Aurore Bissières (Mary Immaculate College)
biss@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

The Gothic Studies panel welcomes papers on any aspect of Gothic studies across a wide range of periods, media, and cultural contexts. The Gothic has long served as a flexible and transgressive mode through which writers and creators explore fear, desire, memory, identity, and social conflict. From classic literary texts to contemporary film, television, gaming, and digital media, Gothic forms continue to evolve and adapt across cultures and historical moments.

In dialogue with PAMLA 2026’s theme, Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict, some topics of particular interest this year include the Gothic’s engagement with structures of power, authority, hierarchy, and resistance. However, proposals on all Gothic-related topics are warmly encouraged.

The Gothic Studies panel welcomes submissions on any aspect of Gothic studies across a wide range of media forms, including literature, film, television, gaming, digital media, graphic narratives, and other cultural expressions. Proposals may explore the Gothic across different historical periods, geographic contexts, and theoretical approaches.

Since its emergence in the eighteenth century, the Gothic has proven remarkably adaptable. As critics such as David Punter and Fred Botting have observed, the Gothic repeatedly returns to moments of cultural tension and crisis, dramatizing anxieties surrounding identity, authority, the body, memory, and the boundaries of the human. Gothic narratives frequently stage encounters with the uncanny, the monstrous, or the spectral, while also engaging with broader cultural concerns such as gender, race, class, colonialism, technology, and ecological change.

In connection with PAMLA 2026’s conference theme, Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict, some topics of particular interest this year include the Gothic’s relationship to structures of power and domination. The genre has long explored figures of authority: from crumbling aristocracies and tyrannical patriarchs to colonial regimes, carceral institutions, corporate power, and other forms of visible or invisible governance. Gothic texts often dramatize both the persistence of such structures and the disruptive forces that challenge them: haunting, rebellion, contagion, excess, the uncanny, and other forms of resistance.

Possible topics of particular interest this year may include (but are not limited to):

· representations of authority, hierarchy, and ruling elites in Gothic narratives

· spectral or uncanny forms of resistance

· gendered, racialized, or colonial power structures in Gothic texts

· contemporary Gothic and new configurations of power (surveillance, bio-politics, corporate or technological authority)

· the relationship between Gothic aesthetics (ruins, doubling, fragmentation, monstrosity, haunting) and political or social critique

Interdisciplinary, comparative, and transnational approaches are especially welcome. Feel free to submit proposals engaging the conference theme, Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict (the conference’s non-binding theme), or proposals that explore other dimensions of Gothic studies, including topics such as Gothic poetics and stylistics, adaptation and translation, global Gothic, ecogothic, disability and gender studies, queer Gothic, and other critical perspectives.