**Call for Papers, Reviews, and Creative Pieces**

Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic

Issue VI: Unthemed Issue

Deadline for abstracts and pitches: 25th July 2026

‘You cannot adapt to extinction’. —Vanessa Nakate

‘The development of ecocriticism itself can been read as a type of Gothic story. If imagined figuratively as if it were a horror film, the field of ecocriticism is at a point where it is confronting the monster that has been hidden in the basement’. —Tom J. Hillard

The Gothic Nature journal offers a unique space in which critical and creative writers, thinkers, and artists alike can come together to productively engage with the anxieties arising from our increasingly troubled co-existence with the more-than-human world. Since its inaugural publication in 2019, the journal has showcased a multitude of wide-ranging explorations into ‘Gothic Nature’, moving in 2022 to an alternately themed model, with our first Special Themed Issue on Haunted Shores, and our most recent on Decolonising the EcoGothic. Our next issue, Issue VI, will be open, meaning that there is no specific theme beyond interrogating the dark entanglements between ‘Gothic’ and ‘Nature’—and so we are excited to hear from potential contributors on all things to do with ecoGothic and ecohorror.

Interdisciplinary and transmedia approaches are welcome, including analyses of literature, film, television, digital media, and visual culture. We are keen, too, to include and celebrate a diversity of new and more established voices alike in these materials.

For Gothic Nature VI, we invite proposals for papers of 6-8,000 words that critically reflect, engage with, and explore any aspect and interpretation of ‘Gothic Nature’.

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

•  Gothic activism and environmental justice
•  Regional and transnational ecoGothic and ecohorror
•  Gothic ecology, Gothic geology, Anthropocene Gothic
•  Extinction
•  Eco apocalypse 
•  Themes of rot, ruin, and decay 
•  Climate crisis
•  Gothic diets and 'Frankenstein food': meat eating, vegetarianism, and veganism
•  Gothic guilt and the environment
•  Heavy weather
•  Queer ecology
•  Ecofeminism
•  Eco-Marxism
•  Religion, cults, and the ecoGothic
•  Decolonising ecohorror and the ecoGothic
•  Unearthing dread: Gothic land
•  Horror and ecocentrism
•  Haunted and spectral environments (seas, skies, swamps, wildernesses, etc.) 
•  Genre and ecocriticism
•  Ecophobia
•  Animal, vegetal, and mineral monstrosity 
•  Re-enchantment through darkness
•  Tropical Gothic
•  Petrogothic
•  EcoGothic tourism
•  Plastics and pollution
•  Trans-corporeality, toxic sublime, polluted bodies, and ecological grotesque

For articles, please send abstracts of 500 words, as well as a brief biography of 150 words, to Dr Harriet Stilley at gothicnaturejournal@gmail.com by Thursday 25th July 2026 (or feel free to contact me informally should you wish to talk through ideas or have any queries). Full drafts papers will be due late 2026/early 2027 and we intend to publish Summer 2027.

If you are interested in writing a review or submitting a creative piece, please send in any pitches or expressions of interest to us by Thursday 25th July. Our Book Review Editor, Dr Jimmy Packham, and Film, TV, & Game Review Editor, Emma Davies, will support our review contributors, and first drafts will be due in November 2026.

About the Gothic Nature Journal

Gothic Nature is an interdisciplinary and peer-reviewed open-access academic journal seeking to explore the latest evolutions of thought in the areas of ecohorror and the ecoGothic. It publishes articles, reviews, interviews, and original creative pieces united in their interrogation of the darker sides of our relationship with the nonhuman and provides a space for all scholars working at the intersections of ecocriticism, Gothic and horror studies, and the wider environmental humanities. Gothic Nature aims to provide deeper understandings of the importance and implications of our monstrous, sublime, spectral, and uncanny constructions of Nature in the cultural imagination and productively explore how Gothic and horror might factor in our conceptions and experiences of contemporary real life ecological crisis.

Website: Gothic Nature Journal – New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic
Instagram: @gothicnaturejournal
X: @gothicnaturejo

Founding Editor: Dr Elizabeth Parker
Editors-in-Chief: Dr Elizabeth Parker and Dr Harriet Stilley
Book Review Editor: Dr Jimmy Packham
Film, TV & Game Review Editor: Emma Davies
Blog Editor: JJ Mokrzewski
Website Designer: Michael Belcher
Editorial Board: Professor Stacy Alaimo, Professor Eric G. Anderson, Dr Scott Brewster, Dr Kevin Corstorphine, Dr Rachele Dini, Professor Simon C. Estok, Dr Tom J. Hillard, Professor Kim D. Hester Williams, Professor William Hughes, Dr Derek Johnston, Professor Dawn Keetley, Dr Ian Kinane, Dr Ashley Kniss, Dr John Miller, Professor Jennifer Schell, Professor Matthew Wynn Sivils, Professor Andrew Smith, Dr Samantha Walton