The International Gothic Association (IGA) is delighted to invite applications for the role of Secretary to The Allan Lloyd Smith and Justin D. Edwards Memorial Book Prizes. This position provides a unique opportunity for a postgraduate or early-career researcher with a strong interest in Gothic studies to contribute meaningfully to the recognition and celebration of scholarly excellence in our field.

Role Overview

The secretary will assist with the coordination and delivery of the IGA’s Memorial Book Prizes, which are awarded to outstanding publications in Gothic scholarship at the International Gothic Association’s flagship biannual conference. The secretary will administer the nomination, review, and award processes and provide essential support to the Chair of the Prizes, Dr Sara-Patricia Wasson.

Key Responsibilities

The Secretary will:

• Support the biennial prize cycle, including calls for nominations, processing nominations, and communicating with publishers and nominators to ensure that panelists obtain copies of the nominated works. Additional details are below.
• Support the Chair in developing and testing the nomination form and process (January 2026)
• Process nominations, checking eligibility (e.g. time span of publication and membership status of nominators), emailing confirmations, and assembling and checking a report (Jan-Feb 2026).
• Liaise with publishers and panel members to obtain copies of the works for all panellists, and follow up with publishers pro-actively where books have not yet been received. This work is intensive during March and April, with spikes of activity continuing during May.
• Maintain accurate records and timelines for all prize-related activities.
• Support the Chair’s announcements, publicity, and dissemination of prize results via IGA channels.
• Contribute to the development and refinement of prize procedures and documentation.
• Approximately 5 hours a week average for the five months Jan to May, although those hours will be especially concentrated in mid Jan-mid Feb, and April.

Person Specification

• Postgraduate student or early-career researcher in Gothic studies or a related field (e.g. literature, cultural studies, film, art history).
• A track record of excellent organisational and communication skills.
• Familiarity with Google Sheets and Microsoft Forms.
• Ability to work independently and manage multiple tasks with attention to detail.
• Familiarity with academic publishing and scholarly networks in Gothic studies.
• Commitment to promoting inclusivity and excellence in the field.
• Availability during the February- May time span for more intensive stages in the administrative activity, with particular peaks in February, March and April.

Benefits

• Opportunity to gain professional experience in academic administration.
• Enhanced visibility and networking within the international Gothic studies community.
• Contribution to the recognition of scholarly achievement in a vibrant and evolving field.

If you are interested in applying, please send a copy of your CV and a short statement of support to Sara Wasson at S.Wasson@lancaster.ac.uk, CC-ing the International Gothic Association (members@globalgoth.org), by 17 December 2025.

I must have been around ten years old when I had my first encounter with what was to become a lifelong passion: the Gothic.

I don’t remember much else of that day other than that it was a cold, dark evening and I was home alone. My parents were working late shifts back then and babysitting was not common for kids of my age in my country of origin. On that fateful evening, a new show was about to premiere on national television, and for some reason, I instantly knew it was going to be a special one. Cuddled up under my warm blanket, lights out, and eyes glued to the flickering screen, I entered a world of sublime mystery.

A misty forest of Douglas fir trees unfolded on the screen, the unforgettable sound of Angelo Badalamenti poured out of the loudspeakers, and the most comforting feeling of awe expanded throughout my entire body: “Fire walk with me!” David Lynch’s Twin Peaks thus set the ground for my everlasting love for the Gothic.

As I grew older, I discovered Gothic poetry and fiction. I remember I used to sit for hours in the public library and devour any poem or short story ever written by Edgar Allan Poe. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre became favorites I would get lost in on long summer afternoons. As a teenager, I started writing my own Gothic poetry, at first out of a feeling of personal necessity, then later more intently, as lyrics for rock bands from my hometown. Gothic metal from Paradise Lost or Moonspell became a favorite music genre and my wardrobe slowly turned grey and black.

My years at university opened up new horizons for Gothic literature and cinema. I moved to Germany and majored in British and American Studies. We read Hawthorne, Perkins Gillman, Faulkner and Morrison. The Gothic slowly revealed itself not only as an aesthetic, but also as a platform for exploring social and cultural anxieties. As I finished my PhD and started teaching at university, I knew that the Gothic would have to feature heavily on my course curriculum: US-American Gothic, Southern Gothic, Gothic Cinema, Arctic Gothic. I delve into various aspects of this fascinating mode whenever I get the chance.

