Submissions to VICFA 4: Embodied Spirits

Scholarly and creative proposals are welcome and are handled through the same process.

This season, Academic and Creative Proposals will submit via the same portal.

We are pleased to present the VICFA 4 theme, call for papers, and special guests for 2025!  This year, “VICFA 4: Embodied Spirits” will run from September 17 to 21, 2025.  We are thrilled to share that this year’s VICFA features Guests of Honor P. Djeli Kim Bo-Young, Djuna, Vince Gerardis, Jonathan Maberry, Mimi Mondal and Guest Scholar Mads Haahr.  We look forward to sharing their insights as well as your assembled art and expertise with the global fantastic community.

Please note that the submission form for VICFA gives participants the opportunity to elect to monitor one of VICFA’s 4 Spaces, moderate sessions during the conference, and to be mentors for students in SCIAFA.  While presentations will not be separated by division, applicants will be able to identify those interest areas and divisions that represent their work.  These tags will be listed for each session in the program.  Be aware that the VICFA application requests a scholarly or creative logline for your presentation in addition to your abstract.  If you have any difficulty submitting your proposal through the online portal, you are welcome to email this completed form to both VCC@fantastic-arts.org and IAFA.1VP@fantastic-arts.org.  All academic and creative proposals will use the same form for VICFA 4 submissions.  Invited Creatives will be sent an additional, separate invitation to attend VICFA 4 with that designation. 

In order to most effectively schedule VICFA programming, VICFA organizers will request the time zone in which you will be during the conference.  This helps VICFA planning to make sure that all presenters are scheduled within reasonable presentation windows.  You will have the opportunity to further identify scheduling conflicts, but please be aware that the first tier of scheduling will be according to your time zone.  Similarly, if you volunteer to monitor one of the VICFA’s Zoom streams—Counter Space, Deep Space, and Interstellar Space, you will be offered a slot that works with the universal time zone you indicate. 

If you are not presenting at VICFA 4 but would like to monitor one of these Spaces, please reach out to VCC@fantastic-arts.org to let us know that you would like to be scheduled.  Scholars, creatives, students, and other community volunteers are encouraged to be involved as Space monitors and session moderators.  Please make sure to reach out and state that you would like to be a Space monitor by TBD.  Specific login information and stream monitoring guidelines will be sent to confirmed monitors by TBD.

From the world’s earliest stories—such as those of spirits dwelling in the dirt beneath the fingernails of Ereshkigal, Mesopotamian Queen of the Great Earth—folktales and myths have long imagined spirits embodied in unexpected natural forms and places, such as the spirit of slain Osiris resurrected as a heron in a willow tree, Baital the Indian vampire hung like a bat in an East Indian walnut tree, and Daphne transformed into a laurel tree to escape lecherous Apollo.

Embodied spirits appear across media and genres, inhabiting not only ancient myth and religion but also science and technology. From the haunted AI of Ex Machina and She to the ghost-in-the-machine horrors of Unfriended, Black Box, and The Ring, spirits manifest in forms both comforting and terrifying. They persist through folklore and its modern retellings, such as R. R. Virdi’s Grave Beginnings and The Binding series, the cursed lovers of Ladyhawke, and enduring transformation tales such as The Wild Swans. Spirits inhabit spaces (The Haunting of Hill House, Silent Hill), symbols (the linden tree in Hannah Crafts’ Bondwoman’s Narrative), and shadows of protest (Angelina Weld Grimké’s “Tenebris”). Natural forces also become vessels: Audre Lorde’s “Afterimages” floods the Pearl River with the spirit of Emmett Till, while Grace Ogot’s “The Rain Came” unleashes divine pity on a girl marked for sacrifice.

Whether animating flesh, metal, cloth, bone, books, or even teeth, spirits return to accomplish justice, comfort, or vengeance. They reappear to the bereaved in works such as Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Morrison’s Beloved, and Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw.” In P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout, The Haunting of Tram Car 015, and “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington,” spirits infest the material world like a zombie plague. Some inhabit machines, such as in Stephen King’s Christine, while others are trapped by powerful figures, as in Kai Ashante Wilson’s “The Devil in America” and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. In more apocalyptic visions, spirits raise armies of fear, as in Bird Box: Barcelona.

Embodied Spirits invites engagement with how embodied spirits persist, haunt, and empower across both cultural and technological landscapes as well as different cosmologies. This call for proposals seeks to bridge the speculative and the critical, exploring Embodied Spirits in fantastic media and cultures. Proposals may consider any of the kinds of stories listed above; we invite critical frames of reference such as—but not limited to—the following:

• Hauntology: Resurfacing unresolved historical traumas and suppressed cultural or familial memories destabilizing the present.

• Afrofuturisms, Asian Futurisms, Indigenous Futurisms, LatinX Futurisms, and Middle Eastern Futurisms: Spectral figures as embodiments of colonial violence or agents of justice, vengeance, or reconciliation in postcolonial and Diaspora contexts unsettling hegemonic narratives.

• Postcolonial Theory: Spectral hauntings as allegories for colonial trauma; the role of embodiment in navigating trauma, identity, or cultural memory.

• Cyberpunk: Manifestations of spirits across technological platforms and digital spaces.

• The Spiritual: Conceptualizations, invocations and embodiments of spirits as animistic natural elements, spiritualist communications, esoteric knowledge systems, and theological doctrines.

• Eco-Criticism: Spirits as manifestations of environmental justice or natural agency.

• Reinterpretations of traditional folklore and myth through contemporary lenses: Spectral manifestations that challenge dominant narratives.

Set your imagination free to explore Embodied Spirits at VICFA 4, with Guests of Honor Kim-Bo Young (I’m Waiting for You and Other Stories, Snowpiercer), Djuna (Counterweight, Everything Good Dies Here), Vince Gerardis (House of Dragon, Dark Winds), Jonathan Maberry (Rot & Ruin, V-Wars), and Mimi Mondal (Luminescent Threads, "In the Mists of Manivarsha"), as well as Distinguished Scholar Dr. Mads Haahr (Random.org, Haunted Planet).

As always, proposals on topics transcending this year’s theme are welcome.

We look forward to your proposals and seeing you this September at “VICFA 4: Embodied Spirits”!

Sincerely,

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

Virtual Conference Coordinator

We sincerely look forward to receiving your brilliant and creative submissions. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to iafa.1vp@fantastic-arts.org