CFP: New Approaches to Teaching the Gothic (working title)

Diane Long Hoeveler and Tamar Heller’s Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction: British and American Traditions (MLA Options for Teaching) was published in 2003; Anna Powell and Andrew Smith’s Teaching the Gothic (Palgrave) was published in 2006. While both texts are excellent guides for teachers of the Gothic, quite a lot has happened in the twenty years since these texts appeared, not the least of which was a Gothic-infused global pandemic and the insidious rise of artificial intelligence in daily life. Academics today are and have been teaching the Gothic at a time when the world’s problems – rising fascism, global conflict, climate change, the devaluation of Higher Education, among many others – make the world itself seem downright Gothic. This collection will seek to provide updated reflections, evaluations, and strategies on teaching the Gothic and utilising or creating Gothic pedagogy in the contemporary moment and beyond.

Courses on or including the Gothic are taught in a wide variety of venues within and outside academia; settings include community colleges, traditional undergraduate programmes, graduate programmes, community centres, prisons and reformatories. Classrooms themselves vary greatly, from giant lecture halls to small upper-level seminars to fully online virtual spaces. Students of the Gothic come from all ages and backgrounds, and include native speakers of English and students acquiring English later in life. These contexts, venues, and audiences present different challenges for the instructor, and require unique approaches to make for successful learning experiences.

We are seeking contributions from a range of scholars at different ranks and types of institutions (as well as outside of them) to present a broad understanding of the diversity of how we study and teach the Gothic today, and to provide new directions for the future. We already have interest from an academic press.

Potential topics might include but are not restricted to one or a mixture of the following:

• Teaching the Gothic in the midst of a crisis (e.g. pandemic, war, from a distance or physically within such spaces)
• Teaching the Gothic outside of the university / in non-traditional settings
• Challenges of AI to teaching the Gothic
• The use of various digital platforms in teaching / student research
• Gothic and the archives in contemporary times
• What texts (and which editions) absolutely must be on any Gothic syllabus (and why)?
• Gothic forms (teaching beyond traditional formats, for instance)
• Gothic theory as pedagogy (in times of crisis particularly)
• Syllabus organizational strategies and rationales: Chronological? Thematic? Canon?
• Decolonizing the Gothic syllabus
• Preparing for and managing class discussions about violence, sexual violence, trauma, discrimination, or other tough topics that arise in the Gothic?
• Strategies for teaching a Gothic course for an audience unfamiliar with the Gothic / unfamiliar with academia / non-traditional students.
• Gothic and public engagement / school outreach
• Opportunities for service learning / personal and professional development in the Gothic course
• Creative forms of assessment in the Gothic classroom
• Neurodivergence and the Gothic
• Designing assignments with AI in mind
• Cancel culture and the Gothic

Co-editors Bridget Marshall (University of Massachusetts, Lowell) and Jen Baker (University of Warwick, UK) seek abstracts of 300-500 words for chapters which will demonstrate innovative approaches to teaching the Gothic or engaging with or creating new Gothic pedagogies, particularly situated within recent contexts. We are open to a variety of forms, including case studies, reflective essays, theoretically informed essays, and other formats that can best showcase pedagogical insights. If your proposed essay includes samples of work by students/participants we will require written permissions before publication. 

Please also include a brief professional bio of 300 words (max).

Please send your abstract and bio by 10 November 2026 to Bridget and Jen at both Bridget_Marshall@uml.edu and J.Baker.5@warwick.ac.uk. We are happy to answer queries at the same address.