57th NeMLA Annual Convention, March 5-8, 2026 in Pittsburgh, PA

Year after year, the NeMLA convention has represented a constant appointment for a growing community of horror scholars: together, we have analyzed the cinematic genre as a porous (and often indirect) representation of economic crises and shifts, class struggles, and material inequities. Moving between opacity and transparency, horror films devour and digest the ineffable fears of our present, later rearticulated into allegories whose meaning is both immediate and removed from the consumption of the object itself. If in the past horror has not been consistently approached through a materialist lens, recently Marxist analyses have saturated conversations on horror beyond our own. What does this “class shift” in horror studies signal? 

Through this seminar, we wish to delve into contemporary horror scholarship, thus encouraging discussions that would engage recent texts on the subject (e.g., Capitalism Hates You, “Processes of Abjection: Towards a Marxist Theory of Horror,” Capitalism: A Horror Story), draw on and expand the Marxist canon, and trace new theoretical trajectories for the field(s). Moving past the mere analysis of singular objects, we will accept submissions that generatively reflect on the many contradictions intrinsic to the genre (is horror an instrument of capital?) and the reading we so enthusiastically embrace (is the insistence on the category of class reducing or augmenting the power of horror?). In this vein, we welcome contributions that unfold the difficulty of immediate solutions and ask searing questions regarding class dynamics in horror (without shying away from intersectional approaches)—in confronting horror’s entanglement with capital, we seek to orchestrate a seminar that foregrounds the fascinating and mutilated dialectic between ideology and fear (one that destabilizes and yet structures the genre’s form, production, and circulation). 

Please submit an abstract of 200-250 words by September 30, 2025, through the submission portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21733. Accepted participants must send their paper draft no later than February 1, 2026, to be shared with the collective. Essays should be between 10 and 15 pages, double-spaced, and include a “Works Cited” section. All participants are expected to read each other’s work before the session and provide a one-paragraph response to one person as assigned by the chairs.

If you have any questions regarding the roundtable, please contact the organizers directly: Valeria Dani (vdani@hamilton.edu)and Ruth Z. Yuste-Alonso (ryustealonso@stetson.edu).