I’m told the Gothic Studies academics at universities mostly don’t much care for Lovecraft, feeling he doesn’t fit in with their canon or their leftist politics. But if you were considering starting an academic journal a touch more friendly to the old gent, then note there’s to be a Gothic Networking Day for postgraduates and academics. It’s in Manchester in the north-west of England, on the 12th July 2014. It will including an afternoon of sessions on publishing academic journals in Gothic Studies, so you’ll get to meet some of the people who are already editing such journals — of which the UK now has quite a few.

The new open access Aeternum : Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies has its first issue available…

* Joseph Young (2010), Secondary Worlds in Pre Tolkienian Fantasy Fiction. (PhD for the University of Otago, New Zealand. Has thirty pages on “H.P. Lovecraft’s Cosmic Witch Hunt”)

* Claes Thoren (2007), “Creating Real Imaginary Worlds: Mythopoeic Interaction and Immersion in Digital Games” (Masters dissertation for the University of East London. Detailed analysis of the now-classic videogame Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth)

* Brandon Jernigan (2010), “Forms of some intenser life”: Genre and imperialism at the turn of the century (PhD thesis for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Tangentially related. Seeks to detect critical attitudes to new global networks in the flexible and mutable genre fiction of Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker and Algernon Blackwood. Chapter Four is: “Hostile swarms and geo-insurgency in weird fiction”, although this looks primarily at Blackwood)

“Marginalised Mainstream 2014: Disguise. 3rd annual international conference held 28th–29th November 2014 at Senate House, University of London, UK.

This year’s conference will consider the varieties, motivations, and meanings of disguise. From secret identities to theatrical performances, from fictional fabrications to factual concealment, disguises of all sorts are part of mainstream culture. This event will explore various manifestations of disguise in popular fiction, media, and culture that have previously been academically marginalised.”

As usual in academia, a tight deadline. Announced on their blog 13th May, with a deadline of 30th May. Expect the deadline to be extended.

This conference might be of interest to Lovecraftians in academia, re: disguise in Lovecraft’s stories (“The Whisperer in Darkness”; “The Thing on the Doorstep”; the various covert behaviours of cultists, such as in “Red Hook”) or in other ways (seriously anti-religious messages disguised inside ‘juvenile pulp trash’; Lovecraft’s playful way with pseudonyms; Necronomicon forgeries/fabulations; later Mythos fiction and its attempted close imitations of Lovecraft’s themes and settings; maybe even Lovecraft’s poetry in terms of its anachronistic 18th century ‘disguise’; etc).

2014 Conference of The Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA). To be held at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, on Friday 24th October and Saturday 25th October 2014.

“Given the conference location in Rhode Island, we would also be very much interested in organizing at least one session on H.P. Lovecraft…”

* Anthony Christopher Camara (2013), Dark Matter : British Weird Fiction and the Substance of Horror, 1880-1927. (PhD thesis for UCLA. Examines Lovecraft’s predecessors in British fiction — Vernon Lee, Machen, Blackwood, Hodgson — and asks how they departed from the Gothic romance and the Victorian ghost story. Seems to lack a proper conclusion, but has a short coda survey article on later developments in British weird fiction)

* Arthur Jorge Dias de Morais Coelho (2013), “Os Mitos de H.P. Lovecraft e a cultura juvenil”, Anais : Semana de Historia, Vol. XIX, 2013. (In Spanish. “Of youth culture and the mythology of H.P. Lovecraft”. Asks how the mythos came to be such a key part of youth culture).

* Frederic Sayer (2004), “Horreur des villes maudites dans l’oeuvre de H.P. Lovecraft”, Belphegor : Litterature Populaire et Culture Mediatique, 3.2, 2004. (In French. Explores… “the combination of attraction and repulsion that these elements [architecture, degenerates, ancient cults] produce for the hero, who is a true double of the reader”)

* Sean Braune (2013), “How to Analyze Texts that Were Burned, Lost, Fragmented, or Never Written”, Symploke, Vol. 21, No. 1-2, 2013.

Handy Selected Letters Of H.P. Lovecraft wiki page, with a record for each letter. Partially complete.

* Sam Gafford (2012), “The Man Who Saved Hodgson!”, williamhopehodgson.wordpress.com, 6th July 2012. (On Herman Charles Koenig, a late associate of Lovecraft. Scholarly blog post, with reference footnotes)

* Lin Wang (2012), Celebration of the Strange : YouYang Zazu and its horror stories (PhD thesis. Chapter five proposes Lovecraft’s concept of cosmic fear as a useful tool for analysis of the… “many zhiguai tales [from China, that] deal with supernatural forces without definite monsters or explicit etiologies”)