Lately, my journey through the Gothic landscape has come full circle, as I explore more and more the intricacies of Gothic film: season one of True Detective, season one of The Terror, or Crimson Peak. And this year has been particularly rewarding, with two exquisite films from my favorite directors: Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein.

A lot has changed in my life since that fateful evening over three decades ago, but one constancy remains. Whenever I cuddle up under the blanket on my couch, lights out, and press play, that same comforting feeling takes over. Because to me, the Gothic has become much more than a hobby. To me, the Gothic feels like home.

Suddenly the day was gone, 
night came out from under each tree and spread.

I can’t claim with certainty what my very first encounter with the Gothic was. Perhaps it was the night in 1994 when my older sister rented The Nightmare Before Christmas on VHS. She was so unsettled that she banned the film from her household for decades — while for me, it opened a door into a dark enchantment that I’ve been chasing ever since. And as 90s kids, we were also given Greg Weisman’s wonderful Gargoyles (1994–1997), the one Disney Afternoon show that truly lodged itself under my skin, where it remains to this day.

But on November 1, 1997, something more formative happened. A ten-year-old boy from the northern German boondocks found himself glued once again to daytime TV. There it was: a cartoon film about Halloween, about time travel to Ancient Egypt, the origins of Samhain and the gargoyles of Notre Dame, culminating in a contemporary Mexican cemetery on El Día de los Muertos. It bore the rather awkward German title Kopfüber in die Geisterstunde (Headfirst into the Witching Hour), a title that only made it harder for me to rediscover the film over the next eighteen years.

I now know that it was a modest Hanna-Barbera production animated largely in Asia. More crucially, it was the brainchild of another lifelong addict of ghost stories: Ray Bradbury of Waukegan, Illinois, better known to some as Green Town. When Bradbury published The Halloween Tree in 1972, it was always with the intention of adapting it into a film for audiences who felt the pull of All Hallows’ Eve. When that dream faltered, he released it as a novel loosely linked to his Green Town trilogy, those semi-autobiographical stories of boyhood in Illinois: bottling Dandelion Wine, braving the uncanny ravine (a liminal zone that also appears in the cartoon), and celebrating the 4th of July with his grandfather, who eventually gave him the bittersweet wisdom of last goodbyes and life’s brevity.

In both novel and film, a group of boys chase the spirit of their friend Pip across time and cultures, guided by the spectral Mr. Moundshroud. Their journey is a meditation on death, tradition, and the eerie beauty of Halloween as a shared inheritance. For the Gothic imagination, it offers everything: crypts and cemeteries, liminal thresholds, uncanny mentors, and the reminder that mortality is the shadow behind every festival light.

Having since taught and examined The Halloween Tree, I now situate its dark existentialism between Kierkegaardian anxiety and Jungian archetype. Yet my fascination is unchanged from that first November afternoon twenty-eight years ago. Bradbury’s story endures for its nocturnal aesthetic, yes, but even more for its courage. When Pip’s friends each give up a year of their lives without hesitation, they acknowledge what awaits us all: horrors, partings, the “undiscovered country”. But they also affirm that this journey can be faced in solidarity: in kinship, in mutual recognition, and in light against the encroaching dark. What first looked like just another cartoon has become, through Bradbury’s words, a lifelong encounter: a reminder that the Gothic is not only about ghosts, but about the beauty of how we speak of them.

Once speculative, artificial intelligence now haunts contemporary society, with public discourse around its application and scope ranging from the utopian to the apocalyptic. The Gothic’s fascination with doubles, simulacra, uncanny agency, and other forms of otherness offers rich tools for examining the anxieties and crucial ethical dilemmas provoked by AI. The Gothic has long been preoccupied with the unstable boundaries between the natural and the artificial, as well as between individual subjectivity and the sublime terror of being subsumed into larger networks of terrible knowledge.  From Shelley’s Frankenstein and Hoffmann’s Olympia in ‘The Sandman’, through Freud’s notion of the uncanny and the development of posthumanist thinking, the concept of artificial beings has raised profound anxieties about what it means to be human. Today, these concerns have become newly urgent in the age of generative AI, where the promise of creativity and connection is shadowed by questions of exploitation, environmental cost, and the erosion of individuality.

‘Gothic Selves/Artificial Others’ invites scholars and practitioners to explore the intersections of Gothic literature, culture, and theory with artificial intelligences,  automated creativity, and posthuman forms of subjectivity. This conference seeks work that is intellectually rigorous and experimentally open, engaging with both classic Gothic texts and contemporary manifestations of the Gothic imagination across media. We invite participants from in and outside the arts and humanities to respond to the theme and intend the conference to have a truly interdisciplinary ethos.

