CFP Frankensteinian Resonance: Transtemporal Reanimations in Fiction, Film, and Video (11/30/2025)

Frankensteinian Resonance: Transtemporal Reanimations in Fiction, Film, and Video

deadline for submissions:
November 30, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Assoc. Prof. Ela İpek Gündüz, Gaziantep University, Turkey & Dr. Ercan Gürova, Ankara University, Turkey

contact email:
frankensteinianresonance@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/07/29/frankensteinian-resonance-transtemporal-reanimations-in-fiction-film-and-video

Call for Book Chapters

Frankensteinian Resonance: Transtemporal Reanimations in Fiction, Film, and Video

“Under Strong Interest” by McFarland’s Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy series

Editors’ Introduction

Considering the still resonating waves of Mary Shelley’s timeless novel Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818), due to its conveying the notions, issues, and messages which are both relevant to current times, and as a reflection of its own time, ‘Frankenstein’ continues to be a very appealing trope, phenomenon or myth. The very idea of “humaneness” is speculated continuously due to the embeddedness of the “Frankenstein” the creator, the monster, and the novel itself, including its writer, within the literary and cultural landscape. It is an undeniable fact that it has been perpetually remembered and reinvented due to its uniqueness, even in the 21st century, prompting producers to adapt it. Yet, how it affects, appeals to, finds correspondences with, and elicits reactions or appreciations may be varied. Nevertheless, regardless of this differentiation in both the re-handlings and/or remembering, as well as the responses, the very speciality of the text remains visible. Notwithstanding the conventions of the genres or the adaptation mediums, as a very special text, Frankenstein transgresses the socio-cultural and even spatio-temporal boundaries that pave the way for the appreciation of contemporary readers and/or audiences.

The proposed edited volume, Frankensteineian Resonance: Transtemporal Reanimations in Fiction, Film, and Video, seeks to provide a rigorous, interdisciplinary exploration of how the Frankenstein mythos continues to evolve, adapt, and resonate across contemporary media landscapes. The volume thus proposes Frankenstein as a transtextual and transtemporal entity, a metaphorical conduit through which trauma, memory, identity, and otherness are endlessly renegotiated. It examines how contemporary rewritings and adaptations, spanning various genres and platforms, reveal the persistence of Frankensteinian concerns with artificial life, the ethics of creation, and the blurred boundaries between human and nonhuman. By assembling approximately 20 original chapters that analyse iconic novels, films, video games, and theatrical adaptations through transtemporal lenses, this collection aims to contribute to Gothic studies, adaptation theory, science fiction criticism, and broader discussions on the posthuman condition. Contributions will be selected through an open international call targeting scholars in literature, film, and cultural studies with PhDs or equivalent credentials.

Each contributor will offer a close and original analysis of a novel, film, or media work that actively reimagines the Frankenstein myth. Rather than adopting a purely descriptive approach, each chapter will develop a coherent and critical argument, connecting the selected work to key interpretive frameworks, such as monstrosity, hybridity, technological creation, identity fragmentation, and moral ambiguity.

Contributors will be asked to choose a specific fictional or cinematic text and engage it through relevant theoretical and cultural lenses. While the exact titles and authors of the chapters will be finalised after the acceptance of proposals, all chapters will be unified by the volume’s overarching interest in Frankenstein as a resonant, reconfigurable myth that speaks to evolving human concerns.

Please choose one of the topics listed below as the focus of your chapter. Proposals should clearly identify the selected work (novel, film, or media) and your theoretical framework.



Part I - Literary Re-Visitations/ Rewritings

1-Frankenstein Unbound (1973) by Brian W. Aldiss

2-The Frankenstein Papers (1986) by Fred Saberhagen

3-Poor Things (1992) by Alasdair Gray

4-The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein (1995) by Theodore Roszak

5-The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008) by Peter Ackroyd

6-Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) by Ahmed Saadawi

7-Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019) by Jeanette Winterson

8-Heart of a Dog (1925) by Mikhail Bulgakov

9-Golem (1915) by Gustav Meyrink

10-The Sandman (1816) by E.T.A Hoffmann



Part II- Movie/ Theatre/Video Game Adaptations



1-Frankenstein (1931) & Bride of Frankenstein (1935) – Dir. James Whale

2-The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) – Dir. Terence Fisher

