A quick round-up of some calls, new journals, conferences, of possible interest…

* A new open access journal, Gothic Nature: New Directions in EcoHorror. The chunky first issue is already online, seemingly coming out of the Gothic Studies / Ecocriticism postgrad crowd in academia. They are obviously happy to range into popular culture. Note also that they will also review suitable works.

* Journal of the British Fantasy Society, call for papers for a future (late 2020 or 2021) special issue “about works of fantasy translated into English”.

* MDPI’s Humanities journal is planning a Special Issue on the “relationship between modernism and science fiction”.

* Journal of Dracula Studies, is planning a Special Issue on witches.

* Gothic Studies is planning a Special Issue on ‘Tales of Terror: Gothic and the Short Form’ (Nov 2021). They appear to want papers on how the very short form, brevity, elision, the left-unsaid, tight story-mechanics, etc, contribute to the effectiveness of terror-tales.

* Announced is a new wide-ranging Religion and Comics series from Claremont Press. Not open access, but “paperbacks with a price point between $20-$30” rather than the usual $80 academic tome.

* The Outer Dark Symposium, 27th – 28th March 2020, Atlanta, USA. The focus is on “contemporary Weird fiction writers”, and it appears to be something of a social convention for writers as well as a symposium.

* Conference on Contemporary Folk Horror in Film and Media, Leeds Beckett University in the UK, 30th – 31st July 2020. Probably with a British slant, I’m guessing. Think Wicker Man and Penda’s Fen.