A call for content for Mysterium Tremendum, set to be “a quarterly chapbook” of poetry and fiction that is also open to non-fiction. It will aim to explore “the intersection between weird fiction/horror and the holy”. And they’re actually paying… “We’re paying flat fees of $50 for non-fiction”. For which your non-fiction nibbings will presumably have to be trembling with a numinous nimbus of the unnameable. Although it sounds as though the editor may favour “film studies” for such items.

* D. Habdankaite, “The Absolute as the Meeting Point Between Speculation and Fiction”, Open Philosophy, Vol. 3, Issue 1, 2020. (“repetitive temporality and the nonrepresentational imagination are employed successfully not only by Lovecraft but also by [the philosopher] Meillassoux when it comes to grasping the absolute…”).

A call for papers for Science Fiction in the Museum. To be a special issue of the paywalled journal Configurations, set for publication in “early 2022”.

“… comparatively little work has sought to develop our understanding of the relationships between science fiction and museum spaces.”

Also Telepoetics, a conference on the mysteries and cultural imaginaries of the telephone. Although the deadline for that has now gone.

New in public Open Access, the French academic book Fantastique et Evenement: Etude comparee des oeuvres de Jules Verne et Howard P. Lovecraft.

Evenement has a specific French academic overtone which isn’t conveyed by simply translating it to ‘event’ in English. But in translation it might be something like The Fantastic and its Events: A comparative study of the works of Jules Verne and H. P. Lovecraft. The book appears to offer a good deal of historical context, more for Poe than for Lovecraft. This was the author’s first book, and he later wrote more books on Verne, as well as one on vampires, another on images of Bohemianism, and three books of essays on the fantastic.

Regrettably the book’s chapter PDFs are now behind an ‘academic libraries only’ paywall. The so-called ‘Open Edition’ site also hides the licence terms, while using the Open Access symbol for the book. But, for now, the HTML version of the book remains free and public. As it’s in plain-text the pages can also be run through Google Translate.

I blogged here about PDF Index Generator 2.9, back in mid July 2020, noting its affordable price and that it could now index footnotes. PDF Index Generator version 3.0 has just been released, and a key change is that the interface is now available in French, German and Italian translations. This update may well interest independent scholars and indie publishers in those nations. Other changes are ease-of-use features and updates, but these will be welcomed by those who use the tool more than a couple of times a year.

This book chapter may well be the result of a time-limited public freebie from publisher Springer (they occasionaly do such things), so get it while you can if you’re interested. I can get both the full HTML and the PDF…

M. Ricciardi, “He Haunts One for Hours Afterwards”: Demonic Dissonance in Milton’s Satan and Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep, chapter in the book The Hermeneutics of Hell, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Robert F. Kilker at Kutztown University has a call-for-papers out for “Critical Approaches to Horror in Doctor Who“, to form a book-length collection. The book will aim to be…

“a thoughtful examination of the ways Doctor Who operates in the horror genre, in its complication of generic definitions, its ideological work, and its relation to fandom.”

Studies of particularly famous ‘horror’ episodes seem to be especially welcome. There should be obvious scope for a discussion of Lovecraftian influences, present as late as “Heaven Sent” (Nov 2015) which drew heavily on both recently-discovered and published plot ideas from Lovecraft. Deadline for abstracts: 4th January 2021. There’s no mention of if the book will be Open Access or not, so I assume it’ll be a commercial academic book.

Proliferations of Lovecraft: An Inclusive Interdisciplinary Conference. 18th to 19th April 2021, Vienna, Austria.

“The organising committee welcomes proposals on any subject linked to Lovecraft’s thinking and writing.”

Although note that the conference is being run by an outfit called “Progressive Connexions” who have it pegged under their “Evil” category. So something tells me that “Inclusive” here doesn’t mean that Robert M. Price is going to be a keynote speaker, in the cause of promoting intellectual inclusivity. Still, it’s an interesting topic and well stated, and at least it’s set to happen. Deadline for abstracts: 2nd October 2020.