CFP Sixth Biennial Dr. Henry Armitage Memorial Scholarship Symposium of New Weird Fiction and Lovecraft-Related Research (5/24/2024; Providence, RI 8/15-18.2024)

The Sixth Biennial Dr. Henry Armitage Memorial Scholarship Symposium of New Weird Fiction and Lovecraft-Related Research

NecronomiCon Providence convention in Providence, RI
15-18 August, 2024
Location: Omni Hotel, Providence – Bristol/Kent Room, 3rd floor

Symposium Chairs: Dr. Elena Tchougounova-Paulson, editor of Lovecraftian Proceedings (Hippocampus Press)
Symposium Co-Chair: Prof. Dennis P. Quinn 

CALL FOR PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS:

The Dr. Henry Armitage Memorial Scholarship Symposium seeks Lovecraftian and Weird Fiction related research for the NecronomiCon Providence convention. Providence, RI, August 15-18, 2024

The Lovecraft Arts and Sciences Council (the organizer of NecronomiCon Providence) invites submissions for the upcoming Armitage Symposium, a conference that will be held within the convention. The Symposium is substantially dedicated to the life and works of the Providence-based Weird fiction writer, the father of Cosmic horror, H.P. Lovecraft, but also to his milieu, his literary contemporaries, predecessors and successors in the Weird/horror/Gothic/Neo-Gothic lore. For many decades, Lovecraft’s legacy has been the central topic for challenging discussions, and many prominent scholars have joined in debates, followed by significant textual insights, great literary discoveries, and numerous high-quality academic publications. The Armitage Symposium in 2024 will continue to explore Lovecraft’s works in relation to classic and contemporary Weird fiction, science fiction, other similar genres of horror/Gothic/Neo-Gothic literature, modern philosophy (phenomenology and epistemology), literary theory, linguistics, cultural history and cultural theory, archaeology, ethnography, etc.


Possible topics for 15-minute papers might include:

• Lovecraft’s influence on the American or, broadly, Western literary canon
• Lovecraft and Cosmic mythology
• Lovecraftian Mythos as a cultural phenomenon
• Lovecraft and religion/mysticism, and race/gender studies
• Lovecraft and Eurocentrism: origins and complexities
• Lovecraft’s correspondence as pre-blogging/travelog
• “Arkham House” and its heritage: further discoveries in its archival history
• Horror/Supernatural/Gothic fiction: its origins, historical frames and defining terms
• The works of potent and influential masters such as Dunsany, M.R. James, and Clark Ashton Smith
• Modern literary and cinematic perspectives in Lovecraftiana and the Supernatural
• Women in Lovecraftiana/Weird fiction in the past, present, and future
• Contemporary philosophy of weird, horror, and the supernatural: interpretive approaches

Traditionally, the Armitage Symposium has aimed to foster explorations and disseminations of Lovecraft’s elaborate cosmic mythology, and how this mythology was influenced by, and has come to influence, numerous other fiction writers, historians, art critics, philosophers, archivists, bibliographers of the past and the present. However, all submissions that contribute to interconnecting new linguistic and literary theoretical concepts in academic Lovecraftiana/horror studies are very welcome.

Specifically for the Armitage Symposium, we are particularly interested in submitting works from academics: undergraduates, PhD students, post-graduates, independent scholars, established researchers. Presenters should be prepared to deliver a fifteen to twenty-minute oral presentation, and are invited to submit a manuscript for possible inclusion in the peer-reviewed Lovecraftian Proceedings no. 6.

For consideration, interested scholars should submit an abstract (of around 250-300 words) in Word format along with a short bio (around 100 words) to the symposium chair, Dr Elena Tchougounova-Paulson, at tch.elena15@gmail.com.

The deadline for submissions is May 24, 2024. Early submissions are encouraged.

In addition to these talks, NecronomiCon Providence will also feature numerous traditional panels and presentations, given by many of the top names in Lovecraftian studies and the global Weird Renaissance. For more information on the Armitage Symposium, or the overall convention and the themes to be explored, please, visit our website: necronomicon-providence.com.





About the Symposium:

The Lovecraft Arts and Sciences Council (the organizer of NecronomiCon Providence) hosts the Armitage Symposium to showcase academic works that explore all aspects weird fiction and art, from pop-culture to literature, including the writings and life of globally renowned weird fiction writer, H.P. Lovecraft. Topics of value include the influence of history, architecture, science, and popular culture on the weird fiction genre, as well as the impact that weird and Lovecraftian fiction has had on culture.

In past years, the Armitage Symposium has aimed to foster explorations of Lovecraft’s elaborate cosmic mythology, and how this mythology was influenced by, and has come to influence, numerous other authors and artists before and since. Additionally, we promote all works that foster a greater, critical, and nuanced understanding weird fiction and art (and related science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc.).