3-Young Frankenstein (1974) – Dir. Mel Brooks

4-Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) – Dir. Kenneth Branagh

5-Frankenstein (2004) – Dir. Marcus Nispel

6-Victor Frankenstein (2015) – Dir. Paul McGuigan

7-Frankenstein (2015) – Dir. Bernard Rose

8-The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015–2017) – ITV Series

9-Frankenstein (1981) – by Victor Gialanella

10-Frankenstein – Playing with Fire (1988) – by Barbara Field

11-Frankenstein (2007) – by Nick Dear, directed by Danny Boyle

12-Frankenstein (2017) a musical theatre adaptation by Eric B. Sirota

13-Frankenstein: Through the Eyes of the Monster (1995)

14-Frankenstein: Master of Death (2015)

15-Frankenstein: Beyond the Time (2016)

16-Frankenstein Wars (2017)

17-Poor Things (2023)



Submission Details and Timeline

Please send a 300–500 word abstract describing the proposed chapter’s theory/framework, contributions, and structure, and a brief bio (100–150 words) to frankensteinianresonance@gmail.com

The abstract submission deadline is November 30, 2025.

Submission of Complete Chapters (for selected abstracts): March 30, 2026.

Final chapters will be expected to be around 5500-6000 words, in English, and referenced in MLA 9 style.

The book is expected to be published in late 2026, following peer review and editorial revisions.

All submissions will undergo a rigorous double-blind peer-review process.

For inquiries and questions, please feel free to contact us at frankensteinianresonance@gmail.com



Editors: Assoc. Prof. Ela İpek Gündüz, Gaziantep University, Turkey

Dr. Ercan Gürova, Ankara University, Turkey



Last updated August 4, 2025

CFP Routledge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft: Wollstonecraft at Work (1/15/2026)

Routledge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft: Wollstonecraft at Work

deadline for submissions:
January 15, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Cynthia Richards and Shawn Lisa Maurer

contact email:
crichards@wittenberg.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/06/27/routledge-companion-to-mary-wollstonecraft-wollstonecraft-at-work


Routledge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft: Wollstonecraft at Work
Call for Papers

Mary Wollstonecraft’s contributions as a philosopher are uncontested, her reputation cemented by such recent publications as The Wollstonecraftian Mind (Routledge, 2019), the first collection on a woman philosopher to appear in the Routledge Philosophical Minds series. By contrast, her work as a writer remains unsettled. We know her work to be passionate: angry with Edmund Burke, she composed the Vindication of the Rights of Man in six weeks. She writes Letters Written During a Short Residence to an indifferent lover, the American businessman Gilbert Imlay, and through her romantically charged descriptions, wins the reluctant affections of the Enlightenment philosopher William Godwin instead. As this example makes manifest, if Wollstonecraft succeeds as a writer, it seemingly happens by accident, a byproduct of the fervor of her convictions. We grant her a place in the literary canon because her influence is undeniable and not because the quality of her production is uniform and unassailable.

This Routledge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft will challenge this reading by focusing on Wollstonecraft as a writer at work, a writer consciously and deliberately innovating to produce a rich and varied oeuvre that reveals forms of intellectual and professional labor beyond her better-known philosophical treatises and novels. Instead, this volume will make the case for Wollstonecraft as an artist first and a polemicist second, yet an artist whose creative interventions stayed true to her principles in the face of conservative backlash. In this regard, the volume comes closest to emulating The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (2002) while building upon the more multidisciplinary Mary Wollstonecraft in Context (Cambridge 2020).

Yet even as the volume will argue for the intrinsic quality of her writing, it will also recognize that the work remains incomplete. The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) had a planned second volume that was never realized; The Wrongs of Woman (1798) was published unfinished. Her primer to her young daughter, Fanny, has yet to be published as a stand-alone text. But her work also remains incomplete because it continues to exert such a powerful force more than two hundred years after her death. Although the feminist political implications of her work, which continues to be “constantly re-moulded in feminism’s changing image,” as Barbara Taylor writes, have been traced in multiple ways, the impact of her literary production and readers’ engagement with that multifaceted work, in the academy, in popular culture, and in the classroom, has yet to be fully explored.

