Sritama Sen (she/they) is a research scholar, poet and writer currently pursuing her PhD in English at St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata. She completed her BA and MA in English from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Their research focuses on the transgressive function of 21st century Lesbian Gothic texts, and the challenges faced by the Gothic tradition in contemporary publishing.
Death in the Eyes 3
The Iconographies of Death in Cinema: Personae, Representations, and Imaginaries
24-25 June 2027 University of L’Aquila (Università degli Studi dell’Aquila), Italy
Few cinematic images have entered the collective imagination as profoundly as Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, 1957). A pale-faced man cloaked in a long black mantle, challenging the knight Antonius Block to a game of chess against the backdrop of the fourteenth-century Black Death, this celebrated personification draws upon a rich medieval iconographic tradition, embodying the inevitability of death, the crisis of faith, and the equality of all human beings before their ultimate fate. Bergman’s Death evokes the numerous allegories of mortality developed between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, demonstrating cinema’s extraordinary capacity to reactivate, reinterpret, and transform visual traditions that have endured across centuries.
Cinema thus emerges as an iconological apparatus capable of bringing different historical temporalities into dialogue and may be understood as a privileged site for the Nachleben of images, in the Aby Warburg sense subsequently extensively explored by, among others, Georges Didi-Huberman. Iconographies of death are not merely inherited; they migrate across media, are continually reassembled, reconfigured, and reinscribed within new cultural imaginaries. Ancient archetypes coexist with contemporary sensibilities. André Bazin understood photography and cinema as forms of the “mummification of time”, preserving reality beyond its disappearance. Edgar Morin interpreted the moving image as an anthropological response to humanity’s enduring desire for survival and immortality. Moving images’ spectral dimension has eventually been elaborated upon in Jacques Derrida’s highly influential (including for film-, media- and visual culture scholarship) hauntology.
Cinema has developed an extensive repertoire of visual forms and aesthetic strategies whereby the inevitable, the invisible, and the unrepresentable acquire shape and visibility. Death has assumed an extraordinary variety of forms and representations: skeleton, Grim Reaper, psychopomp, ghost, invisible presence, and cosmic force. At times, it appears as a fully embodied character endowed with agency, speech, and intention; at others, it remains an abstract principle, perceptible only through its effects, rendering visible that which, by definition, escapes representation. It is a spectral figure rooted in Swedish folklore in The Phantom Carriage (1921). It erupts as a medieval Totentanz within the dystopian future of Metropolis (1927); it takes the form of the seductive young man in Death Takes a Holiday (1934), of the celestial official administering the afterlife in A Matter of Life and Death (1946), of the sardonic visitor concluding The Meaning of Life (1983), of the enigmatic Joe Black in Meet Joe Black (1998), of the ironic yet melancholic figure traversing The Book of Life (2014) and Coco (2017), and of the unsettling Shinigami of the anime adaptation of the manga Death Note (2006-2007). Horror cinema has transformed death into monstrous corporeality through zombies, vampires, revenants, ghosts, and supernatural beings that dissolve the boundaries between life and death. Fantasy has imagined death as guide, companion, or mediator between worlds. Modern cinema has elevated it into a philosophical allegory of human existence, while animation has frequently offered ironic, pedagogical, or deeply melancholic incarnations of mortality.
To investigate the iconographies of death in cinema means to confront one of the fundamental questions of visual culture: how can images represent what stands for the ultimate limit of representation itself? From Philippe Ariès’s cultural history of death to Hans Belting’s anthropology of images; from the iconological studies of Warburg and Didi-Huberman to Laura Mulvey’s reflections on cinematic temporality and Elisabeth Bronfen’s analyses of the aestheticization of death, scholarship has consistently demonstrated that cinema does not merely stage death as a narrative event but continuously generates new forms of visibility, new personifications, and new visual imaginaries. Cinematic images thus become the site where memory, absence, corporeality, trauma, and survival converge, transforming one of humanity’s most universal experiences into an inexhaustible laboratory of forms, figures, and visions.
The ERC Project FILM AND DEATH is organizing with the University of L’Aquila a two-day conference exploring the multiple ways in which cinema has represented, embodied, personified, and visualized death. It invites contributions that investigate the figurative forms, aesthetic strategies, iconographic genealogies, and audiovisual dispositifs through which the cinematic medium renders death visible, thinkable, and culturally meaningful.
In parallel with the conference programme, the Necropoli Film Festival 2027 will organize film screenings (more details to be announced).