We invite the submission of abstracts that explore the theme of ‘Gothic Selves/Artificial Others’. We welcome proposed panels of three related papers. Proposals might consider AI as a lens for Gothic subjectivity, the Gothic in AI-generated texts, or the ethical and aesthetic implications of artificial others in Gothic texts and contexts.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Doubles, doppelgängers, and AI analogues
• Artificial creativity and the Gothic imagination
• Gothic ethics and AI decision-making
• AI, disability, and the Gothic
• Gothic ecologies and AI
• Human/machine boundaries and Gothic subjectivity
• Gothic hauntings in digital media
• Automata, robots, and other uncanny others
• Generative AI and Gothic aesthetics
• Posthuman and cyborg Gothic
• Gothic constructions of consciousness
• Ethics, horror, and the uncanny in AI
• The Gothic sublime and artificial intelligence
• Surveillance, Paranoia, and the Gothic
• Queering AI and Gothic identity
• Deconstructing human/AI binaries in Gothic narratives
• Digital narratives and the Gothic
• Cognitive studies, neuroscience, and the Gothic
• Gothic destabilization of somatopsychic boundaries
• Technology, Labour, and the Gothic
• Gothicizing digital humanities
• Gothic, Affectivity, and Embodiment

Please submit a 250-word abstract by 30 January 2026 to IGAHull2026@hull.ac.uk, including your name, a short biography, affiliation (if any), and contact details. Please send your submission as an attachment (as opposed to a link to a server such as Google Docs). Submissions for panels should be sent as a single submission with three 250-word abstracts, a brief statement of the theme of the panel and the information above about each of the presenters.

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I can’t remember the very first time I encountered Gothic literature. For me, it was more a case of growing awareness, of tales about youths suffering the tyranny of the adults in whose institutional care they happened to be. And the medium that brought those tales home initially was television. As a child of the brightly lit twentieth century, I wondered where they all hailed from, these young people trapped in gloomy old houses and lost in rain-soaked landscapes, searching for a route to self-actualisation? I was in adolescence before I engaged with the literature that made these television epics possible.

I was fourteen when I found a copy of Jane Eyre in the school library on a Friday afternoon. I took it home and spent the entire evening reading the book. The next day, I resumed reading and stayed in my room until I finished, and then I sat for ages, wondering. Only a strict directive from my parents to join the family for Saturday evening tea brought me downstairs. But descend the staircase I did, declaring triumphantly, “It’s fine, I’ve read Jane Eyre.” A year or so later, I read Wuthering Heights by another Brontë sister. From then onward, I couldn’t find sagas enough of brooding heroes in old houses, and heroines trying to unravel family secrets.

Over the following years, I read voraciously, the remaining Brontë books, Sir Walter Scott, Dickens and Hardy. I didn’t bypass Jane Austen, and I laughed uproariously at her burlesque of the Gothic voiced in Northanger Abbey. And yes, I confess to bearing strands of protagonist Catherine Morland. I moved on to twentieth-century literature, Daphne Du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King and Dean Koontz. But the voices of the older heroes and heroines still spoke to me: it was as if they wanted me to create something.

Following completion of my Masters in English literature, I embarked on another voyage. Beginning with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, I traced the progress of Gothic tropes through the eighteenth century to the present day. This voyage led to the writing and publication of my book, Wicked Uncles and Haunted Cellars: What the Gothic Heroine Tells Us Today (Greenwich Exchange).

In it, I discuss the endurance of the Gothic, and its continuing relevance in this technological environment. I explore how bright lights and smartphones will never vanquish the ghosts that preside within, and sometimes outside, ourselves. I refer to the nascent adolescent within all of us, and how we struggle constantly to cast off the bindings of banality and mediocrity that are even more of a threat to the personality than the monsters that lurk in the basement. Of course, I now write my own Gothic tales, but that is a story for another time.

I didn’t stumble upon the Gothic. I was raised by it.

I lived with the uncanny long before I read Dracula or wandered the echoing halls of theory. Cosied up on the couch as a child of the late 80s and early 90s, I was mesmerised by the soft horrors of The Addams Family, The Munsters and I Dream of Jeannie. Some might call them monster-coms or paranormal sitcoms, but to me, they were family albums.