We envision essays relating to three broad categories–Wollstonecraft at Work, Wollstonecraft in the World, and Wollstonecraft in the Classroom–and invite essays on all stages of Wollstonecraft’s career and all genres in which she worked. Possible topics might include Wollstonecraft as a working woman/professional writer/public intellectual; Wollstonecraft as an artistic innovator; Wollstonecraft’s growth and development; Wollstonecraft and visual culture; Wollstonecraft as an educator. We also seek essays that address Wollstonecraft’s historical as well as contemporary resonances in literary, artistic, and feminist political contexts across the globe. We encourage reflections on the productive imbrications of Wollstonecraft’s life and work; on her critical reception, her artistic legacies, and her place in popular culture. Finally, we invite essays on editing and teaching Wollstonecraft’s work. How is her influence felt throughout the world and how is her work taught in various regions and countries? How does she continue to educate us and our students?

We welcome preliminary proposals on these or related topics. Please send abstracts of approximately 250 words to both editors via email by January 15, 2026.

Shawn Lisa Maurer (College of the Holy Cross): smaurer@holycross.edu

Cynthia Richards (Wittenberg University): crichards@wittenberg.edu



Last updated July 3, 2025

CFP Mary Shelley Today: *Frankenstein* in the Twenty-First Century (2/1/2025)

Mary Shelley Today: *Frankenstein* in the Twenty-First Century

deadline for submissions:
February 1, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Timothy Ruppert and Danette DiMarco

contact email:
timothy.ruppert@sru.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/12/26/mary-shelley-today-frankenstein-in-the-twenty-first-century

Mary Shelley Today: Frankenstein in the Twenty-First Century seeks to reevaluate the influence of Mary Shelley, and particularly her most prominent novel, on literature and imaginative work of the last quarter century (defined as 1999-2024). This project engages with works and authors on whom little has been written to date in the hope of providing exciting new resources for Romanticists and general readers alike.

We seek contributions between 4,500-6,500 words. While we do not wish to delimit authors in terms of focus, we will give special preference to scholarship on undertreated works and writers, for example, Seanan McGuire’s Down Among the Sticks and Bones (2017), Theodora Goss’s The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (2017), Kiersten White’s The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein (2018), John Kessel’s Pride and Prometheus (2018), Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (trans. 2018), and Jennifer McMahon’s The Children on the Hill (2022). We are also interested in reinterpretations of Frankenstein in other genres, including works such as the Japanese manga series Fullmetal Alchemist,cinematic products such as Larry Fessenden’s 2019 Depraved or the Doctor Who episode ‘The Haunting of Villa Diodati’ (2020), or stage plays such as Eric Sirota’s musical adaptation of Frankenstein (2017). Please note that we already have a chapter concerning Peter Lovesey’s 1999 novel, The Vault, and so will not accept submissions exclusively concerning that work.

Please submit a 500/1,000-word proposal along with your contact information and a biographical note (up to 200 words) to both co-editors by 1 February 2025. Further details on style and formatting will be provided to prospective contributors upon acceptance.

Accepted contributors should plan to submit complete book chapters (4,500/6,500 words, including references and footnotes) by 1 August 2025.

This volume is already under contract to a leading academic publisher, so the manuscript will likely go for peer review in late 2025. The projected publication date is 2026. Please contact both Danette DiMarco (danette.dimarco@sru.edu) and Timothy Ruppert (timothy.ruppert@sru.edu) with any questions.



Last updated January 2, 2025

Out Now: Frankenstein and Its Environments, Then and Now edited by Jerrold E. Hogle

Another new collection of essays on Frankenstein. Details copied from H-Albion at https://networks.h-net.org/node/16749/discussions/7631521/toc-huntington-library-quarterly. 

 

The issue can be accessed from Project MUSE at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/44365 and/or via the links provided (if you have institutional access) or purchased direct from the publisher, University of Pennsylvania Press, for $20 at https://hlq.pennpress.org/home/.

 

Huntington Library Quarterly Volume 83.4  Winter 2020

Special Issue: Frankenstein and Its Environments, Then and Now 

Edited by Jerrold E. Hogle

 

 

ARTICLES

 

The Environments of Frankenstein
Jerrold E. Hogle

 

This prolegomenon to a collection of eleven essays provides a setting for them all by explaining the ongoing significance of Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein two hundred years after it was first published; the theme of multiple “environments” that imbues Frankenstein and its offshoots and that is common to all these essays; the novel’s emergence from a generic environment of fiction (the Gothic) that established itself in the 1760s and continues to this day; the history of interpretations of Frankenstein generated by the various theoretical environments in which it has been analyzed; and how all of the following essays, including the particular environments of Frankenstein they treat, both advance that history and fit into the overall scheme of this special issue.

