Category: Calls

Posted on

GIFCon 2026 – The Technologies of the Fantastic – Call for Papers

General admission registration for GIFCon 2026 is now available! Register here.

Check out the 2026 Programme here.

The GIFCon 2026 CfP deadline has passed and we are no longer accepting submissions. Thank you to everyone who submitted! All candidates have now been contacted with their outcomes.

The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic is excited to announce the call for papers for Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFCon) 2026, to be held online on 13-15 May, with the theme of ‘The Technologies of the Fantastic’.

Many addendums have been made over the years to Arthur C. Clarke’s famous third law: ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ (‘Technology and the Future’), from Professor Barry Gehm’s corollary, ‘any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced’ (Analog) to Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen’s explanatory statement in The Science of Discworld that ‘Technology works because whoever built it in the first place figured out enough of the rules of the universe to make the technology do what was required of it … With magic, in contrast, things work because people want them to’. Such discourse leaves us asking what, if anything, fundamentally separates the technological from the magical?

Though scholars have attempted to clarify the division between science fiction and fantasy by suggesting that the latter is solely concerned with the impossible whilst the former is concerned only with fact, such binaries disregard the foundations of the fantastic prevalent in science fiction, in which ‘the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible’ (Arthur C. Clarke Profiles of the Future). Similarly, the fantastic is filled with the technological. We can find technology in carefully constructed runes and magical glyphs that operate as locks and keys; in the textile metaphors of spell weaving; in the taxonomy of the naming of the wind and waves; and in the engineering of biomechanical monsters piloted by traumatized teens to fight angelic horrors.

This year, GIFCon invites the consideration of the technologies of fantasy, emphasizing those things that are too often overlooked both in the real world and in fantasy, whether through hierarchical practices that limit the definition of the scientific or because ‘technology’ has become so ubiquitous in everyday life.

GIFCon is a three-day virtual conference welcoming proposals from researchers and practitioners working in the fields of fantasy and cognate genres/subgenres across all media, whether from within academia or beyond it. We are particularly interested in submissions from postgraduate and early career researchers, and warmly welcome proposals from researchers whose work focuses on marginalized communities and subjects.

Topics for papers may include, but are not limited to:

  • The rules of magic and magic systems.
  • The Science-Fantasy genre.
  • Who are these fantasy worlds made for? What does their magic and technology account for, and who do they overlook?
  • Nonwestern technologies and colonialist constructions of science in Fantasy.
  • Exploring Fantastic infrastructures: how cities, buildings, modes of transportation, paths, and worlds are shaped by fantastic interventions/inventions.
  • How the body (whether human, non-human, posthuman, or something in between) is shaped by technology.
  • Disability and impairment in fantasy literature.
  • The relationship between technology, time, and fantasy.
  • Fantasy as escapism from notions of advancement.
  • The response to technological growth in fantasy.
  • Echoes of the real world in technological fantasies: responses, adaptations and critique.
  • Fantasies created by science practitioners: how real-world science and scientists influence the genre.
  • Technological dystopias and/or utopias.
  • The relationship between Ecology and Technology in Fantasy.
  • Punk Practices: Rethinking technological and social practices through subgenres like cyberpunk, steampunk, or solarpunk.
  • Queer and Trans Theory approaches: how may queer and trans theory offer insights to the concatenation of the magical and technological?
  • What is left out in normative narratives of the scientific and technological? How does fantasy disrupt these narratives?

We also welcome proposals for roundtables and workshops, consisting of 75-minute interactive online sessions which can be run on any aspect of our conference theme by either an individual or group. Generally, workshops have limited capacities and do not set preliminary reading, but participants sign up in advance and flexibility is possible. We encourage creative responses to the workshop call; please select ‘Workshop/Roundtable’ on the proposal form if you intend to lead a workshop or roundtable session.

The submission forms for papers, workshops, and roundtables has passed for GIFCon 2026. Thank you to everyone who submitted!

GIFCon 2026 Programme

REGISTER NOW

Posted on

Fantasy’s Present Pasts – Call for Papers and Sessions

Fantasy’s Present Pasts

The inaugural European Conference on the Fantastic

University of Glasgow
Tuesday 23rd – Thursday 25th June 2026

Keynote Speakers

Stefan Ekman
(author of Here be Dragons and Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic)

Sofia Samatar
(author of A Stranger in Olondria, The Winged Histories and The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain)

Helen Young
(author of Race and Popular Fantasy Literature and Global Medievalism (with Kavita Mudan Finn))

The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow is delighted to invite proposals for ‘Fantasy’s Present Pasts’. This will be the first in a series of annual European Conferences on the Fantastic organised by groups of scholars across the continent, currently involving clusters in Denmark, Germany, Poland, Scandinavia and the UK.

