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CALL FOR PAPERS:
MONSTRUM 8.2 (December 2025)
Vegan and Animal Liberation Horror
Guest Editor: Mike Thorn
Joss Richer, 2024
Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles note, in their introduction to Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene (2021), that “ecohorror is not defined only by fear of nature but also encompasses fear for nature” and thus that ecohorror “is not simply a venue for ecophobia" (14). Ecohorror, then, offers a unique vantage into our contemporary epoch, wherein factory farming and other Eurowestern practices of ecocidal, colonialist imperialism pose existential threats to human and more than human species.
Horror’s interest in the more than human world predates the relatively contemporary category of “ecohorror.” In Gothic Metaphysics: From Alchemy to the Anthropocene (2021), Jodey Castricano traces the genre’s ecological interests to its literary Gothic origins. She asserts that Gothic horror proves more prescient now than ever, stating: “In the time of the Anthropocene, the return of the concept of animistic interrelationship and interconnectedness cannot be overemphasized, if only because it is the harbinger of the failure of the Cartesian paradigm, which had once ‘seemed infallible to most Westerners’ and which has, arguably, contributed to the crisis facing the planet today with respect to climate change” (190).
In what ways, then, can horror fictions help us better understand relations between human and more than human animals? How do horror texts contend with the real-world horrors of capitalist human exceptionalism that justify the industrial exploitation and killing of more than human animals? How might horror’s “speculative” or “excessive” aesthetics offer insights into animals’ perceptual or experiential modalities? How does the horror genre employ its self-announcing affect to these ends?
Submissions are now open for Monstrum 8.2, a special issue devoted to horror and ecohorror’s engagements with veganism and animal liberation. We seek proposals for essays (5,000-7,000 words) devoted to horror texts, modalities, and philosophies with a focus on veganism or animal rights. Your essays might consider how issues of animal liberation present in canonical Gothic and horror fiction (e.g. the work of Shirley Jackson, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King), in the Weird literary tradition (e.g. Algernon Blackwood, Robert Aickman, Thomas Ligotti), in works of folk horror, in horror cinema, or in contemporary and “understudied” horror texts. They might consider issues of animal liberation in works of Indigenous horror (e.g. Eden Robinson, Stephen Graham Jones, Owl Goingback), or how veganism manifests in horror texts by publicly vegan and vegetarian writers and filmmakers (e.g. Rob Zombie, Kathe Koja, Clive Barker, Dario Argento). We are open to all manner of proposals pertaining to the intersection of horror and animal liberation, including videographic criticism (video essays).
Proposals should be no longer than 500 words and should be submitted no later than Friday, November 15. For inquiries or further information, or to submit a proposal, please contact Guest Editor Mike Thorn.
Proposal Guidelines
Proposals should include the following elements:
Title: A descriptive title for your essay.
Abstract: A concise summary of your proposed essay, identifying your object of study, articulating the main argument, and outlining your methodology/approach. If you are proposing a videographic essay, describe the methods and techniques you intend to use in your video essay, including how you plan to convey your ideas visually and aurally.
References: Provide a preliminary list of key texts, media objects, etc., that inform your project.
Please see the Monstrum submission guidelines for more information.
Book Launch:
Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America
October 10, 5-7 PM
Thomson House
3650 McTavish
McGill University
The Department of English has invited Professor Amber Jamilla Musser (City University of New York) to engage in a dialogue with Assistant Professor Camille Owens.
Like Children (New York University Press, 2024) is a history of American childhood that rethinks black children’s excluded status, demonstrating instead white Americans’ possessive investment in black children's value and the violence of humanist inclusion.
Public Screening:
Black Snow
Directed by Stepan Burnashev
Wednesday, July 10, 2024— 6:30pm to 8:00pm
Groupe Intervention Video (GIV)
4001 rue Berri #105 / Métro Mont-Royal
Eco-Horrors and the End of the World: Scarcity, Fear, and Environmental Anxieties in Film and Media
Keynote Lecture by Dr. Lorna Piatti Farnell
Auckland University of Technology Media and Cultural Studies
Monday, July 8, 2024— 2:30 to 4:00pm
Dawson College, Room 3F.43
Lorna Piatti-Farnell, PhD, is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Auckland University of Technology, where she is also Director of the Popular Culture Research Centre. Her research interests lie at the intersection of film, popular media, and cultural history, and include a focus on corporeality, horror, technology, bio-ethics, eco-environmental studies, consumer culture, and the Gothic. She has published widely in these areas, including volumes such as Consuming Gothic: Food and Horror in Film ( 2017) and Gothic Afterlives: Reincarnations of Horror in Film and Popular Media (editor, 2019).
