CFP Monstrous Bodies: From Frankenstein to the Posthuman (2/13/2026; Madrid 4/23-24/2026)

Monstrous Bodies: From Frankenstein to the Posthuman

deadline for submissions:
February 13, 2026

full name / name of organization:
Saint Louis University Madrid

contact email:
olivia.badoi@slu.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/11/03/monstrous-bodies-from-frankenstein-to-the-posthuman

Monstrous Bodies: From Frankenstein to the Posthuman

Saint Louis University Madrid, April 23-24, 2026

Two centuries after Mary Shelley's Frankenstein first posed urgent questions about creation, responsibility, and what constitutes the human, we find ourselves once again confronting transgressive bodies that challenge boundaries—and monsters that reflect our deepest anxieties about the essence of humanity. Classic monsters are being reimagined with renewed urgency: Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein (2025) explicitly rejects AI and digital technology in favor of "old-fashioned craftsmanship" and practical effects, while Robert Eggers' Nosferatu (2024) and Luc Besson's Dracula (2025) resurrect the vampire to explore psychological trauma, isolation, and the burden of immortality—Eggers through the lens of female agency and Victorian pathologization, Besson through existential tragedy and centuries of alienation.

Meanwhile, body horror has emerged as a dominant mode of cultural critique, from films like The Substance (2024) that weaponize visceral transformation to expose ageism and misogyny, to literary works like Rahel Yoder´s Nightbitch (2021), Cassandra Khaw's The Salt Grows Heavy (2023), or Jade Song's Chlorine (2023).

These works arrive at a crucial juncture: the Age of AI has intensified anxieties about what defines human intelligence, creativity, embodiment, and consciousness. In an era when machines can generate art, hold conversations, and simulate human thought, the figure of the monster—whether Frankenstein's creature, the vampire, or the body-in-transformation—becomes a powerful lens for examining the boundaries of the human.

This conference brings together foundational and emerging scholarship in monster studies, posthumanism, and body theory. Drawing on Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's "Monster Theory" (1996), Susan Stryker on trans monstrosity as resistance, and N. Katherine Hayles on posthuman embodiment, we examine how contemporary monsters challenge boundaries of the human. The conference engages established critical posthumanist frameworks (Haraway, Braidotti, Alaimo, Wolfe) alongside emerging voices pushing these conversations forward—including Oxana Timofeeva's work on the "non-human as such" that challenges posthumanism's own anthropocentrism, and Maria Hlavajova's explorations of art's role in posthuman futures. We particularly welcome papers that analyze how monstrous bodies function as sites of struggle, medical intervention, and cultural inscription—or that explore how monstrosity offers modes of resistance, reimagining boundaries of the human.

Possible Topics Include:

Monster Theory and the Posthuman Condition

• The monster as cultural symptom in contemporary posthuman theory (Alaimo, Braidotti, Haraway)
• Viral monsters and contagion narratives in the wake of pandemic experience
• AI anxiety and the return of the created monster in 21st-century Gothic

Bodies Under Capitalism

• Beauty terror and age horror in The Substance and contemporary body horror cinema
• Monstrous transformations as critiques of late capitalism and neoliberal body politics
• Wellness culture, optimization, and the production of the "failed" body

Gothic Feminisms and Queer Monstrosity

• Victorian anxieties reimagined: female agency and pathologization in Eggers' Nosferatu
• Trans embodiment and monstrous becoming in contemporary speculative fiction
• Reproductive horror and the monstrous-feminine from Rosemary's Baby to Titane

Disability and Monstrous Embodiment

• Crip monstrosity and the rejection of cure narratives
• Prosthetic bodies and cyborg identities in science fiction
• Mad studies approaches to the "monstrous" mind

Race, Colonialism, and the Monstrous Other

• Decolonizing monster studies: indigenous perspectives on shapeshifting and transformation
• The zombie as racial metaphor from Haiti to Get Out
• Afrofuturist reimaginings of monstrous embodiment

Technology, Creation, and Responsibility

• Laboratory life: from Shelley's workshop to CRISPR and synthetic biology
• Digital ghosts and virtual monsters in the age of deepfakes
• The ethics of creation "without responsibility" in AI and biotechnology

Environmental Monsters and Multispecies Encounters

• Climate horror and monstrous ecologies in the Anthropocene
• Fungal networks, viral agencies, and more-than-human monsters
• Toxic bodies and chemical transformations in environmental justice narratives

Submission Guidelines

We welcome proposals for:

• Individual papers (20 minutes)
• Pre-formed panels (3-4 papers)
• Creative presentations and performances
• Roundtable discussions

Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words, along with a brief biographical note (100 words), to olivia.badoi@slu.edu by February 13.


