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CFP for ICFA 2020: Trans Futurisms

In the first issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly, Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah write, “Transgender does not simply critique present configurations of power/knowledge; it is engaged with all manner of unexpected becomings, oriented toward a future that, by definition, we can anticipate only imperfectly and never fully grasp” (9). Trans is about the future – about transitions, becomings, evolution, and potentiality. Science fiction offers a privileged site for these trans futures – in fact, there is a long history of trans characters in SF, although that history is not yet centralized in SF studies. From Joanna Russ to Gerald Vizenor to Octavia Butler to N. K. Jemisin, trans people appear in SF as dystopian monsters, exercises in critical estrangement, casually-included minor characters, and very occasionally as the authors and protagonists of our own stories. Trans bodies themselves have historically been understood as science fictions: as artificial men and surgically-constructed women, unreal genders made up on Tumblr, or grotesque monsters who may not be men or women at all. Trans theorist Susan Stryker said it best in her 1994 essay, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix”: “I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster” (240).

This panel explores generative crossings between “trans” and “SF”: trans futures, trans speculative fictions, trans as science fiction, science fiction as trans. Potential areas of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:

• How has SF historically imagined and used trans characters?
• How can SF create more livable futures for trans life?
• What does it mean to write and read SF while trans women of color are being murdered at epidemic rates?
• How have Afrofuturist, latino futurist, indigenous futurist, and other artists of color imagined futures for trans people?
• How have trans writers, artists, and activists envisioned and built their own futures?
• What does it mean for one’s body to be read as science fictional – or to see your own body as speculative fiction?
• How does SF help extend conceptions of “trans” beyond the human?
• How do fan cultures create, rewrite, and extend trans futures?

I welcome creative contributions as well as academic presentations. Please contact Dagmar Van Engen at ddvaneng@asu.edu by October 20 with questions or proposals of <500w.

Please find pasted below the call for papers for the next issue of Dzieciństwo. Literatura i Kultura [Childhood: Literature and Culture], a biannual journal published at the University of Warsaw, Poland. The theme of the issue is Horror(s) of childhood and adolescence, and the deadline is January, 31, 2020.

The first issue of the journal is here: https://www.journals.polon.uw.edu.pl/index.php/dlk/issue/view/18.
All papers are peer-reviewed and, if accepted, published in open access without any article processing fees.

Call for papers 1/2020

To read more about the journal, including our submission procedure, please visit our platform: http://www.journals.polon.uw.edu.pl/index.php/dlk (to change the language to English, please click the ‘globe’ button of the page). You can also find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dlkuw/.

Yours faithfully,

Maciej Skowera

Vice-director of the journal  Dzieciństwo. Literatura i Kultura [Childhood: Literature and Culture

 

Horror(s) of childhood and adolescence

On the one hand, within literary and film studies, the notion of horror is used as a genological category. On the other hand, as an aesthetic category, it is referred to various cultural texts: literary works, films, and TV series as well as theatrical performances and video games. Anita Has-Tokarz, in a monograph Horror w literaturze współczesnej i filmie [Horror in Contemporary Literature and Film] (2010), even considers it to denote “an effect [of dread] exerted on the recipient by a [cultural] text” (p. 51; our own translation). We would like to devote the third issue of “Dzieciństwo. Literatura i Kultura” to the relations of childhood and adolescence with horror – understood in all these ways – which are visible in three fields of consideration.

