The Southern Gothic is not merely a regional offshoot of the Gothic tradition—it is a dynamic cultural mode shaped by the histories, violences, mythologies, and contradictions of the American South. Rooted in hauntings both literal and structural, the Southern Gothic interrogates race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, ecology, labor, memory, and the ongoing afterlives of history. Its borders—like its landscapes and bodies—are unstable, porous, and contested.
Whether understood as genre, aesthetic, or rhetorical strategy, the Southern Gothic stages encounters with repression, grotesquerie, decay, excess, and revelation. It manifests in literature, film, television, music, digital culture, performance, and visual art. From canonical authors to contemporary Black, queer, and Indigenous creators; from prestige horror to folk aesthetics circulating on TikTok; from plantation tourism to eco-horror cinema—the Southern Gothic remains a vital framework for critically examining how the South is imagined, commodified, resisted, and reconfigured.
The Southern Gothic Area of the Popular Culture / American Culture Association in the South (PCAS/ACAS) invites proposals for individual papers, roundtables, or full panels (3–4 papers) for the 2026 PCAS/ACAS Annual Conference, to be held October 15 – 17, 2026 in New Orleans, LA.
Topics may include (but are by no means limited to):
- Contemporary Southern Gothic in film, television, streaming, and literature
- Black, Indigenous, and Latinx Southern Gothic traditions
- Queer and trans Southern Gothic
- Religion, evangelical spectacle, and faith practices
- Eco-Gothic Souths: climate crisis, landscape, extraction, environmental decay
- Southern noir and crime narratives
- True crime, documentary, and the commodification of Southern violence
- Carcerality, labor, poverty, and regional capitalism
- Vampires, monsters, ghosts, witches, cryptids, and body horror in the Southern imaginary
- Adaptation and transmedia reimaginings
- Southern Gothic in music and sound cultures
- Digital Southern Gothic (games, podcasts, social media, graphic narratives)
- Regional inflections: Appalachian, Delta, Gulf Coast, Borderlands Gothic, etc.
- Disability, madness, addiction, and mental health narratives in the South
- Camp, grotesque humor, and performance
- Pedagogical approaches to teaching the Southern Gothic
- Intersections with adjacent modes (folk horror, Afrofuturism, speculative fiction, Southern surrealism)
Submission Guidelines:
To propose a presentation (20 minutes or less) or roundtable for the Southern Gothic Area, please email your proposal to Area Chair Stephanie Graves at [email protected] by June 15, 2026, and include the following information:
- Name(s), institutional affiliation (if applicable), and email address
- Type of submission (individual paper, roundtable, or full panel)
- Abstract (250 words or fewer)
- If you need A/V for your presentation (rooms are not guaranteed to have A/V access unless requested)
Submission deadline is June 15, 2026; Notifications of acceptance will be sent by July 1, 2026.
NOTE: Please submit directly to the Area Chair rather than through the PCAS/ACAS website if your proposal is intended specifically for the Southern Gothic Area.