 

Frankenstein’s Origin-Stories
Susan J. Wolfson

 

Of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus—as the or (appositive or alternative?) may suggest—origins are in such oversupply, such over-determination, as to make a question of origin itself. Its complex multiples extend to a report from the decade in which Frankenstein is cast, the 1790s: J. M. Itard’s De l’éducation d’un homme sauvage (1801), about a feral boy of mysterious origin. Susan Wolfson investigates the several origin-stories for, in, from, and around Mary Shelley’s durably dynamic novel, including the question of “monstrous” assignments and the riddle for Enlightenment thought about whether primitive existence is ideal innocence, or savagery.

The Volcano That Spawned a Monster: Frankenstein and Climate Change
Gillen D’Arcy Wood

 

The volcanic period of 1816–18 is the most recent and vivid case study we have for worldwide climate catastrophe, evident from archival and geological records of sustained extreme weather, including drought, floods, storms, and crop-killing temperature decline. The signature literary expression of this historic climate crisis occurred in Switzerland, where teenage Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in the midst of the disastrous “Year without a Summer,” 1816, a season of floods and food riots caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora thousands of miles away. This essay, combining climate science with historical and literary sources, reexamines the literary legend of that direful, stormy summer, which Mary Shelley spent on the shores of Lake Geneva with the poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, with a new and original emphasis on its climatic context. The writers huddled indoors and wrote ghost stories, while the cataclysmic weather and humanitarian emergency unfolding around them weaved its way into Mary Shelley’s imagining of a tragic monster brought to life.

Moving Parts: Frankenstein, Biotechnology, and Mobility
Alan Bewell

 

The goal of this essay is to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a “bioethical” novel that draws upon several Romantic-era discourses that powerfully combined medical environmentalism, ecology, and political reform to criticize the “biotechnology” of her era. In her novel, Mary Shelley engages in a critique of the selective breeding that farmers of her era used to create new biological beings, as Victor Frankenstein does, by building on the role that new breeds of livestock played in the industrialization of late eighteenth-century British agriculture and the greater consumption of animal food in England. At the same time, Frankenstein also points up the problematic links between such breeding schemes and two other factors of the same period: the greater mobility of peoples and animals made viable by wide-ranging, seagoing trade, and the multiplicity of different-colored races made more apparent by how this mobility enabled the possibility of more human, as well as animal, crossbreeding.

 

Et Tu, Victor? Interrogating the Master’s Responsibility to—and Betrayal of—the Slave in Frankenstein
Maisha Wester

 

A white, wealthy, educated male, Victor Frankenstein spends a good portion of Mary Shelley’s novel complaining about being a slave to his Creature. Victor’s laments draw attention to Frankenstein’s engagement with debates about race, slavery, and abolition. The novel seems to ask what a slave is and thereby challenges notions about racial difference and the ideals of cultural/intellectual superiority that support enslaving populations. Foundational studies by H. L. Malchow and others on race in Frankenstein have defined the views of Shelley’s father, William Godwin, as well as the pervasive ideas of the era, to clarify the ways in which the Creature is racially coded to align with stereotypes about Blacks in particular. Using these studies as a starting point, Maisha Wester specifically examines the ways in which Shelley’s text engages the anxieties born out of slave insurrections and Britain’s abolition of the slave trade. To this end, she explores Shelley’s depiction of the turbulence in British society arising from these issues, showing how the Creature’s attacks metaphorize the insurrections that disturbed the era’s notions of racial difference. Ultimately, her essay explains how Victor is, indeed, a “slave”—as are many others like him.

 

Frankenstein and the Sciences of Self-Regulation
Robert Mitchell

 

This essay argues that Romantic-era concepts of regulation help us to understand both how and why Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein provided a critical commentary on the sciences and political theories of its time and why the novel has continued to serve as a cultural touchpoint for understanding the implications of new technologies (for example, genetic engineering). Concepts of regulation appear at key points in Frankenstein, including in Robert Walton’s hopes that his trip to the North Pole will result in a scientific discovery about magnetism that can “regulate a thousand celestial observations” and in his and Victor Frankenstein’s reflections on the relationship between their education and their identities. Concepts of regulation were also central for many eighteenth-century and Romantic-era natural scientists, philosophers, political economists, and political theorists (including Antoine Lavoisier, Immanuel Kant, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Godwin), and they were paramount to the development of “liberal” economic theory, which aimed to use the science of political economy to limit the power of the state. Robert Mitchell argues that Frankenstein takes up these concepts of regulation in order to critique this linkage of liberalism and the sciences, with the end of encouraging its readers to reimagine the components of liberalism in more equitable forms.