Firstly: the child in horror fiction. Culture, especially popular culture, eagerly casts children in the roles of disturbingly mysterious, mediumistic, frightening, demonic beings, or even torturers – but also in the roles of victims, specially protected individuals, objects of interest of variously presented evil, as well as heroes and heroines who are the only ones that can fight this evil. From the classic examples, it is enough to recall the teenage girl, Regan, from The Exorcist directed by William Friedkin, the young antichrist from The Omen franchise, and children’s characters from Stephen King’s prose – e.g. The Shining, Children of the Corn, Pet Semetary, or It – and from many famous screen adaptations of his works. Such figures – demonic children, but also children as saviours – have appeared in many popular films in recent years, such as John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place, Jennifer Kent’s Babadook, or Ari Aster’s Hereditary; in TV series, to mention the American Horror Story anthology by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, Stranger Things by the Duffer brothers, The Haunting of Hill House by Mike Flanagan (loosely based on the novel by Shirley Jackson); in video games, e.g. The Last of Us by the Mighty Dog studio and American McGee’s Alice series; and, finally, in literature, like Josh Malerman’s already filmed novel, Bird Box. It is also worth to mention the approaches other than the Anglo-Saxon ones: the dreadful child presented by the classics of Japanese horror cinema in which it is an embodiment of tragedy and mystery, and where childhood is stigmatised by unimaginable suffering from which the protagonists cannot free themselves (e.g. The Ring and Dark Water by Hideo Nakata, or Ju-On: The Grudge by Takashi Shimizu); Spanish, Portuguese, Mexican, and South American representations, connected to folklore, traditional beliefs, and fairy tales, such as Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth or J. A. Bayona’s The Orphanage; the cruel children from German and Austrian works, e.g. Goodnight Mommy by Veronica Franz and Severin Fiala. We would like to look at the ways in which children’s characters are used both in the classics of the genre and in the latest cultural production.

Secondly: children’s and young adult horror fiction. In the last dozen or so years, we have been experiencing a renaissance of horror literature for young people. The literary roots of such works date back to the tradition of the 19th century and, inter alia, to the so-called pedagogy of fear, while in the 20th century, classical examples are the works by John Bellairs, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, and Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. Today, many authors display both the ludic and reflective dimensions of horror, such as Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket), Ian Ogilvy, Chris Priestley, or Neil Gaiman and, in Poland, Marcin Szczygielski and Grzegorz Gortat. The issue of horror in cultural texts for children and young adults has become the subject of research of many scholars, both in Poland, especially Katarzyna Slany, and abroad, including Jessica R. McCort, Michael Howarth as well as Anna Jackson, Karen Coats and Roderick McGillis, Monica Flegel, Christopher Parkes, Chloé Germaine Buckley, K. Shryock Hood, Laura Hubner. To continue the considerations they have undertaken, we would like to invite authors to examine the strategies of creating horror fiction for young recipients – not only literary works, but also those from other media, such as films, TV series, video games, comic books.

Thirdly and lastly: childhood and adolescence as a horror. In this problem area, the concept of horror will be understood the most broadly. Such plots and motifs appear in works addressed both to adults (including biographical and autobiographical pieces) and children and young adults. The dominance of the Arcadian tone in cultural texts for young people is a thing of the past; for several decades, there has been a clear tendency to raise drastic subjects, tabooed before, such as domestic violence, sexual abuse, addictions, suicides, etc. 13 Reasons Why, a famous TV series created by Brian Yorkey (adapted from the novel by Jay Asher), Euphoria by Sam Levinson, Stephen Chbosky’s novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower and its screen adaptation directed by the writer, The Lovely Bones by Jodi Picoult and Peter Jackson’s film based on this work, Dom nie z tej ziemi [The House Out of This World] by Małgorzata Strękowska-Zaremba, The Book Everything by Guus Kuijer, or transgressive picturebooks (like those by Gro Dahle and Svein Nyhus) – are just a few of the many examples. Another issue is the horror of childhood and adolescence in dystopias and post-apocalyptic narratives, those for adult audiences (The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and a TV series inspired by this prose, The Road by Cormac McCarthy and a film based on it) and those for young adults (Suzanne Collins’s trilogy The Hunger Games, Veronica Roths’s Divergent series, and screen adaptations of these works, or Meto by Yves Grevet) and children (Woolvs in the Sitee by Margaret Wild and Anne Spudvilas). Social problems with a destructive impact on childhood and adolescence, reflected or extrapolated in many cultural texts, are therefore another issue we encourage potential authors to explore.

