35th Annual LSU Mardi Gras Conference - Spectral Landscapes: Hauntology in Place and Space

deadline for submissions: 
December 15, 2024
full name / name of organization: 
Tatiana Servin De Maio/Louisiana State University
contact email: 

CFP 35th LSU Mardi Gras Conference - Spectral Landscapes: Hauntology in Place and Space

Lousiana State University | February 26-28, 2025 | Hybrid Format

It was haunted; but real hauntings have nothing to do with ghosts finally; they have to do with the menace of memory.—Anne Rice

The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.—Nikola Tesla

Laissez les temps hantés rouler! The LSU English Department and English Graduate Student Association invite you to our 35th annual LSU Mardi Gras Conference, themed "Spectral Landscapes: Hauntology in Place and Space." Just as Mardi Gras is a vibrant call for festivity and community, this event aims to celebrate the range of ideas surrounding the dynamic and diverse concept of hauntology—a portmanteau of haunting and ontology—in literature and other disciplines. Following Derrida’s Specters of Marx, we might conceive of hauntings as the persistence of elements that haunt the present like a ghost across social, cultural, economic, political, and even religious instances, performances, and texts.

From a mild obsession with ghosts and ghouls to unmaterialized, lost, and dead futures—we’re exploring how the present is “haunted” across the spectrum. A rigorous exploration of hauntology could interrogate hauntings by responding to questions such as: What haunts? What persists from the past and merges with the present and future, collapsing notions of temporality? Where are the tangible effects of “dead” or “lost” futures brought to life through a haunting of the present? How might we reimagine certain futures in light of what haunts us?

Hauntings may include but are not limited to:

  • Literary Hauntings: Studying how past and present cultural, social, and familial elements shape individual and collective identities and their futures in literary texts. 
  • Cultural and Historical Hauntings: Considering how societies and cultures transmit values, traditions, and narratives, including historical perspectives across generations.
  • Ecological and Environmental Hauntings: Understandingencounters and entanglements with ecosystems, species, and other environmental corporealities.
  • Technological and Digital Hauntings: Investigating the place and space of digital memories and archives between humans and technology in the digital age.
  • Economic and Political Hauntings: Assessing the capital gains and deficits of invested ideas made in global economies, politics, and governance systems taxing the present and future. 
  • Philosophical Perspectives: Researching hauntings in metaphysics, ethics, and the philosophy of mind and consciousness in concepts such as materiality, memory, temporality, and ontology.
  • Aesthetic Hauntings: Exploring how art, film, music, performance, and aesthetics capture and represent the complexities of individual and collective memory in asynchronous place and space.
  • Legal and Social Hauntings: Surveying how institutions—legal, educational, pedagogical, and social—are embedded in the living materiality of laws, practices, rights, politics, and obligations. 

The LSU Mardi Gras Conference is an interdisciplinary conference soliciting proposals for academic and creative work engaging with the theme and related topics. While this is primarily a forum for graduate students to share their research and ideas, we welcome proposals from undergraduate students and emerging scholars. 

Abstracts are due by December 15, 2024, via submission form. Individual proposals for 15-minute papers, creative works, or panels must include a 250-word abstract and a 100-150-word presenter bio. For more inquiries, contact Margarita Cepele & Tatiana Servin De Maio at MardiGrasConference2025@gmail.com.