‘Fantasy’s Present Pasts’ invites innovative papers that explore works of Fantasy or consider genre culture more broadly. However, it focuses particularly on the ways in which speculative genres engage with the interplay of past and present. It hopes to explore the kinds of history on which works of Fantasy currently draw; the ways in which pasts present themselves in genre texts; and the manners in which we currently model the diverse pasts of genres across different cultures and traditions. As the inaugural conference in a new series, it hopes to take stock of where we are in genre studies and collaboratively to think through where we would like to get to.

Topics papers might address include, but are not limited to:

  • The ways that pasts burst into the present in fantastical works
  • The intermingling of actual and fictional histories
  • The types of histories that genre texts draw upon and omit
  • Fantastic histories across different media
  • The histories of genres, subgenres and microgenres
  • Different forms and scales of time: personal, societal, planetary, universal
  • Diverse temporalities: indigenous, queer and culturally specific conceptions
  • The ways in which our present pasts might evolve into brighter futures

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers to be presented in person; these should be submitted using the paper proposal form. The form asks for a 250- to 350-word abstract supplemented by a list of 3 to 10 primary and secondary references (indicating the works with which your paper will engage) and a 100-word biographical note, as well as some brief information on dietary and accessibility requirements.

We also invite proposals for full panels, roundtables and workshops. For full panels, organisers should ask panellists to submit individual abstracts using the paper proposal form, entering the panel name in the appropriate field. Organisers should also submit an overall panel description using the session proposal form. For roundtables and workshops, please submit the session proposal form, clearly describing your proposed session and listing all contributors (with contact details).

The Call for Papers and Sessions closes on Friday 12th December (11:59pm GMT). The organisers will respond to all proposals before the end of January to allow ample time for travel arrangements to be made. Alongside Glasgow’s many accommodation options, the organisers have arranged a booking code for affordable student rooms; this will be made available when registration opens.

If you have any questions about the conference, please email arts-fantasy@glasgow.ac.uk or Matthew.Sangster@glasgow.ac.uk.

Hope to see many of you in Glasgow in June!

A downloadable version of this CfP can be accessed below.

Fantasy’s Present Pasts CfP – 1 Oct 2025Download
Posted on

CFP – Publishing Fantasy for Younger Readers: A Symposium

Publishing Fantasy for Younger Readers: A Symposium 

University of Glasgow, Thursday 3rd April 2025 

Keynote Speaker: Frances Hardinge 

Call for Papers: 

Fantasy literature for younger readers continues to be a booming arm of the book industry, both in the UK and internationally, with successful children’s fantasy novels and series crossing into film and TV and morphing into multimodal franchises. But to what extent do the ways in which children’s and YA fantasies are read and theorized by the academy chime with the ways these genres are commissioned, produced and marketed by the industry? How are trends set and critiqued, how do industry demands drive creativity, what are the roles of readers, and how is the process of book-producing represented fictionally?  

This conference invites answers to all of these questions (and more!) by inviting contributions from academics, publishers, agents, editors, and authors. It explores the fruitful intersections between critical and theoretical knowledge, on the one hand, and practice-based, professional knowledge on the other, seeking to enrich our understanding of the imaginative materials that reach the hands of young readers.  

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following:  

  • Mechanics and processes of publishing (including covers, marketing, etc.) 
  • Trends and phases in Children’s Fantasy 
  • The roles of series and publishing formats 
  • Archival work – e.g. authors’ correspondence with agents and publishers 
  • Age-related categories/demographic imaginaries 
  • Representations of the book trade in Children’s Fantasy 
  • Censorship and transgression 
  • Children’s Fantasy in different countries and cultural contexts 
  • Fan cultures (fan fiction, fan art, BookTok, etc.) 

We welcome abstracts for twenty-minute papers and other contributions (250 words).  These should be submitted along with a short biographical note (50-100 words) to arts-fantasy@glasgow.ac.uk by 30th November 2024. 

Please use “Publishing Fantasy for Younger Readers Abstract” as your e-mail subject.

Posted on

CFP: Tolkien sessions at IMC Leeds 2025

In 2025 Tolkien at IMC Leeds (7-10 July 2025) will be celebrating our ten year anniversary having been started in 2015 by our founder Professor Dimitra Fimi.   

