CFP: A Dark Hunger – Appetite, Desire, and Consumption in the Gothic Imagination

Date: 29 January 2027, 10:00-17:00 
Venue: Utrecht University (room TBC)
Organiser: Bart Mulderij (University of Groningen)
Credits: 1–2 ECs (assignment details will be shared closer to the date)
Open to: MA and Research MA students, PhD candidates, and early-career researchers; OSL members have first access.

A Dark Hunger: Appetite, Desire, and Consumption in the Gothic Imagination is a one-day symposium exploring the forms and meanings of appetite, desire, and consumption across Gothic, weird, horror, and speculative culture. Taking place on 29 January 2027 at Utrecht University, the event will bring together students, PhD candidates, and early-career researchers for a day of presentations and discussion, framed by opening and closing keynote lectures.

Gothic fiction has always been hungry. Its vampires thirst for blood; its monsters devour, infect, and consume. Its characters hunger for knowledge, intimacy, power, beauty, revenge, transcendence, or escape. Across literature and other media, appetite marks the point at which need becomes danger, desire becomes compulsion, and consumption becomes transformation.

This symposium invites scholars to explore these themes across Gothic, weird, horror, and speculative fiction and culture. How does the Gothic imagine the relationship between desire and monstrosity? When does hunger become excess, transgression, or violence? Who is permitted to desire, and whose appetites are represented as threatening? How do bodily hungers intersect with larger structures of exploitation, scarcity, extraction, and ecological depletion? And what possibilities might emerge from refusal, restraint, or the pursuit of forbidden desires?

We welcome papers that engage with the following topics, among others:

• Vampires, blood, cannibalism, and predatory appetite
• Food, fasting, starvation, excess, and deprivation
• Desire, eroticism, obsession, and forbidden longing
• Addiction, compulsion, and forms of insatiability
• Body horror, ingestion, infection, parasitism, and transformation
• Appetite in relation to gender, sexuality, race, class, and disability
• Colonial extraction, commodification, consumer culture, and the consumption of land and bodies
• Ecological depletion, scarcity, and planetary exhaustion
• Technology, digital culture, and economies of attention
• Adaptation, appropriation, and texts that consume or transform other texts
• Hunger, resources, and survival mechanics in games
• Refusal, abstinence, restraint, and the politics of not consuming

We encourage interdisciplinary approaches and welcome contributions that examine these questions in literature, film, television, games, comics, visual culture, music, podcasts, and other media.

The symposium is particularly aimed at MA and Research MA students, PhD candidates, and early-career researchers.

Submission Details

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief biography of approximately 100 words to osl@rug.nl by 2 November. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 9 November.

For enquiries, please contact: osl@rug.nl

A Dark Hunger: Appetite, Desire, and Consumption in the Gothic Imagination