 

Wild Minds: Frankenstein, Animality, and Romantic Brain Science
Alan Richardson

 

Only recently, with the rise of critical animal studies, have readings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein begun to do full justice to the hybrid nature of Frankenstein’s Creature, constructed (as Victor tells us) from materials found in the “slaughter-house” as well as the “dissecting room.” Yet even animal-studies scholars view the Creature’s brain as “human,” in the absence of any supporting evidence from Shelley’s text. Here, Alan Richardson traces the Creature’s horrific effect to dual anxieties that came to ferment during the early nineteenth century, both of them amply documented in the brain science of Shelley’s era and in published reactions to it. First, the line between human and animal was becoming notably porous, in natural history, in comparative anatomy and physiology, and even in such areas as the controversy over vaccination. Second, a new discourse of instinctive and innate mental tendencies had come to compete with both creationist and tabula rasa accounts of the human mind—a development that further eroded the border between human and animal. Frankenstein’s Creature, a literally monstrous hybrid, both embodies these anxieties and exaggerates them, as a fully material and yet rational humanoid entity with body parts, and perhaps neural organs and instincts, traceable to animals.

 

Adapting the Unthinkable: An Interview
Nick Dear, Anne K. Mellor

 

This segment consists primarily of a transcript of the question-and-answer exchange conducted at the Huntington on May 12, 2018, between Nick Dear, the author of the 2011 adaptation of Frankenstein first presented by the National Theatre of Great Britain, and Dr. Anne K. Mellor, Distinguished Research Professor of English at UCLA. The interview was then and is here preceded by general remarks from Mr. Dear, for which he provides the following abstract: “I first remind our readers that I am a playwright, not a scholar, and that I identified a ‘gap in the market.’ Whilst there are many movie versions of the novel in existence, there has not been, to my knowledge, a stage version that was a good play. I wanted to do justice to Mary Shelley’s ‘handbook of radical philosophy’; at the same time, I stress that it’s a fairy tale, not a work of science. I then focus on the decision made with the director, Danny Boyle, to reframe the narrative from the Creature’s point of view. I go on to discuss some of the issues that this raised and the dramaturgical decisions that were subsequently made (for example, losing the framing narrative in the novel of Robert Walton on the ship). Finally, I talk about the difficulties of ending the story onstage—and my solution—given the ambivalent ending of Shelley’s novel.”

 

Frankenstein and Modern Bioscience: Which Story Should We Heed?
Henry T. Greely

 

Frankenstein presents us today with two different stories and two different lessons. The book, especially in the 1818 first edition, tells the story of Victor Frankenstein’s neglect of his parental duties and the harms that followed. The more lasting myth that succeeded the novel, however, became popular as early as the 1823 production of the first theatrical piece based on the book, Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein. This play’s different lesson is that Frankenstein dared too much, presumed to divine powers, and thus instigated the harms that followed. Modern bioscience affords us many unprecedented and disconcerting possibilities through, among other tools, genetics, neuroscience, stem-cell biology, and assisted reproduction. Which lessons should we apply to those possibilities, and from which of the two Frankenstein stories? Henry T. Greely argues that we should mainly fulfill the novel’s views of our duties of care. We should indeed, in Bruno Latour’s words, “Love our Monsters,” though we also need to heed the allure to the public of the myth of presumption.

 

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Genetic Engineering
Anne K. Mellor

 

Looking back over the essays in this collection, as well as the two-hundred-plus years since Frankenstein was conceived and published, this postscript asks us to recall that Mary Shelley’s own life experiences, especially childbirth, were sources for her story, even as it incorporated many other ingredients from her milieu. And today, the possibilities for creating artificial life that Frankenstein reflects on and prefigures so vividly are echoed directly in much bioscience. Shelley’s tale haunts our minds when we learn of the development of the Non-Invasive Prenatal Diagnosis, which can genetically scan a pregnant woman’s blood to make detailed predictions about her fetus, and especially CRISPR technology, which could be used to edit the genes of a human embryo. More than Victor Frankenstein did with his creation, we must take responsibility for both the intended and the unintended consequences of human germline engineering.

 

Important Recent Scholarship on Frankenstein: A Bibliography of the Last Decade
Jerrold E. Hogle

 

 

Submitted by Paul Chase, Penn Press Journals