Selected talks will be presented together as part of the Armitage Symposium, a mini-conference within the overall convention framework of NecronomiCon Providence, 15-18 August 2024. Presenters will deliver fifteen-minute oral presentations summarizing their thesis, and are invited to submit a brief manuscript for possible inclusion in a proceedings publication.

For more information on the Armitage Symposium, or the overall convention and the themes to be explored, please visit our website: necronomicon-providence.com – where we will post updates and details as they develop over the final weeks leading to the convention. In addition to these talks, NecronomiCon Providence will feature numerous traditional panels and presentations given by many of the top names in the global weird renaissance.

The 2024 CALL FOR PRESENTATION PROPOSALS can be downloaded here: Armitage-Symposium-CFA-2024.pdf

CFP SFRA Conference (3/31/20; Bloomington 7/8-11/20)

CFP: SFRA 2020
https://www.fantastic-arts.org/2020/cfp-sfra-2020/
February 19, 2020


DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 3/31/20 (details at http://www.sfra.org/Coronavirus-News)


SFRA 2020
Wednesday, July 8th – Saturday July 11th
Indiana University, Bloomington IN
Conference Theme: Forms of Fabulation

Keynote Speakers:
Tavia Nyong’o
Kate Marshall
Special Guest: John Crowley (author of Little, Big)

The Science Fiction Research Association invites proposals for its 2020 annual conference, to be held on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

The SFRA is the oldest scholarly association for the study of science fiction and related genres. It brings together important writers of speculative fiction with premiere scholars of speculative fiction to discuss and debate timely and relevant themes. The annual conference also recognizes important contributions to the field through the Pioneer and Pilgrim Awards for excellence in scholarship.

This year we take FABULATION as our key term. Fabulation is a potent political force as well as an emerging genre convention. Ranging from fantasy fiction and the New Weird to fictional sciences and prefigurative politics, fabulation centers the importance of imagining otherwise in the construction of reality as a scholarly as well as a fictional action.

Fabulation is a future-oriented practice that draws from the energies of the past and the perspectives of the oppressed. Keynote speaker Tavia Nyong’o writes that Afro-fabulation resurfaces from the historical archive those untimely ideas that were “never meant to appear” (3) in majoratian culture and so could only be articulated by way of minor genres and obscure gestures—in performance art, speculative fiction, gossip and legend. Building on the critique of imperial sciences by Indigenous scholars and imaginative writers that were the focus of the 2019 conference, this year’s conference asks what subjugated knowledges can be found in the speculative fiction archives and how they might be surfaced in the present toward multispecies thriving and antiracist worlding. At the same time, reality-production as a form of fictionality has become the principle characteristic of politics in the 21st-century. In addition to asking how we can make fabulations, the conference theme also asks participants to consider the ethics of fiction in the post-truth era.

Topics related to the conference theme include:

● prefigurative politics, visionary fiction, & speculative futurisms
● the weird and the New Weird
● fantasy fiction, fairy stories, magic
● Afro-futurism, indigenous futurisms, and related genres
● post-truth politics and fabulation
● fabulation and Afro-fabulation
● insurgent research, fictional sciences, and related methods
● decolonial speculative fiction
● fabulation and the occult
● aesthetic warfare, feminist witchcraft, meme magic
● aesthetics as a technology of resistance
● European mythology and the problem of white supremacism
● fabulation, environmental ethics, and eco-eroticism
● fabulation and the nonhuman
● fabulation in games, videos, and other non-print media
● fabulation, cosplay, cons, and fan cultures
● science fiction, fantasy and the Midwest
● African, Afro-caribbean, and Indigenous cosmologies
● technology and magic
● children’s literature and magic
● Posthumanism, speculative realism, and fabulation

We also welcome papers on topics relevant to science fiction research broadly conceived that are not specifically related to the conference theme, including proposals for preconstituted panels & roundtables.

300-500 word abstracts should be sent to SFRA2020IU@gmail.com by March 15 2020. Acceptance notices will be returned by April 1.

Questions concerning this call for papers, preconstituted panels, & roundtables can be directed to SFRA2020IU@gmail.com with the subject line “CFP QUESTION,” or to the conference’s local organizers, Rebekah Sheldon (rsheldon@indiana.edu) and De Witt Douglas Kilgore (dkilgore@indiana.edu).

Graduate students are encouraged to submit abstracts & to attend, regardless of whether they plan to present.

Some conference travel grants will be made available. Applications will be posted soon and due on 15 April 2020.