The special thematic strand of this conference will be ‘Worlds of Learning’. 

We are very pleased that the 2025 IMC Tolkien Sessions will again be sponsored by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow

Paper submissions are being sought for the following 2025 Tolkien at Leeds sessions:  

Tolkien: Medieval Roots and Modern Branches

This session can accommodate wider topics and new approaches to Tolkien’s medievalism, ranging from source studies and theoretical readings to comparative studies of Tolkien’s works.  

Learning, Lore and Craft in Tolkien’s Medieval World 

Papers in this session can explore the role that learning, preserving lore and producing crafts in their widest sense play in Tolkien’s world-building of his Middle-earth legendarium and other fictional and academic works.   

Oral Tradition and Medieval Transmission in Tolkien’s Works 

“From ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ to ‘The Red Book of Westmarch’ and ‘The Notion Club Papers,’ Tolkien crafted various narrative frameworks to convey the conceit of transmitting his invented secondary world into our primary reality. In this session, papers can delve into the significance of orality in Tolkien’s works and explore the diverse transmission frameworks he developed. Additionally, researchers may investigate the literary works that might have influenced Tolkien’s efforts to create these connections 

J.R.R. Tolkien as Teacher and Mentor at Leeds and Beyond 

In this session, papers will celebrate Tolkien’s pivotal role as a teacher and mentor to students at the Universities of Leeds and Oxford. Topics may encompass how Tolkien’s teaching and mentorship influenced scholars, the academic work he supervised, and the establishment of academic clubs like The Viking Club at Leeds and its counterpart, Kolbitar, at Oxford. Additionally, attendees can explore students’ memories of Tolkien as both a teacher and mentor

Tolkien at Leeds Annual Roundtable: Teaching Tolkien 

The Annual Tolkien at Leeds Roundtable will invite educators to discuss and debate teaching methodologies and the unique challenges of bringing Tolkien’s works into 21st-century classrooms.

Please submit a paper contribution title and abstract by 31 August 2024 to  

Dr. Andrew Higgins (asthiggins@me.com) 

  • Length of abstracts: 150 words (max!)  
  • Please include a short bibliography of main research your paper will be drawing on and be in dialogue with.  
  • Papers will be 15-20 minutes long (3 session papers will be preferred) 
  • With your abstract, please include name and details of contributor (affiliation, address, and preferred e-mail address)

Posted on

CFP: Medical Humanities and the Fantastic Online Symposium: Neurodiversity and Disability

Medical Humanities and the Fantastic Online Symposium: Neurodiversity and Disability

Friday 11th  February 2022

Keynote lectures from Dr Ria Cheyne and Dr Louise Creechan

The second Medical Humanities and the Fantastic Symposium, funded by the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Medical Humanities’ Early Career Foundation Award, and co-hosted by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, continues to map and establish new ways of connecting research into the fantastic (traditionally understood as science fiction, fantasy and horror) and popular culture with the field of the medical humanities. It aims to showcase the potentials the fantastic has to offer as valuable gateway and perspective for discussing medical encounters, practices and lived experiences. The fantastic as a research method can expand the scope of the medical humanities since its modus operandi relies on reframing human understanding of the world, particularly the human condition and its relationship to technology, society, and the environment. Likewise, medical humanities offer emerging trajectories to approach the fantastic.

This time the symposium intends to focus on a specific area, and its theme is set as “Neurodiversity and Disability”, seeking to explore and formulating answers the following questions:

  • How does the fantastic represent or subvert neurodiversity and disability?
  • How can the fantastic help express lived experiences of neurodiversity and disability?
  • How can the fantastic negotiate the reframing of current medical, social, political and economic debates surrounding neurodiversity and disability?
  • How can the fantastic raise awareness, and facilitate critical and policy intervention?