We particularly welcome interdisciplinary contributions from film and media studies, philosophy, art history, visual culture, media archaeology, death studies, religious studies, anthropology, comparative literature, and cultural studies.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Please submit a title, an abstract of 300-words, and short biographical note to deathintheeyes3@gmail.com by 30 November 2026. Accepted speakers will be notified before December 18. A registration fee of 90 euros (which includes lunches and coffee breaks) will be due in early 2027. A selection of papers presented in the conference will be part of an edited collection planned for 2028.
Organizers: Mirko Lino (University of L’Aquila); Lucas Ferraço Nassif, Marco Grosoli, Susana Viegas, and Vasco Baptista Marques (NOVA University Lisbon)
Film and Death Project website: https://filmdeath.fcsh.unl.pt/
Conference: Falmouth University, June 30 to 2nd July 2027
In 2014 and 2023, Falmouth University hosted two of its most successful conferences: Haunted Landscapes. This conference is round three of that event, which will again be held in beautiful Cornwall on the Falmouth Campus, set in lush tropical gardens and only a few minutes’ walk away from its picturesque town and beaches.
Literature, art, games, and film have always explored concepts of the supernatural, as well as the landscape, and the environment – those places and spaces haunted by spectres, memory, or history. Places may be indelibly marked by the past and by the people who populated and shaped the environment in an infinite variety of ways. Landscapes can be haunted by acts of violence done, and irrevocable crimes committed, and echoes and memories of oppression, persecution, and colonization. Layers of memory and action can be embedded in the landscape alongside the layering of history in stone and soil. Encounters with the landscape reverberate through the ages as well as through the rocks, trees, hills, and streams that are still present today. Ghosts can shade the atmosphere of a place, showing that some things never vanish, and the environment as a whole bears witness to the devastating impact of human action.
This conference will explore haunted landscapes of all sorts – from environments teetering on the verge of collapse due to climate emergency, to landscapes steeped in blood, dripping in nostalgia, or haunted by spectral memories, supernatural entities, and the threatening future of AI.
We welcome topics and proposals from any discipline. Subjects can include (but are not limited to):
Please send 250 word abstracts and a short bio (and any questions) to: Hauntedlandscapes2027@gmail.com
Deadline: 1st February 2027
Website: www.darkeconomies.co.uk
Dr Suvendu Ghatak has recently finished his PhD at the University of Florida, exploring the conjunctures of medical and cultural narratives of malaria in South Asian literature and culture. He has received fellowships from the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and American Institute of India Studies. He has published or has forthcoming works in Volupté, Synapsis, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Nineteenth Century Gender Studies, and Global Nineteenth-Century Studies. He is interested at the intersections of the race, medicine, and horror.
Edited Collection – ed. Suvendu Ghatak (ghataksuvendu@gmail.com)
Abstract submission date: 15 September 2027
Article submission date: 1 February 2027 (7,000 words)
The humorous has often been understood to be a relief from the horrific, or the proximity of the humorous and the horrific has been analyzed as specific mixed genres, such as the horror-comedy. This edited volume posits that the boundary between a gasp and a guffaw is not a universal aesthetic constant. Rather, the historical and cultural conditions of systemic racial subordination, marginalization, policing, and violence fundamentally focalizes what is experienced as horror or humor. This edited volume aims to examine the not-human, the abhuman, and the posthuman figures in Modern literary and media studies that slip across the barriers of the comic and the horrific.
The philosopher Noël Carroll has found in both horror and humor shared markers of incongruity, impurity, and transgression. Similarly, literary scholars Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik have pointed to the incorporation of comic elements in foundational texts, such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). Yet, the interaction between horror and humor is far from merely aesthetic or seamlessly universal. Race often shapes what becomes laughable or monstrous, as Jerry Rafiki Jenkins traces what he aptly calls the “ideo-pleasure” of “anti-Black sadism” under figurations of monstrosity in Black American horror literature.
The materiality and historicity of race under the inscription of the comic-horrific has been traced by a range of scholars in Black Studies, South Asian Studies, and Latin American Studies. The media scholar Robin R. Means Coleman has noted in Horror Noire the historical oscillation between comic caricature and monstrous threat in the representation of Black figures in American genre cinema, while the historian Tithi Bhattacharya has analyzed how depredations of colonial capitalism in nineteenth-century Bengal trivialized both the life and the death of the colonized, and thereby exiled the vernacular cosmologies of fear out of the domain of “serious horror” into dark humor and parody. In the seepage of the comic and the horrific, marginalized subjects have also navigated suppressed pathways of history, as scholars on the Gótico Tropical of Latin America, such as Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz argue.