You will also need to join SFRA (or renew your membership) in order to register for the conference. Conference Registration information will be posted soon.

http://www.sfra.org/

CFP Speculative Souths (1/1/2019)

An intriguing idea for a collection:

Speculative Souths
https://www.theasa.net/jobs-opportunities/cfps/speculative-souths

Deadline: Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Review Begins: Tuesday, January 1, 2019



Speculative Souths

Ed. Amy Clukey, Erich Nunn, & Jon Smith

Edited Collection CFP


In the early years of science fiction, space frequently figured as the American West writ large—the final frontier. In the genre’s darker, grittier reboot era, however, it often looks more like the final plantation, from Blade Runner’s updated slavecatchers to the transnationally and transtemporally exploited Appalachians of William Gibson’s The Peripheral to Atlanta architect John Portman’s abstracted plantation-house columns looming over the Hunger Games films. And even as some white writers, in the twilight of American empire, set their dystopian survivalist fantasies in the region (The Road, The Walking Dead), self-consciously “southern” varieties of Afrofuturism and speculative blackness, ranging from OutKast to novels such as Kiese Laymon’s Long Division and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, represent it as a site of vibrant black futurity contesting and sometimes transcending both the nation’s plantation past and its carceral present. Meanwhile, cli-fi and ecofiction set in the South, from Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior to Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, is on the rise as the region’s coasts begin to sink.


This collection seeks to make sense of these and other“southern turns” in speculative fiction, broadly defined across multiple media and subgenres, and of earlier southern turns that, because they didn’t fit with dominant models, earlier scholarship may have missed or misread. What happens when speculative fiction goes from western to southern, for example, and/or when our understanding of “the South” shifts its gaze from past to future? How does the speculative allow writers to conceive of the South in ways that transcend the black/white binary that has long shaped how the region is imagined?


Send abstracts by January 1st, 2019 to Amy.Clukey@gmail.com. Final papers of 4000-5000 words will be due by January 1st, 2020.



Possible topics might include

• Southern Afrofuturisms in literature and music from Sun Ra to Outkast and beyond
• Speculative Souths in comic and graphic narratives: Swamp Thing, Black Panther, Bitch Planet, Kindred
• Nineteenth-century literature and speculative Souths: Edgar Allan Poe and lesser known southern innovators/imitators of the genre
• Southern iconographies that serve as sci-fi prop, backdrop, mood enhancers: architect John Portman
• Southern retro-futurism, futurity, and future’s futures
• Transnational, transtemporal, weird, queer, fantastic, or dystopian speculative Appalachias: The Hunger Games, The Peripheral
• The South and the (Old and/or New) Weird (e.g., Southern Reach)
• The presence or weird absence of “the South” in theorizations of science fiction, such as the work of Darko Suvin or North Carolinian Fredric Jameson
• Octavia Butler and the South, beyond Kindred
• Speculative fictions (e.g., Laymon’s Long Division) as counter-politics
• Alt-histories: Henry Turtledove’s white nationalist rehashes of the Civil War, more recent treatments like Omar El Akkad’s American War
• Cli-fi of or in the South
• Speculative poetry of or in the South
• Voodoo/hoodoo fantasy
• Time-traveling revisions of southern temporalities from Kiese Laymon’s Long Division to Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series
• Native southern speculative reclamations of space and time
• Even more Undead Souths
• Speculative southern modernisms
• NASA’s ties to Southern cultures or locales (Huntsville, Houston, Cape Canaveral)
• Southerners in space (e.g., Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars)
• The construct of U.S./Global/Planetary “Souths” on Mars, Venus, and beyond (such as the appearance of the Jim Crow South in golden age SF like Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein’s work, or the icy southern polar settlements of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, the agricultural terrains of The Expanse)
• Treatments of plantation agriculture, slavery, and incarceration in space
• Speculative southern camp in 60s and 70s sci-fi television

CFP Studies in the Fantastic (7/1/2018)

CFP: Studies in the Fantastic
https://www.fantastic-arts.org/2018/cfp-studies-in-the-fantastic-2/
May 1, 2018

Please submit to Studies in the Fantastic, a journal published by the University of Tampa. July 1 deadline.

full name / name of organization: Studies in the Fantastic

contact email: fantastic@ut.edu, afirestone@ut.edu, slauro@ut.edu

Studies in the Fantastic requests submissions for volume 6 of our peer-reviewed academic journal, to be published in winter 2018/19. Essays examining the fantastic from a variety of scholarly perspectives are welcome. For consideration for volume 6, please send submissions to fantastic@ut.edu by July 1, 2018.

Submitted articles should conform to the following guidelines:

6,000-12,000 words
MLA-style citations and bibliography
A separate title page with author information to facilitate blind peer review
1” margins, 12 point serif font, page numbers (but no identifying information in page headers)

Studies in the Fantastic is an annual journal publishing refereed essays, informed by scholarly criticism and theory, on both fantastic texts and their social function. Although grounded in literary studies, we are especially interested in articles examining genres and media that have been underrepresented in humanistic scholarship. Subjects may include, but are not limited to, weird fiction, science/speculative fiction, fantasy, video games, science writing, futurism, and technocracy. Electronic access to Studies in the Fantastic is available via Project MUSE.