Haunted Thresholds:

The Southern Gothic in Comparative Perspective 

South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) 2026
Conference Dates: November 5–7, 2026
Location: Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel and Conference Center, Atlanta, Georgia

Contact: stacy.stingle@gmail.com

Haunted Thresholds: The Southern Gothic in Comparative Perspective

In Martin Heidegger’s essay, “What are Poets for?” from Poetry, Language, Thought, he examines the figure of the Poet who he says has an important role to fill, one which only he can, through his relationship to language, in what Heidegger calls “a destitute time.” This destitute time is the modern world in which through war, slavery, colonialism, and other totalitarian forces, human being has lost its connection with both freedom and an experience of the sacred. What manifests in response is the homeless spirit who resides on a threshold between being and becoming, recovery and the recoverable, welcome and extinction. Heidegger says of the Poet that it is “He among mortals who must, sooner than other mortals and otherwise than they, reach into the abyss, come to know the marks that the abyss remarks…. (Heidegger 91).

There is something strikingly Gothic about the Poet’s reach into the abyss. The Gothic has long served as a mode for exploring thresholds—between self and other, belonging and exclusion, memory and forgetting, life and death. Human being has become estranged, and, to reorient itself, it turns to language, which Heidegger calls being’s first home. He tells us: The poet’s task, therefore, is to “go toward and reach the place that he can,” which he does through language (Heidegger 93). This is why language, Heidegger tells us, is “the house of Being” (Heidegger 129). In keeping with this year’s SAMLA theme of Hospitality, this panel examines the relationship between homeliness, home, hospitality, the homeless spirit, and what Heidegger calls the “house of Being.” It places these concepts in dialogue with how we might understand the Southern Gothic and the way in which related Gothic traditions imagine encounters at these liminal boundaries, where individuals, communities, and institutions negotiate the ethics and politics of invitation, estrangement, and coexistence.

While rooted in the American South, the Southern Gothic’s preoccupation with haunting, violence, repression, and the persistence of the past resonates across cultures and historical moments. This panel invites interdisciplinary and comparative approaches that place the Southern Gothic in conversation with broader Gothic traditions to consider how landscapes, borders, homes, institutions, and communities become liminal spaces haunted by histories of slavery, colonialism, war, occupation, migration, environmental catastrophe, political violence, and social exclusion. This panel especially welcomes papers that examine hospitality as an ethical, political, spatial, or existential question, asking how Gothic narratives challenge conventional understandings of home, community, identity, and belonging. Papers may engage literature, history, philosophy, film, visual culture, architecture, folklore, religious studies, memory studies, phenomenology, or cultural studies.

Proposals for presentations no longer than twenty minutes should include a title, your name and affiliation, and a 250- to 400-word abstract. Please send submissions to stacy.stingle@gmail.com for The Poetics of Liminality panel by September 1, 2026.

deadline for submissions: 

September 1, 2026

full name / name of organization: 

SAMLA

contact email: stacy.stingle@gmail.com

SAMLA 2026 – Call for Papers

• Southern Gothic and cultural memory
• Liminality and crossroads, thresholds, and the in-between
• Race, violence, and historical haunting
• The Gothic city and urban landscapes
• War, occupation, and Gothic space
• Comparative Gothic traditions across nations and regions
• Environmental Gothic and haunted ecologies
• Religious imagery, ritual, and the uncanny
• Gender, sexuality, and the Gothic body
• Memory, trauma, and spectral identities
• Gothic representations of institutions, law, and power
• Contemporary adaptations and reimaginings of the Southern Gothic
• Intersections between Southern Gothic, existentialism, phenomenology, and memory studies
• Experimental art and other forms grounded in liveness, Gothic, and co-presence

In keeping with this year’s SAMLA theme of Hospitality, this panel examines the relationship between homeliness, home, hospitality, the homeless spirit, and what Heidegger calls the “house of Being.” It places these concepts in dialogue with how we might understand the Southern Gothic and the way in which related Gothic traditions imagine encounters at these liminal boundaries, where individuals, communities, and institutions negotiate the ethics and politics of invitation, estrangement, and coexistence. This panel is interested in papers examining the poetics of liminal spaces, the space of the in-between, of fractured consciousness as seen in trauma, testimony, memory, and recovery—but also the transitory spaces of the everyday that we resituate after the event—be it war, revolution, occupation, enslavement, transformation, and exile.

Submission Details
Abstract: 250-400 words
Bio: 100 words
Deadline: September 1, 2026
Send to: stacy.stingle@gmail.com
Panel: Haunted Thresholds: The Southern Gothic in Comparative Perspective SAMLA 2026
Conference Dates: November 5-7, 2026
Location: Wyndham Atlanta Buckhead Hotel and Conference Center, Atlanta, Georgia