We are inviting 10-15-minute presentations (including work-in-progress projects) relating to but not limited to the following topics:

  • Ableism
  • Academia
  • Activism
  • ADHD, ASD
  • Anthropocene
  • Art and artistic practices
  • Care and care crisis
  • Capitalism and anti-capitalism
  • Children’s literature
  • Chronic illness and chronic pain
  • Comics and graphic novels
  • Communities online and offline
  • Creativity
  • Dis/ability
  • Ecology, ecopsychology, ecosickness
  • Education
  • Fantasy
  • Fantastic franchises
  • Film and television
  • Gaming and gamification
  • Gender
  • Gothic and Horror
  • History and medical history
  • Learning disabilities
  • Modernism and Postmodernism
  • Neurodiversity and the Neurodiversity Movement
  • Posthumanism
  • Precarity
  • Reproductive health
  • Robotics
  • Science fiction and speculative fiction
  • Sex and sexuality
  • Social media
  • Technology
  • Theatre
  • Vulnerability
  • Weird fiction
  • Young Adult

Please send your short abstract (100-200 words) accompanied by a brief bio (50-100 words) by the end of January 2022 as well as any enquiries and concerns to fantastic.medhums@gmail.com. For information and updates on the event follow @fantastic_mhs on Twitter.

Registration for this Symposium is now open! You can register here.

Posted on

CFP: Tolkien and Fantasy sessions at ICMS, Kalamazoo

We are seeking abstracts for two sessions on J.R.R. Tolkien and Young Adult Fantasy, sponsored by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, for the 57th International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, Western Michigan University), to be held online on 9-14 May 2022.

Tolkien and the Medieval Animal

Organised by Kris Swank

The emerging field of “animal studies” shifts critical thought away from an assumption of human supremacy and instead explores the web of interdependence that enmeshes humans with all other forms of life (Crane 2015: 1). As Anna Tsing puts it, “Human nature is an interspecies relationship” (2012: 144). But these conceptions are not new. Susan Crane writes, “The people of medieval Britain lived in daily contact with domestic and wild animals. Forest and wasteland loomed over settlements, and even city streets teemed with all kinds of creatures” (2012: 1).

The medieval animal is explored in a number of recent monographs, e.g. Animals in the Middle Ages by Nona C. Flores (2000), The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed., by Joyce E. Salisbury (2010), Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain by Susan Crane (2012), and Medieval Pets by Kathleen Walker-Meikle (2021), among others. Animals mattered to J.R.R. Tolkien, too, and his writings frequently engage with medieval conceptions of the interspecies relationships between humans and non-human animals. A few examples include Farmer Giles and his dog, Garm, Gandalf and Shadowfax, and bestiary animals Fastitocalon, the Oliphaunt, and dragons. Lists of animals found in Middle-earth are available online (e.g. here and here).

We welcome proposals for this paper session on “Tolkien and the Medieval Animal.” Interdisciplinary topics are welcome, and scholars might engage with a number of diverse fields, such as anthropology, art history, biology, communication, geography, history, literary studies, philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc. Panelists may also employ various theoretical perspectives.

For any questions on this session please contact Kris Swank at 2464732s@student.gla.ac.uk.

The Global Middle Ages in Young Adult Fantasy

Organised by Grace Ann Thomas Worm

Contemporary trends in Young Adult fantasy literature demonstrate a close relationship between young adult stories and a global medieval settings. Young Adult fantasies often use medieval settings to position arguments around identity, race, culture, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, violence, environmentalism, technology, folklore, and magic. We want to open a conversation about the turn toward a Global Middle Ages in Young Adult fantasy and its opportunities and challenges for new voices, groups, cultures, and readers.

Since the days of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, settings for fantasy novels have largely been modelled upon the medieval North: the British Isles and Scandinavia. In the last decade, a wave of emerging voices in the field of Young Adult fantasy have turned to the rich variety of cultural models, mythologies, and folklore traditions of the “Global Middle Ages,” that is pre-modern Africa, Asia, the Americas, Austronesia, even eastern and southern Europe. Among this wave of authors who write on global medievalism are Tomi Adeyemi, Renée Ahdieh, P. Djèlí Clark, Hafsah Faizal, Julie Kagawa, Nnedi Okrafor, Rebecca Roanhorse, Nghi Vo, Neon Yang, and many others.

We want to reveal not only cultures which have previously been silenced, but also groups which have been silenced, including women, the enslaved, indigenous peoples, queer, or disabled groups.

For any questions on this session please contact Grace Worm at g.worm.1@research.gla.ac.uk.

How to submit your abstract

All proposals must be submitted through the International Congress on Medieval Studies site: https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/call

The proposal deadline is 15 September 2021

References

Crane, S. (2012). Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain (University of Pennsylvania Press).