We invite you to consider various aspects of the relations of childhood and adolescence with horror in diverse cultural texts for different audiences. We are interested in cross-sectional articles and case studies about works created in the 19th, 20th, and 21st century. The three problem areas we identified – the child in horror fiction, horror for children and young adults, and childhood and adolescence as a horror – do not cover such a complex issue fully; therefore, the editorial team is open to other proposals, going beyond the proposed topics.

We also invite you to send texts unconnected with the issue’s subject matter to our Varia and Reviews sections.

Article submission deadline: 31.01.2020

Call for Chapters: Japanese Horror: New Critical Approaches to History, Narratives and Aesthetics (Extended Deadline)

deadline for submissions:
November 25, 2019

full name / name of organization:
Subashish Bhattacharjee (Jawaharlal Nehru University), Ananya Saha (Jawaharlal Nehru University) and Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina)

contact email:
jhorrorvolume@gmail.com

Call for Chapters: Japanese Horror: New Critical Approaches to History, Narratives and Aesthetics (Extended Deadline).

Edited by Subashish Bhattacharjee (Jawaharlal Nehru University),

Ananya Saha (Jawaharlal Nehru University)

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina)

Cathedra of Film and Literature

http://artes.filo.uba.ar/la-literatura-de-las-artes-combinadas-ii

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 abstracts for proposed chapters up to 500 words within November 25th, 2019, but complete papers will be well received. The papers must be written according to the MLA stylesheet, following the rules of the 7th Edition handbook, with footnotes instead of endnotes. All submissions (Garamond, 1.5 pt line spacing) must be accompanied by an abstract (200-250 words) and a short bio-biblio of the author. Images, if used, should preferably be free from copyright issues—sourced from creative commons/copyright-free sources, or permissions should be obtained from relevant copyright holders.

Enquiries and submissions are to be directed to Subashish Bhattacharjee, Ananya Saha and Fernando Pagnoni Berns at jhorrorvolume@gmail.com

Subashish Bhattacharjee is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Bengal, India. He edits the interdisciplinary online journal The Apollonian, and is the Editor of Literary Articles and Academic Book Reviews of Muse India. His doctoral research, on the cultures of built space, is from the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he has also been a UGC-Senior Fellow. His recent publications include Queering Visual Cultures (Universitas, 2018), and New Women’s Writing (Cambridge Scholars, co-edited with GN Ray, 2018).

Ananya Saha is a PhD scholar in the Centre for English Studies, JNU, New Delhi. Her research is on the idea of the ‘outsider’ in Japanese and non-Japanese manga vis-a-vis globalization. Other research interests include Fandom and Queer studies, Translation theory and practice, New Literatures and so on. She has published in international journals, including Orientaliska Studier (No 156), from the Nordic Association of Japanese and Korean Studies. She is the co-editor of the volume titled Trajectories of the Popular: Forms, Histories, Contexts (2019), published by AAKAR, New Delhi. She has been the University Grants Fellow, SAP-DSA-(I) in the Centre for English Studies, JNU (2016-17), and has been awarded a DAAD research visit grant to Tuebingen University, Germany under the project “Literary Cultures of Global South.”

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns is an Assistant Professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) – Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Argentina)-. He teaches courses on international horror film and is director of the research group on horror cinema “Grite.” He has published chapters in the books To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post 9/11 Horror, edited by John Wallis, Critical Insights: Alfred Hitchcock, edited by Douglas Cunningham, A Critical Companion to James Cameron, edited by Antonio Sanna, and Gender and Environment in Science Fiction, edited by Bridgitte Barclay, among others. He has authored a book about Spanish horror TV series Historias para no Dormir.

