ICFA 48: Fantastic Appetites (17 Mar 2027)

Wed, 17 Mar 2027 16:00:00 GMT

Fantastic Appetites

The 48th International Conference on the Fantastic in the ArtsMarch 17–20, 2027Marriott Orlando Airport Lakeside (Orlando, Florida)

Guests of Honor: Ursula Vernon (T. Kingfisher) and Justina Ireland

Guest Scholar: Lorna Piatti-Farnell

Submission Deadline: October 31, 2026

ICFA 48: Fantastic Appetites invites scholars, creators, and critics to consider the many forms hunger, desire, consumption, and satiation take across fantastic literature, media, and culture.

The concept of appetite offers a toothsome way of thinking about the fantastic: to consume is to incorporate what was once outside; to be consumed is to become part of something else. Fantastic appetites therefore raise questions of bodily permeability, transformation, disgust, pleasure, abjection, intimacy, and monstrosity. They invite us to ask who is permitted to hunger, who is expected to provide, who enjoys abundance, and who is made consumable.

Such questions are inseparable from an interrogation of contemporary structures of power. Fantastic narratives can make visible the appetites of colonialism and empire, racial capitalism and consumer culture, and extraction and accumulation. They can imagine ecological systems strained by endless growth, worlds organized around scarcity, bodies commodified for labor or reproduction, and futures consumed in the pursuit of profit. In an era of climate disruption, food insecurity, mass displacement, technological acceleration, and resource-intensive computational systems, the language of appetite also allows us to think critically about cultures that imagine consumption as limitless even on a finite planet. Fantastic appetites can also take us to the deepest reaches of the psyche, invoking the madness of obsession, a hungry covetousness, or an ego consumed with the pursuit of perfection or the glory of fame.

At the same time, appetite need not signify only violence or excess: food creates kinship, feasts build communities, and cooking preserves memory. Fantastic worlds imagine alternative foodways, multispecies relationships, practices of sharing and mutual aid, methods of interpersonal connection, and forms of pleasure that evade disciplinary regimes. Appetites can be queer, unruly, excessive, joyful, collective, transformative—and sometimes revolutionary.

We welcome proposals engaging the theme of Fantastic Appetites from any disciplinary, theoretical, historical, cultural, or methodological perspective. Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

Food, cooking, feasting, hospitality, ritual, commensality, and the making of community
Fairy-tale foods, enchanted meals, forbidden fruits, dangerous delicacies, poisons, potions, and other uncanny consumables
Vampires, zombies, cannibals, parasites, predators, and other monstrous or consuming bodies
Disgust, abjection, incorporation, bodily permeability, transformation, and the grotesque
Appetite, pleasure, desire, sexuality, gender, queerness, disability, fatness, and the disciplining of bodies
Race, diaspora, migration, Indigenous foodways, and decolonial, postcolonial, and anti-imperial approaches to consumption
Colonialism, capitalism, extraction, commodification, accumulation, resource theft, and the consumption of lands and peoples
Labor, agriculture, slaughter, preparation, service, supply chains, and the often-invisible work behind consumption
Ecocriticism, environmental justice, climate crisis, extinction, more-than-human hunger, and planetary appetite
Speculative food futures: biotechnology, synthetic foods, lab-grown meat, genetic modification, post-apocalyptic foodways, and sustainable abundance
Technological appetite: energy consumption, data extraction, attention economies, artificial intelligence, and computational infrastructures
Hunger for knowledge, power, immortality, wealth, conquest, transcendence—or entire worlds, planets, stars, and futures
Refusal and alternative appetites: fasting, abstention, restraint, sharing, care, reciprocity, mutual aid, and the politics of saying “enough”

We are especially interested in work that crosses conventional disciplinary, generic, medial, geographic, or historical boundaries. We encourage approaches drawing on food studies, Gothic and horror studies, science fiction and fantasy studies, critical race and ethnic studies, Indigenous studies, postcolonial and decolonial theory, queer and trans studies, feminist theory, disability and fat studies, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, animal and multispecies studies, posthumanism and new materialism, media and game studies, folklore and fairy-tale studies, religious studies, cultural studies, and related fields.

We also welcome proposals that ask whether appetites themselves might be a mode of fantastic worldmaking. What worlds are produced by what their inhabitants want? What social orders emerge around hunger and its satisfaction? What happens when an appetite cannot—or should not—be fulfilled? Who gets fed, who goes hungry, and who or what becomes food? And what alternatives might the fantastic offer to worlds premised upon endless consumption?

Proposals need not address the conference theme. As always, ICFA welcomes individual papers, academic sessions, and panels addressing any aspect of the fantastic in any medium.

We particularly encourage proposals from institutionally affiliated and independent scholars, graduate students and early-career researchers, international scholars, and scholars working on fantastic traditions, texts, and media beyond Anglophone contexts. Interdisciplinary, comparative, and cross-cultural approaches are especially welcome.

The deadline for proposals is October 31, 2026.

Academic paper proposals should include a 350-word abstract and working bibliography. Panel and session proposals are also welcome.

Submission Portal: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ZU2-GhA98EG-zOkn-FRggvytwqmegRjEkWChg5bFmZM/edit

Please use the above link for submission to the academic Divisions, which will be acknowledged by a receipt email from Google Forms. Please contact your Division Head immediately if you do not receive such a receipt.

Proposals that address Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC) authors or cultures or that discuss BIPOC topics alongside issues of racism, sexism, xenophobia, or restorative justice are welcome to also choose the "Counterspace" session option for scheduling as part of the BIPOC Caucus stream rather than a Division stream.

Acceptances will be sent out by November 30, 2026.

Invitations to participate in creative sessions are handled through a separate process; if you have questions about the creative track, or if you would like to propose a creative session, contact the IAFA Second Vice President directly at iafa2vp@gmail.com.

Guests of Honor

Ursula Vernon (T. Kingfisher) is an award-winning author, illustrator, and creator whose work moves between fantasy, horror, fairy tale, romance, and children’s literature. Writing for adults as T. Kingfisher, she is the author of such acclaimed works as Nettle & Bone, A House with Good Bones, What Moves the Dead, Thornhedge, and A Sorceress Comes to Call. As Ursula Vernon, she created the Hugo Award-winning webcomic Digger and has written and illustrated numerous books for younger readers. Her fiction is celebrated for combining folkloric strangeness and horror with humor, compassion, and an abiding fascination with monsters, bodies, food, transformation, and the more-than-human world.

Justina Ireland is an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and historical speculative fiction for young adult and middle-grade readers. Her books include Dread Nation and Deathless Divide, Ophie’s Ghosts, Rust in the Root, and The Boo Hag Flex. She is also a prolific contributor to the Star Wars universe and one of the original story architects of Star Wars: The High Republic. A former editor of FIYAH Literary Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, Ireland received a World Fantasy Award for her editorial work; her fiction has also received the Locus and Scott O’Dell Awards and has been shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker Awards.

Distinguished Scholar

Lorna Piatti-Farnell is a scholar of popular culture whose interdisciplinary work spans Gothic and horror studies, food studies, film and media, cultural history, corporeality, disability, technology, and the environmental humanities. Her books include Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction, Consuming Gothic: Food and Horror in Film, The Vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature, and Gothic Afterlives, and she co-edited The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food. She is Academic Dean at SAE Creative Media Institute in Auckland, an Adjunct Research Professor at Curtin University, and Director of the Australasian Horror Studies Network. Her scholarship on food, bodies, consumption, and horror speaks especially directly to the concerns of Fantastic Appetites.

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ICFA 48: Fantastic Appetites (17 Mar 2027)