Tsing, A. (2012). Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species: for Donna Haraway. Environmental Humanities 1, available at: https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/1/1/141/8082/Unruly-Edges-Mushrooms-as-Companion-SpeciesFor

Crane, S. (2015). ‘Medieval Animal Studies: Dogs at Work’. Oxford Handbooks Online, available at: https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199935338-e-103

Image Credits

Man with hunting dogs. Marginal drawing from Luttrell Psalter. Originally published in England East Anglia; circa 1325-1335. Photograph from Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest, 2 Mar 2017.

Medieval Cosplaying. @ Grace Worm

Posted on

CFP: Tolkien sessions at Leeds IMC 2022

Paper abstracts are currently being sought for the following Tolkien sessions for the Leeds International Medieval Congress, to be held at the University of Leeds on 4-7 July 2022. These sessions are organised by Dr Andrew Higgins and sponsored by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow.  The special thematic strand of the conference will be “Borders” which is reflected in several of the suggested sessions.

Paper submissions are being sought for the following sessions:

Tolkien: Medieval Roots and Modern Branches

This session can accommodate thematic topics on, and new approaches to, Tolkien’s medievalism, ranging from source studies and theoretical readings, to comparative studies of Tolkien’s and others’ works. 

Tolkien and Medieval Poets: A Session in Memory of Richard C. West  

This session is in memory of medievalist and distinguished Tolkien scholar who we sadly lost in 2020: Richard C. West.  Richard wrote some of the most important and influential early scholarship on Tolkien including his seminal 1975 essay ‘The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings’ which demonstrated how the narrative interlace structure used by medieval authors influenced Tolkien’s work.  In memory of Richard’s scholarship papers in this session will explore the influence and impact of works of medieval poetry and poets on the creative thought, process, and works of J.R.R. Tolkien.   

Crossing Borders in Middle-earth 

This will be the first session to directly address the special thematic strand of the conference.  Papers in this session can explore any aspects of borders in Tolkien’s works in the broadest sense of the term.  We welcome explorations of geographical, conceptual, political, linguistic and other borders in Middle-earth studies. 

Borders between Life and Death in Tolkien’s Legendarium

In the second session related to the thematic strand of the conference we are looking for papers that explore themes around metaphysical borders and liminal spaces between life and death in Tolkien’s works and their influences. 

Family Ties:  The Limits of Kinship in Tolkien’s Middle-earth

In his vast and complex life-long world-building Tolkien put a great focus in his narrative and para-textual work on developing networks of relationships between different races, languages and families, as in the case of the genealogies found in The Silmarillion and in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings. These networks of various forms of kinship create their own borders between the many peoples of Middle-earth.  This session welcomes papers that will explore the many different types of kinship networks Tolkien establishes in his legendarium and how they work within his rich secondary world. 

Orientation, Transgression, and Crossing Borders of Middle-earth

Papers in this session will explore broader topics around different types of less evident borders found in Tolkien’s creative thought and writing. They can include orientations and borders that are encountered and crossed (or not) in various types of social interactions and relationships in Tolkien’s legendarium including social, linguistic, racial and sexual. 

Tolkien as a Gateway to Interdisciplinary Teaching: A Roundtable

For our 2022 Roundtable we would like to hear from teachers who have used the works of Tolkien to introduce and engage students with new fields of study and disciplines. How have you used the works of Tolkien as a gateway for students to explore and become passionate about other areas of study?

  • Please submit a paper title and abstract by 31 August 2021 to  Dr. Andrew Higgins (asthiggins@me.com)
  • Length of abstracts: 150 words (max!) 
  • Papers will be 15-20 minutes long

Posted on

Call for British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowships candidates on fantasy

The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow is inviting expressions of interest from candidates who are considering applying for a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship focusing on research projects on fantasy/the fantastic.

Given the highly competitive nature of this scheme, the College of Arts at the University of Glasgow has put in place an internal process to select, and then closely support, potential candidates to be put forward with the University of Glasgow.  The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic is keen to support excellent research projects on fantasy that might attract funding from the BA scheme. Therefore we are seeking to identify, at an early stage, candidates whom we would be keen to mentor. We will offer them tailored support in preparing an application for the College selection process.

The British Academy application process is in two stages: The deadline for Outline applications is anticipated to be in mid-October 2021 (date tbc by the British Academy). The deadline for the second stage (by invitation only) is usually mid-February. The College of Arts internal deadline for UofG candidates is going to be towards the end of August 2021 (date tbc by College of Arts).

If you are interested in applying with a research project that focuses on fantasy/the fantastic, please send a CV and a draft of the research proposal part of the BA application by Thursday 15th July 2021 to arts-fantasy@glasgow.ac.uk.