Contact Info:

subashishbhattacharjee@gmail.com;

citeron05@yahoo.com

Contact Email:

jhorrorvolume@gmail.com

Call for Nominations: IAFA Second Vice-President and Public Information Officer

Nominations are open from 30 September to 30 October.

The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts announces a call for nominations for the elected Executive Board positions of Second Vice-President and Public Information Officer. Any IAFA member in good standing may run for these positions.
Those interested in running or in nominating someone for either position should send a nomination to both IAFA Immediate Past-President Sherryl Vint (sherryl.vint [at] gmail.com) and IAFA Registration and Membership Coordinator Karen Hellekson (iafareg [at] gmail.com) by 30 October 2019. The Election Committee will notify each nominee of her or his nomination and will provide each with the names of everyone else who has accepted nomination during that election cycle. Candidates declining nomination must notify the Election Committee immediately upon notification of their nomination.

Candidates eligible for the offices to which they have been nominated and willing to run for those offices will be asked to submit position statements by 20 November 2019. The Election Committee will distribute position statements and ballots to the membership on 10 December 2019, and ballots will be counted by the Election Committee after 10 January 2020. If no candidate receives a majority vote, a runoff election between the two candidates who have received the most votes will be conducted. The Election Committee will announce results of the election at the IAFA business meeting at ICFA 41 in March 2020, with additional announcements in appropriate IAFA venues thereafter.
For those elected, terms will begin immediately following the conclusion of ICFA 41 in March 2019 and will last for three years. Duties of each position are listed below. Please contact Sherryl Vint if you have any questions. We look forward to hearing from you!

Second Vice President
The Second Vice President oversees and develops the programming track of creative guests, maintaining a current email list, contacting writers to solicit proposals, organizing sessions, and consulting the First Vice President to schedule the creative track. The Second Vice President also collects biographies and photos of the invited attending writers for publication in the program book and passes this information on to the Program Book Coordinator. The Second Vice President is elected by majority vote of the IAFA members who participate in the election.

Public Information Officer
The Public Information Officer edits and distributes promotional materials and forms publicity liaisons with other organizations where appropriate. The Public Information Officer maintains and regularly updates the website and blog, creates and distributes information from the Board such as the Call for Papers and election material, and contributes photos and promotional copy to the IAFA website. The Public Information Officer maintains and regularly updates the social media feeds, responds to inquiries via the social media feeds, and monitors the IAFA’s public image on social media. The Public Information Officer takes Executive Board minutes, disseminates them, archives them, and makes them available for archival use. The Public Information Officer is the recorder of motions and amendments at official meetings. The Public Information Officer maintains the IAFA electronic archive. The Public Information Officer is elected by majority vote of the IAFA members who participate in the election.

Assistant Professor of Fantasy/Science Fiction Literature

The Department of English at Florida Atlantic University invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position to begin August 2020. Candidates must have teaching and research interests in Fantasy literature and/or Science Fiction, preferably the former. Special consideration will be given to candidates who also have research interests in nineteenth-century British literature. Candidates with other secondary fields (Medieval literature, Renaissance literature) will also be considered.

The hired candidate will teach primarily on the Boca Raton campus, with the possibility of a minor assignment on the Davie campus. We seek a candidate who will balance high-quality scholarship, excellence in teaching, and committed service. Faculty typically teach a 3-2 course schedule. There will be the opportunity to teach and mentor students in the Department’s MA and MFA programs, as well as in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters’ interdisciplinary Ph. D. program, the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies’ MA and undergraduate program, and other interdisciplinary programs within the College.

Requirements include a Ph. D. in English or Comparative Literature, or related field, at time of appointment, publication record in field, and relevant teaching experience at the college level. Applications, including a cover letter, vita, and copies of graduate transcripts must be uploaded to https://fau.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/FAU. The job requisition number is 07356. Applications have a deadline of November 1, 2019. A background check will be required for the candidate selected for this position.

