the varied cultural discourses of extinction, past and present. It will not only be a platform to discuss current environmental and ecological concerns of the Anthropocene in the cultural imagination, but it also offers a space to think about how previous literary and scientific forms have imagined extinction as a process or finality, and how these conversations speak to and could offer a means to think about our current climate crisis. Moreover, we will explore ‘extinction’ and ‘rebellion’ as they pertain to questions of literary form and scientific theory and practice. This one-day event will allow postgraduates, early-career researchers, and academics to think about how the sciences and humanities can work together, inform, and facilitate the “clear language” needed to rebel against human and non-human extinction.