CALL FOR PAPERS:
Eco-horror’s Minor Intimacies: Affective Embodiments, Ecological Desires
Somatechnics 16.1 (Winter 2026)
Issue Editor: Lynn Kozak and Alanna Thain (McGill University)
300-word proposals due: June 15, 2024 to corerisc@gmail.com
Image from Welcome to BioNet, Shu Lea Cheang, 2021
Horror is an affect, genre and epistemology relevant to our current condition, signaled by a resurgent interest in horror media in popular culture and in high art. A re-coding in horror’s language is widely perceptible across media that serve as a site for commentary and intervention
around contested social issues. Beyond their capture in genre, horror affects and tendencies increasingly modulate our relation to the social and environmental crises of our day. For this special issue of Somatechnics we propose a focus on minoritarian eco-horror, asking how horror’s complicated affects and intimacies allow for critical reworkings of negative experiences to tell other stories: of persistence, mutation, adaptation or survivance. This approach uniquely foregrounds dynamics of power that are obscure(d), relational, temporally unruly and entangled with the legacies of colonialism, exploitation, technology and questions of scale, from the long arc of the cosmos to the intimacy of every breath. Beyond the oppositional framework that sees nature as a site or source of exploited, vengeful, or sensationalist horror, how might minoritarian eco-horror operate along other axes of relation, intimacy and otherness?
Attending to eco-horror affects amplifies two tendencies of genre media that are especially relevant for considering the unevenly shared and embodied risk that is at the heart of eco-horror’s concerns. First, it foregrounds how horror media "does things to bodies." Horror's exceptional ability to foreground immersive, leaky, and pervasive relations of bodies and spaces produces a critical and alternative epistemology of sensations. Second, genre films produce temporal plurality through recirculation, where genre’s narrative or structural logic of the same is wound up with an unruly thread of differential repetition. Reading the horror genre through its mobilizing tendencies brings out this aspect of minor difference too often dismissed, taking seriously qualitative changes of feeling, sensation and other metrics beyond “progress”. Eco-horror affects tell other stories of social and environmental crisis, shifting the enervations of media fatalism to different spectrums of activism, ambiguous agency and affective encounters.
We seek work that attends to the risky business of eco-horror and the relations it animates. We welcome work that addresses media and performance, fiction and documentary, platforms and content, from perspectives that foreground minoritarian lifeworlds. Our key question is: what does embodied survival look and feel like in minoritarian eco-horror?
Abstracts due: June 30, 2024 to corerisc@gmail.com, subject line ECOHORROR. Full Papers du:e Jan 15, 2025
Expected publication: Winter 2026
Editors: Lynn Kozak is an associate professor at McGill University. Recent work includes book chapters and articles on contemporary North American horror-hybrid television shows including Evil, Lucifer, Hannibal, Stranger Things, iZombie, and The Exorcist. Alanna Thain is associate professor of cultural studies and world cinemas at McGill University in Montreal, and former director of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies. She directs the Moving Image Research Lab, dedicated to the study of the body in moving image media, as well as the research team CORERISC, on epistemologies of embodied risk. Her most recent projects include The Sociability of Sleep and Light Leaks: Outdoor Cinema and the Ecological Art of Encounter.
Kozak and Thain are both members of the research collective CORÉRISC (Collective for research on epistemologies of embodied risk), looking at minoritarian horror media and performance.
Emily Banks (MFA, Ph.D) is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Franklin College. Her work on Shirley Jackson has appeared in Shirley Jackson: A Companion, Shirley Jackson and Domesticity: Beyond the Haunted House, Women's Studies, and JMMLA. She chairs the Shirley Jackson Society and is a managing editor of Shirley Jackson Studies. She has published additional scholarship on the American Gothic in ESQ, Mississippi Quarterly, and Arizona Quarterly, and is also the author of the poetry collection Mother Water. She lives in Indianapolis.
Shirley Jackson's Textual Hauntings: A Public Lecture on the Author's Intertexts and Afterlives
Scholars of Shirley Jackson are quick to note her influence on contemporary horror and gothic literature. From overt references to subtle nods and barely visible traces, Jackson's oeuvre continues to resurface with a haunting persistence. This is fitting in that Jackson's own work is full of allusions that tempt her readers to pursue tangled webs of association and signification. This talk will consider Jackson's intertextuality from both of these angles and introduce Monstrum 6.2, Shirley Jackson: Intertexts and Afterlives.