FAU is an equal opportunity/affirmative action/equal access institution and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran’s status or any other characteristic protected by law. Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodation, please call 561-297-3057. For communication assistance, call 7-1-1. FAU is a designated Hispanic-serving institution.

Edited Volume CFP

Not Dead, But Dreaming: Reading Lovecraft in the 21st Century

In the one hundred and twenty-nine years since his birth, H. P. Lovecraft’s reputation has grown beyond all expectation. Not only has he influenced generations of readers, but he has also influenced scores of people in areas such as filmmaking, television, comics, music, and literary theory. Because interest in Lovecraft continues to grow, our intention is to explore some of the reasons why he has become so influential—and so indispensable—since the early 1990s. From his stories of human degeneration that started with “The Tomb” and “Dagon” to the cosmic horror that culminated in The Shadow out of Time and “The Haunter of the Dark,” the less than 20 years that Lovecraft devoted to a career in fiction produced narratives that remain popular among a growing number of readers who follow his work from multiple areas of interest. Additionally, Lovecraft’s literary production in general has also become increasingly relevant from an academic perspective since at least the 1990s. In this volume, we want to reflect on the possible reasons for Lovecraft’s expanding popularity and the significance of his legacy as we entered the digital age. Consequently, we are interested in research that focuses on the significance of Lovecraft’s work from the 1990s to the present day.

Possible topics to explore in the work of Lovecraft and its connection with the 1990s to the present might include, but are not limited to:

• The Anthropocene
• Influence in videogames
• Lovecraft Adaptations, including his influence on film and art in general
• Lovecraft’s philosophical thought
• Lovecraft’s poetry
• Lovecraft related RPGs and LARs
• Lovecraftian families
• Object Oriented Ontology
• Posthumanism
• Postmodernism

Please send a proposal of about 500 words, for chapters of 6000-7000 words, and a short biography to Tony Alcala antonio.alcala@tec.mx or Carl Sederholm csederholm@gmail.com, by 30 Nov 2019.

Contributors can expect to be selected and notified by 15th December 2019. The deadline for submission of completed articles will be 30 May 2019.

The IAFA is committed to finding ways to make attendance of the ICFA feasible for as many financially disadvantaged members of our community as possible, and to doing so in a fair and even-handed way.

Toward this end, we are replacing the current subvention system and increasing the amount the organization dedicates to this purpose to $3,000 USD annually. The funds will be distributed in the following way:
o 2 international invited artists: US$500 each
o 2 scholars: one international US$700, one from the US at US$300*
o 2 students: one international US$700, one from the US at US$300*
We also urge members who are able to contribute to this fund to do so at https://iaftfita.wildapricot.org/Donate. These donations will be added to the following year’s assistance fund toward additional awards.

*Some additional consideration, in the form of an additional complimentary room night, will be presented to U.S. recipients whose distance from the continental United States results in significantly higher travel expenses.
Please note: In order to assist IAFA in funding these grants, IAFA requires that recipients stay at the conference hotel. The hotel compensates IAFA based on room usage, and in turn, this compensation helps us fund these grants. We are contractually obligated to meet minimum guest room requirements, and IAFA loses money when attendees stay elsewhere.
Recipients will be decided by blind draw, and will receive a check in the appropriate amount at the end of the conference.

Eligibility: All invited artists and scholars not receiving institutional assistance are eligible to apply. All students are eligible to apply.

How to apply: Attendees requesting assistance should self-identify at this link by Dec. 15, 2019:
https://iaftfita.wildapricot.org/page-1820560.