Last updated November 3, 2025

CFP The Shelley Conference 2024: 'Posthumous Poems', Posthumous Collaborations (1/29/2024; London 6/28-29/2024)

The Shelley Conference 2024: 'Posthumous Poems', Posthumous Collaborations

deadline for submissions:
January 29, 2024

full name / name of organization:
The Shelley Conference

contact email:
shelleyconference@gmail.com

The Shelley Conference 2024

Posthumous Poems, Posthumous Collaborations

Keats House Museum, London, 28-29 June 2024



Two years after the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the summer of 1822, Mary Shelley, after a painstaking editorial process, published Posthumous Poems (1824). The volume contained much of Shelley’s major poetry, including the hitherto unpublished ‘Julian and Maddalo’, together with translations of Goethe and Calderón, and unfinished compositions such as ‘The Triumph of Life’ and ‘Charles the First’.



The Shelley Conference 2024 celebrates the first collected volume of Shelley’s poetry. Posthumous Poems is the product of collaborations. The most significant of these is between Mary Shelley as editor and Shelley as poet, but they also occur between Shelley and the guarantors of the volume, including Bryan Waller Procter (‘Barry Cornwall’) and Thomas Lovell Beddoes. The conference also addresses ideas of posterity and reception more generally in Shelley scholarship, the range of literary forms collected in a single volume, and the complex collaborative literary relationships that shaped Shelley’s life and endured after his death.



The conference will be held at Keats House Museum in Hampstead, London. Proposals should be in the form of 200-word abstracts for 15-minute papers. Please include a 100-word biography with your proposal.



Papers are invited on themes including, but not limited to:



● Posthumous Poems, its texts and history

● New readings of key poems and of Posthumous Poems as a collection

● Mary Shelley as editor

● Posterity and futurity as themes in Shelley’s work

● Texts in dialogue with Shelley’s work, particularly by those in his circle who survived him

● Shelley’s engagement with Europe and European literature

● The nature and limits of the collaborative process

● Shelley’s reception outside of Britain or in languages other than English

● Shelley and Byron

● Shelley and piracy



Deadline: Please email proposals in Word to shelleyconference@gmail.com by Monday 29 January 2024.



Bursaries: Several bursaries will be available for postgraduate and early-career researchers presenting papers. Please visit the conference website for details. To apply, please add ‘Bursary’ to your email subject.



Keynote Speaker: Dr Ross Wilson (Cambridge)

Plenary Speakers: Professor Nora Crook (Anglia Ruskin); Dr Bysshe Inigo Coffey (Oxford);

Dr Madeleine Callaghan (Sheffield)

Pre-Conference Lecture (27 June): Professor Mark Sandy (Durham)



Conference Website: theshelleyconference.com / facebook.com/shelleyconference / Twitter: @shelleyconf





Conference Organisers: Dr Amanda Blake Davis (Derby); Dr Andrew Lacey (Lancaster); Dr Merrilees Roberts (QMUL);

Dr Paul Stephens (Oxford). Postgraduate Helpers: Lydia Shaw (Durham); Keerthi Vasishta (Durham).



Advisory Board: Dr Will Bowers (QMUL), Dr Bysshe Inigo Coffey (Oxford); Dr Anna Mercer (Cardiff);

Dr Mathelinda Nabugodi (UCL); Professor Michael Rossington (Newcastle).




Last updated August 8, 2023

CFP They Live: Female Monsters and Their Impact on the Frankenstein Tradition (9/30/2023; NeMLA Boston 3/7-10/2024)

They Live: Female Monsters and Their Impact on the Frankenstein Tradition

Sponsored by the Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association

Organized by Michael A. Torregrossa


Call for Papers - Please Submit Proposals by 30 September 2023

55th Annual Convention of Northeast Modern Language Association

Sheraton Boston Hotel (Boston, MA)

On-site event: 7-10 March 2024


See the shared Google Doc for the full call with a list of bibliographic resources on the topic: https://tinyurl.com/They-Live-NeMLA-2024.