While these scholars have explored the comic-horrific in specific geographic and historical fields, this volume seeks to bring scholars from different fields for an interdisciplinary conversation on race, horror, and humor. This volume explores how in the intersection of the comic and the horrific, the body and its spatial boundaries lose their fixed form, mutating into uncanny, grotesque, or campy figurations that interrogate and dismantle normative identities. Thereby, the volume seeks to initiate a rigorous theoretical exploration on the role of various marginalized identities, racial, class, gender, and so on, in focalizing and shaping the interstices of the comic and the horrific.
Conference venue: Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand
Conference dates: 17-19 February 2027
Conference organisers: Katarzyna Ancuta (Chulalongkorn University) and Christophe Thouny (Ritsumeikan University)
Call for papers closes on 20 October 2026.
We welcome proposals for the 25th Kinema Club conference on Japanese film and moving-image media, to be held at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.
The first Kinema Club conference in Bangkok provides an occasion to reconsider the place of Japanese film and moving-image media in the Global South, and in Asia in particular. The conference aims to explore Japanese cinema from Asian and Global South perspectives, opening up new and alternative ways of understanding and theorising Japanese visual media. Rather than approaching Japanese cinema primarily through established national frameworks, the conference seeks to foreground the regional and transnational networks through which Japanese moving-image media are produced, circulated, and consumed across Asia and the Global South.
More specifically, we are interested in situating this discussion within a moment marked by an ongoing planetary crisis affecting all spheres of existence – the social, environmental, political, and existential – and by the growing dominance of televisual modes of moving-image consumption through online streaming platforms. These developments challenge established conceptualisations of cinema while redefining the relationships between the local, the global, and the planetary.
With this in mind, we welcome presentations that question the nature of place in Japanese film and moving-image media. This might include papers on transnational collaboration and co-production, as well as on the circulation and consumption of Japanese moving images across screens and venues in the Global South, and the increasing presence of these modes of engagement within the Global North. Given the location of the conference, we are particularly interested in abstracts that provide opportunities to re-examine the legacy of Thai and Southeast Asian cinematic practices in relation to Japan and Japanese visual media. We also welcome applications from PhD students and early-career scholars.
Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to:
Kinema Club will take place over three days, 17-19 February 2027, at Chulalongkorn University. We welcome applications for individual presentations or panels. As a rule, only in-person attendance will be allowed, and there will be no attendance fee. This format is intended to encourage more discussion between presenters and the audience. For this reason, we ask that presentations be no longer than ten minutes, introducing a few key ideas about a particular visual text to open up discussion, rather than taking the form of a conventional 20-minute formal talk.
Please send abstracts of up to 200 words and a brief bio to kinemabkk@gmail.com
Deadline for paper proposals: 20 October 2027.
Kinema Club is a long-standing, international but informal group devoted to the study of Japanese moving-image media.
Anything related to Japanese image media is open to discussion: feature film, television, magic lanterns, anime, documentary, experimental film and video, as well as the social, economic, and historical factors that are deeply intertwined with these media.
Kinema Club also manages KineJapan, the only e-mail list of its kind devoted to discussions of Japanese cinema and other image media. KineJapan has been in operation since 1997, and continues to be very active even in these days of social media, enjoying active participation by members from around the globe.
For more information about the group, its publications and events please visit Kinema Club website https://kinemaclub.org/
Conference venue: Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand
Conference dates: 17-19 February 2027
Conference organisers: Katarzyna Ancuta (Chulalongkorn University) and Christophe Thouny (Ritsumeikan University)
Call for papers closes on 20 October 2026.
We welcome proposals for the 25th Kinema Club conference on Japanese film and moving-image media, to be held at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.
The first Kinema Club conference in Bangkok provides an occasion to reconsider the place of Japanese film and moving-image media in the Global South, and in Asia in particular. The conference aims to explore Japanese cinema from Asian and Global South perspectives, opening up new and alternative ways of understanding and theorising Japanese visual media. Rather than approaching Japanese cinema primarily through established national frameworks, the conference seeks to foreground the regional and transnational networks through which Japanese moving-image media are produced, circulated, and consumed across Asia and the Global South.
More specifically, we are interested in situating this discussion within a moment marked by an ongoing planetary crisis affecting all spheres of existence – the social, environmental, political, and existential – and by the growing dominance of televisual modes of moving-image consumption through online streaming platforms. These developments challenge established conceptualisations of cinema while redefining the relationships between the local, the global, and the planetary.