ICFA 41 “Climate Change and the Anthropocene”

When: March 18–21, 2020

Where: Marriott Orlando Airport Hotel, Orlando, Florida, USA

Guest Scholar: Stacy Alaimo, UT-Arlington

Guest Author: Jeff VanderMeer

Call for papers: https://iaftfita.wildapricot.org/resources/Documents/ICFA%2041%20CFP.pdf

Proposal deadline: October 31, 2019

Membership and registration: https://iaftfita.wildapricot.org/event-3331007

Price summary:

https://www.fantastic-arts.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/ICFA-41-price-summary.pdf

Info about IAFA membership in terms of the conference: https://iaftfita.wildapricot.org/Conference

Website update: We’re updating the website and migrating content. Things may look a little different, and your bookmarks might not work anymore.

Interested in governance? Read the Board minutes (must be logged in to view): https://iaftfita.wildapricot.org/MembersOnly

Venue update: Thank you to everyone who responded to our surveys regarding ICFA’s venue. The conference will stay at the Orlando Airport Marriott Lakeside, Orlando, Florida, through 2024. Read IAFA president Dale Knickerbocker’s July 2019 announcement about this (and note down future convention dates): https://www.fantastic-arts.org/2019/future-icfa-venues/

Membership term change: We have edited everyone’s membership to expire at the end of the calendar year rather than date of initial signup. Example: If your term previously ended March 2, 2019, renewal is now due on January 1, 2020. We expect mass confusion to reign during the years of transition, so don’t hesitate to reach out if you are perplexed. Meanwhile, if you prefer to pay your membership at the same time you sign up for the conference, for ease of reimbursement, go ahead and do that; the term will extend a year.

PayPal update: We are no longer using PayPal for financial transactions, in favor of the system provided by our membership management software.

Invited creatives: David Higgins will send around the registration code to “yes” RSVPs on Halloween, October 31, 2019.

Financial support: Stay tuned for an announcement from IAFA president Dale Knickerbocker regarding an exciting new support lottery.

Problems logging in? What if the system fails to recognize your name/email combination? I beg you! Don’t create a new profile. STOP and email me. I can update your info, including changing your email address.

Do you have a credit? (The system will say “Overpayment” in the bottom right corner.) Sign up as usual, which will generate an invoice. Then STOP. Do not pay. Instead, email me and tell me to apply your credit to the invoice. I will then contact you with your outstanding balance, if any.

Looking forward to seeing you in Orlando!

Karen Hellekson, IAFA Registrar (iafareg AT gmail.com)

Threshold, Boundary, and Crossover in Fantasy

Organised by the University of York Fantasy Discussion Group

To be held in York 12th-13th March 2020

Keynote speakers: Professor George P. Landow (Emeritus Professor, Brown) and Dr. Rob Maslen (University of Glasgow)

‘There was nothing Lucy liked so much as the smell and feel of fur. She immediately stepped into the wardrobe and got in among the coats and rubbed her face against them, leaving the door open, of course, because she knew that it is very foolish to shut oneself into any wardrobe. Soon she went further in and found that there was a second row of coats hanging up behind the first one. It was almost quite dark in there and she kept her arms stretched out in front of her so as not to bump her face into the back of the wardrobe. She took a step further in – then two or three steps – always expecting to feel woodwork against the tips of her fingers. But she could not feel it.’ – C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, first published in 1950.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on the subject of ‘threshold, boundary, and crossover’ in fantasy. Creative interpretation of the theme is encouraged, and particular precedence will be given to papers looking at interdisciplinarity in fantasy studies. We wish to push the limits of how we interpret and understand fantasy as a categorical term, interrogating the idea put forward by art historian Walter Schurian that ‘the fantastic can also be found in other fields of art, such as literature, architecture, music and film; fantastical tendencies and currents can even be observed in the natural sciences, for example in the form of unusual, chance opinions and theories.’ As such, we welcome papers from scholars working in any field or discipline. Some thematic prompts include, but are not limited to:

Interdisciplinarity
Intertextuality
Juxtaposition, comparison, overlap
Cross-media studies
Synthesis
Hybridity
The monstrous
Cross-cultural exchange
International exchange
National fantasies
Gender, Sexuality
The body
Selfhood, self and other
The alien
Interethnic relationships
Race
Tribalism
Schools of thought
Systems
Children/ YA/ Adult
Journey, pilgrimage, passage
Dimensions
Time and space
Ancient/ Medieval/ Modern/ Contemoprary
Between worlds
Frames, framing devices and literal thresholds
Hermeticism
Retellings
Portals and transportation
Genre, categorisation, classification
Ideas of here and there
The real and unreal
Fin-de-siècle
Youth and age
Fantasy and science fiction

To submit a proposal, please send (in one document) a biography of c. 100 words and a paper abstract of no more than 400 words to fantasythreshold2020@gmail.com by September 13th 2019. Queries can be directed to this email address also.

N.B. We also welcome and encourage non-traditional forms of participation and presentation, i.e. performances, cosplay, lightning presentations (1 slide & 5 minutes), speed panels, poster discussions, and other. For non-traditional presentations, please outline your delivery proposal when submitting.

Please join us in Orlando, Florida, March 18-22, 2020 for the 41st International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) when our theme will be “Climate Change and the Anthropocene.”

Since the turn of the millennium, the term Anthropocene has been widely popularized to describe the massive changes humanity has inflicted upon the planet through our technologies and ways of living—influences so substantial that some believe we have entered into a new geological epoch. Climate change, and its related crises of ecological damage, forced migrations as weather and arable land shift, and mass extinctions of nonhuman species, are imaginative and materially entwined. Climate change asks us to think in spatial and temporal scales that exceed human lifetimes and perceptions, while the concept of the Anthropocene encourages us to think in global, perhaps cosmic registers about humanity’s pasts and possible futures.

Amitov Ghosh suggests in The Great Derangement (2017) that among the difficulties of confronting climate change is the fact that it is “unthinkable” via the conventions of realist fiction. Taking our cue from Ursula K. Le Guin’s phrase “realists of a larger reality” in her acceptance speech for the Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters, ICFA 41 will explore the power of fantastic genres to make climate change and other crises of the Anthropocene visible and intelligible. How have fantastic genres helped us represent and respond to this reality? How might these genres offer us new ways for thinking about humanity, our planet, and the complex entanglements between them? How might we reimagine ourselves and the future in the face of climate change? We welcome papers, creative works, and panel discussions addressing these and related questions across any genre, every language, and across all media of the fantastic.

Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:
• Texts engaging questions of eco-horror aesthetics and themes
• Fantastic texts by that explore Indigenous worldviews on ecology
• Analyses of how specific motifs or themes emerge and change with time, such as climate-driven apocalypse or images of urban worlds
• Texts that imagine innovative technologies and/or new lifeways that offer new patterns for human habitation
• Texts or other media that interrogate questions of ontology, especially humanity’s relationship with other life
• Engagements with alternative terms used to frame our present era—Donna Haraway’s Cthulhucene, Jason Moore’s Capitalocene, and the like
• Work emerging from ecocritical frameworks and methodologies
• Work emerging from posthumanist frameworks and methodologies, especially human-animal studies
• Work emerging from environmental humanities and petrocultures frameworks and methodologies
• Dystopian and/or utopian responses to climate change
• YA and children’s literature and its distinct strategies for representing climate change
• Work on significant authors of ecologically themed works, such as Kim Stanley Robinson or N.K. Jemisin or the subgenre solarpunk
• Analyses of texts or other media that question the human/animal boundary
• The role of fantastic texts in offering new theoretical rubrics for thinking about climate change and the Anthropocene

The conference will feature Guest Scholar Stacy Alaimo (University of Texas at Arlington) and Guest of Honor Jeff VanderMeer. We encourage proposals that engage the work of these two distinguished guests.

Please submit proposals via the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts Portal (https://www.fantastic-arts.org/icfa-submissions/) by October 31, 2019. Further instructions regarding submissions are available at this link, including instructions regarding IAFA’s Division Structure and Division Head contact information where questions may be sent.