If you have any questions, please contact Michael Bibler at [email protected] or Luke Anderson at [email protected].
This symposium is made possible by the generous support of LSU's Provost Fund for Innovation in Research “Big Ideas” Grant and by the Department of English.

Contributors to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the Southern Gothic explore new ways to think about Southern Gothic’s uncanny pasts, present, and futures in relation to a range of themes, including race, sex, gender identity, violence, surrealism, art, comics, music, journalism, and more.

Likewise, if you have questions about the collection, please
contact either of us.
Jeanie Wills is Associate Professor and D.K. Seaman Chair of Professional and Technical
Communication in the Graham School of Professional Development, College of
Engineering, University of Saskatchewan.

Contributors are encouraged to build upon these themes. Chapters have a 7000-word limit, due by 1 January 2026 with MLA formatting. Authors will be notified by 15 January 2026.
Please send your completed paper to Jeanie Wills, [email protected] and Roxanne
Harde [email protected].

• Depictions of spiritual leaders
• Depiction of evil embodied
• Depictions of faith
• Rhetoric of transformation | transubstantiation
• Rhetoric of Resurrection

• The unlikely hero
Material rhetoric
• Technology
• Music
• Consumer rhetoric
• Environments
Public health
• Contagion and infection
• Addiction & recovery
• Cannibalism
Spiritual rhetoric

Topics might include but are not limited to the following:
• Public Address, Public Arena, and Public Character
• Political rhetoric
• The Rhetoric of Leadership
• Equity & social justice
• Failure of systems of civilization
• Writers and writing
• Adolescent lives / King’s YA readership

Please direct 250-word proposals (demonstrating appropriate conversance with relevant existing scholarly literature), as well as inquiries, to [email protected] and [email protected]. The deadline for proposals is December 1st, 2025.

#SSAG #CFP #StephenKing
#GothicLiterature

Those interested in proposing an Exhumations piece should contact Tom Hillard and Matthew Sivils at [email protected] and [email protected] respectively.

#SSAG #CFP #AmericanGothicStudies #GothicLiterature

In issue 1.1, this meant introducing readers to nineteenth-century American William Leete Stone's fiction, but Exhumation pieces could also republish neglected or obscure works by better-known and/or more contemporary authors, including authors not necessarily associated with the Gothic genre.