Session Information

In this session, we seek to engage with and to build upon the work of Erin Hawley in “The Bride and Her Afterlife: Female Frankenstein Monsters on Page and Screen” in order to develop a more complete picture of the roles of the Bride of Frankenstein and her analogues within the Frankenstein tradition.


In 2025, James Whale’s film Bride of Frankenstein will celebrate its 90th anniversary. This is an important milestone, but it has a larger impact beyond the world of film. In both Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein, Whale and make-up artist Jack Pierce gave life to two iconic figures of modern popular culture: the Monster (played by Boris Karloff) and the Bride (played by Elsa Lanchester).


The creation of the Bride was especially significant since in the source, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the mate of the creature is destroyed while still in progress. There is no meeting of Victor Frankenstein’s creations. In the film, however, the Bride is completed, brought to life, and briefly interacts with her intended. Unfortunately, the pair fail to connect, and, by the film’s end, the Bride is destroyed again.


Despite this, once having encountered her in the flesh through Lanchester’s portrayal, it was impossible for creative artists to let the Bride stay dead. For at least six of her almost nine decades, the Bride of Frankenstein has been revived time and again in a diverse variety of media, including artwork, cartoons, children’s books, comics, films, games, prose fiction, and television programs. Each new text offers an innovative contribution to the ongoing Frankenstein tradition through the ways the Bride and her analogues forge new narratives as they act with and react to other characters within the base story.


Submissions might explore

• The ways the Bride of Frankenstein and her analogues transform the story through their roles as wives and mothers as they bring to fulfillment many of the hopes expressed by the creature in Shelley’s novel
• The ways versions of female Frankensteins that take a darker turn bring about the bleaker visions Victor Frankenstein has for his creation(s)
• How the existence of female Frankensteins (even when absent) reshapes many of their male counterparts by moving them from menaces to husbands and fathers

See the shared Google Doc for the full call with a list of bibliographic resources on the topic: https://tinyurl.com/They-Live-NeMLA-2024. Further resources about the Frankenstein tradition can be found at our website Frankenstein and the Fantastic at https://frankensteinandthefantastic.blogspot.com/. Do connect with any ideas for additional references and/or resources.


Thank you for your interest in our session. Please address questions and/or concerns to the organizers at popular.preternaturaliana@gmail.com.


For more information on the Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association, please visit our website at https://popularpreternaturaliana.blogspot.com/.

Submission Information

All proposals must be submitted into the CFPList system at https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20362 by 30 September 2023. You will be prompted to create an account with NeMLA (if you do not already have one) and, then, to complete sections on Title, Abstract, and Media Needs.


Notification on the fate of your submission will be made prior to 16 October 2023. If favorable, please confirm your participation with chairs by accepting their invitations and by registering for the event. The deadline for Registration/Membership is 9 December 2023.


Be advised of the following policies of the Convention: All participants must be members of NeMLA for the year of the conference. Participants may present on up to two sessions of different types (panels/seminars are considered of the same type). Submitters to the CFP site cannot upload the same abstract twice.(See the NeMLA Presenter Policies page, at https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/policies.html, for further details,)


Thank you for your interest in our session. Please address questions and/or concerns to the organizers at popular.preternaturaliana@gmail.com.

CFP British Romanticism in 1823 (5/31/2023; PAMLA Portland 10/26-29/2023)

British Romanticism in 1823

deadline for submissions:
May 31, 2023

full name / name of organization:
L. Adam Mekler/PAMLA

contact email:
adam.mekler@morgan.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/03/03/british-romanticism-in-1823

PAMLA 2023: October 26-29, 2023
Portland, Oregon

This panel invites paper that explore the decades of the 1820s, focusing especially on the year 1823, with regards to the shifting perspectives both on and of the writers of the Romantic period. The greatest works of William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, and all of the novels of Jane Austen, had been published years, if not decades earlier, while John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and William Blake would all die by the end of the decade. Nevertheless, 1823 saw the publication of several notable works, including the second edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Shelley’ second novel, Valperga; William Hazlitt’s important essay “My First Acquaintance with Poets;” Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia; and Cantos VI-XIV of Lord Byron’s masterpiece, Don Juan. While the more canonical writers of the period offer substantial material to consider, discussions of lesser-known writers or texts of the period are also certainly encouraged.

Please submit your 250-word abstract by May 31 through the PAMLA portal: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/




Last updated March 7, 2023