With this in mind, we welcome presentations that question the nature of place in Japanese film and moving-image media. This might include papers on transnational collaboration and co-production, as well as on the circulation and consumption of Japanese moving images across screens and venues in the Global South, and the increasing presence of these modes of engagement within the Global North. Given the location of the conference, we are particularly interested in abstracts that provide opportunities to re-examine the legacy of Thai and Southeast Asian cinematic practices in relation to Japan and Japanese visual media. We also welcome applications from PhD students and early-career scholars.
Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to:
Kinema Club will take place over three days, 17-19 February 2027, at Chulalongkorn University. We welcome applications for individual presentations or panels. As a rule, only in-person attendance will be allowed, and there will be no attendance fee. This format is intended to encourage more discussion between presenters and the audience. For this reason, we ask that presentations be no longer than ten minutes, introducing a few key ideas about a particular visual text to open up discussion, rather than taking the form of a conventional 20-minute formal talk.
Please send abstracts of up to 200 words and a brief bio to kinemabkk@gmail.com
Deadline for paper proposals: 20 October 2027.
Qin Wu is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS), University College London. Her research comparatively examines objects featured in eighteenth-century Chinese Gothic and Victorian Gothic literature. Her current thesis explores and compares representative objects, such as monsters, artificial objects, and natural landscapes, in eighteenth-century Chinese Gothic and Victorian Gothic. She is particularly interested in the concept of “Chinese Gothic” and in the extent to which the terror evoked by these objects is shaped by their cultural contexts.
The Gothic is undergoing a resurgence in academic and popular cultures. Propelled by fears produced by globalization, the neoliberal order, AI technologies, outbreaks of war, post-truth, and environmental catastrophe—tropes of ‘the gothic’ resonate. The gothic allows us to delve into the unknown and call up repressed truths.
Gothic Studies has always been in relation with ecologies. In Western temperate traditions, the Gothic is associated with fog, bleak landscapes, cryo-horror, howling wolves, and stone castles crumbling atop craggy mountains. In contrast, Tropical Gothic imagery may invoke humid forests entwined with snakes, savannah-concealed tigers, the luxurious and relentless growth of plants, decaying plantation mansions, or islands under a relentless sun surrounded by shark-filled seas.
This call for a Tropical Gothic emphasis on ecology invites considerations of climate and geology, plants and animals, land and water. It calls up landscapes from vast monocultural plantations to the claustrophobic entanglement of urban jungles. We are interested in how such tropical ecologies recast the horror and monstrosity present in local cultural imaginaries read from legends and popular myths, colonial memories and historical documentation—and how these are expressed through film, architecture, literature, art, and ethnography—the humanities and social sciences.
Tropical Gothic tropes draw from local narratives and representations to unveil the hauntings of violence rooted in socioeconomic, political, racial, and sexual oppression left behind by colonial economies, indentured labour, slavery, and their links to the present neocolonial and neoliberal capitalist production. “Tropical Gothic Ecologica” also aligns with the Anthropocene, Plantationocene, and related theories.
Tropical Gothic may call on theories from tropicality, rhizomatics, plant humanities, animal studies, orientalism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and decolonialism. It may engage subgenres like Imperial Gothic or Tropical Gothic regional studies such as Asian Gothic, Latin American Gothic, African Gothic, and Southern Gothic.
CFP Tropical Gothic Ecologica
Reflecting the diversity of the tropics, this CFP is open to interdisciplinary practices as well as critical perspectives on established disciplinary approaches. It invites papers that consider the ecological interface between, for example, nature and culture; humans and animals; indigeneity and colonialism; science and literature; technology and poetics; histories and futures; reality and fiction; mythologies and realities; spirits and humans; natural and social sciences; or the mundane and the sacred.
The special issue invites a wide range of articles and creative works from scholars who engage Tropical Gothic with a strong emphasis on various forms of Ecologica from tropical Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Indian Ocean Islands, Tropical East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, tropical North Australia, Melanesia and the Pacific Ocean Islands, Hawai’i, and the American South.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS
Special Issue Editors: Katarzyna Ancuta, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand; Amit R. Baishya, University of Oklahoma, USA; Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodriguez, National Humanities Center, North Carolina, USA; Anita Lundberg, James Cook University, Australia.
eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics publishes new research from Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences and allied fields on the variety and interrelatedness of nature, culture, and society in the Tropics. ISSN:1448-2940, free open access; indexed in Scopus, Google Scholar, Ulrich’s, DOAJ; archived in Pandora, Sherpa/Romeo; uses DOIs and Crossref, ranked Scimago Q1.