It wasn’t the fright that drew me in. It was the familiarity.

The Gothic has always felt like home, even in its laugh-track form: a space where strangeness was ordinary, where death wasn’t feared but invited to dinner, where affect ran thick and weirdness was not a flaw but a form of love. The Addamses weren’t monstrous to me – they were kind, devoted, delightfully odd. In a world that often punished difference, they celebrated it with joy. And in that celebration, I felt recognised.

No one told me this was the Gothic. I had to grow into the word, but the sensibility was always already in me: the hauntings, the yearning, the sense that beauty could be twisted and the twisted, beautiful. As I aged, the shadows deepened. I began to trace the aesthetic’s darker roots – abandonment, loss, power. I started to notice what lay beneath the surface of the laughter: the way these shows carved out space for otherness, for melancholy, for critique.

Looking back, those early monster-coms were my first lessons in Radical Gothic Relationality – long before I gave my theory a name. They modelled relationality in resistance, where love took strange forms and community wasn’t built through sameness but through acceptance of the spectral, the grotesque, the uncontainable.

For me, the Gothic has never been about fear alone. It has always been about recognition – of the parts of ourselves that don’t quite fit the frame, of the ghosts that trail behind us, of the systems that haunt our lives in ways we are taught not to name. The Gothic taught me not just how to see the world, but how to feel it differently.

I still carry those first hauntings with me as a cultural philosopher and theorist. They echo in every footnote, flicker through every lecture, and linger in the questions I ask about power, affect and recognition. That old black-and-white screen glowed with more than nostalgia – it gave me my first glimpse into the uncanny kinship of a world that felt, finally, like it had room for me.

The Gothic didn’t frighten me. It found me.

And I’ve never left.

I was eight years old, wide-eyed and innocent, when I first encountered the Gothic. My family were on summer vacation, staying in a little family-owned motel at Myrtle Beach that we’d frequented for years. Our annual beach trip was significant for many reasons, but one thing that I especially looked forward to was the blissful promise of 24/7 access to the Disney Channel, since we didn’t have cable television at home.

One night, my parents fell asleep early, no doubt exhausted from a long day of managing my boundless vacation-enhanced energy. Left to consume pre-teen TV programming to my heart’s content, I gobbled up network staples—Hannah Montana, Good Luck Charlie, The Suite Life on Deck, Sonny with a Chance—until 10:30pm, when an unfamiliar title flashed across the television screen.

My Babysitter’s a Vampire: “No parents. No rules. No pulse.”

Lights out, volume turned low, I watched as teenage vampires and their mortal friends battled the spirit of an ancient, vengeful, sentient tree that once served as a site for druid rituals. Furious at having been chopped down, the tree sought its revenge by growing infectious weeds into the local high school’s computer system until a rag-tag group of two nerdy boys and their vampire “babysitter” defeated it by uploading a virus to the network.

My heart pounded wildly in my chest for nearly thirty minutes straight, slowing only during the episode’s requisite commercial breaks. I remember quietly getting up from the queen-sized bed that I shared with my mother, grabbing a hard-backed chair from the breakfast table, and plopping down directly in front of the television set to catch as much of the action as possible. I felt almost naughty—as if I was doing something illicit, watching something that my parents wouldn’t approve of if they’d been awake.

But one episode and I was hooked. My Babysitter’s a Vampire was all I could think about the next day, and I stayed up late that night, too, to experience the thrill again. Faced with the loss of my newfound obsession as we prepared to leave Myrtle Beach, I resolved to use my hard-earned odd-jobs money (I never received a weekly allowance) to buy the series on DVD. By some odd stroke of luck, I managed to find it a week later at Target.

My Babysitter’s a Vampire soon became an integral part of my childhood media experience and certainly played a role in shaping my fondness for all things monstrous and grotesque. After graduating to “adult” horror as a teenager and developing a particular taste for Elvira’s Movie Macabre and anything starring Winona Ryder or Christina Ricci, I completed multiple courses on horror literature while pursuing my undergraduate degree and won a fellowship to study American Gothic fiction writer Shirley Jackson (best-known for “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House) in North Bennington, Vermont in 2023.

But regardless of where the Gothic takes me next—whether I continue to examine horror literature in my graduate studies or elect to turn my attention elsewhere—My Babysitter’s a Vampire will always enjoy its place of honor on my DVD shelf, where it reminds me never to fear the shadows, but instead to relish the stories best shared in the dark.