Call for Contributors:

 Special Issue of Mortality: Hauntology

Editors:

Robert Spinelli (rspinelli@ncis.org); Katie Clary (mclary@coastal.edu)

Abstract:

‘It affects and bereaves it in advance, like the ghost it will become, but this is precisely where haunting begins. And its time, and the untimeliness of its present, of its being ‘out of joint.’ To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology.’

Jacques Derrida (1994) Spectres of Marx, the state of the debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge

Working with Derrida’s definition, this special issue will examine the ways in which the past remains a constant specter in the present. Although the term of hauntology itself implies a preoccupation with the paranormal, its meaning stretches into the realm of metaphysics and existential philosophy. When approaching the multilayered and interdisciplinary field of death studies, a discussion of hauntology as applied to history, archaeology and the broader social sciences is a path open to many interpretations pertaining to questions of mortality, ontology and the general desire for things to be other than they are. The goal of this special issue is to conduct a survey of the field of hauntology to understand how the framework can apply to humanistic research methodologies and how the concept applies to our understanding of the ways in which what has past maintains a shadow in the present.

Suggested topics may include:

• Haunted houses, spaces, landscapes
• Dark Tourism
• Cemetery Studies
• Nostalgia and extremism
• Memory and trauma
• Neuroplasticity and identity
• Slavery and cultural silences
• Ritual and death practice and memorialization
• Commemoration of the dead
• Death and museums, libraries, or archives
• Geopolitics, genocides, and/or decolonization

Details

 Proposals between 250 and 500 words, CVs and brief author bios (50-80 words), should be submitted to Robert Spinelli (rspinelli@ncis.org) & Katie Clary (mclary@coastal.edu) by September 15, 2026.

The editors will then review all submitted proposals and notify applicants by October 1, 2026. Articles should be approximately between 5,000-6,000 words, and first drafts of completed manuscripts will be due March 15, 2027.