From the snowbound Overlook Hotel in The Shining (King 1977) to the sentient unease of The Haunting of Hill House (Jackson 1959) and the racialized spaces of Get Out (Peele, 2017), Gothic horror has long imagined ‘place’ as more than just setting. Environments watch, wound, return, and refuse to forget. This seminar asks how literary and cultural texts use Gothic forms, such as haunting, monstrosity, spectrality, ruins, and the uncanny, to make visible the environmental afterlives of colonialism, displacement, and ecological violence. What happens when we read these haunted spaces ecologically as archives of colonialism, displacement, violence and environmental destruction? 

This seminar considers the environment not simply as setting but as an archive of violence, memory, and resistance. What does it mean for land to “remember?” How do damaged landscapes register histories that have been erased, denied, or inadequately mourned? How might Gothic forms illuminate the relationship between past violence and contemporary ecological crisis? This seminar also interrogates the limits of the Gothic itself, as colonial literatures have long represented unfamiliar landscapes and Indigenous peoples as mysterious, threatening, empty, or supernatural. Therefore, we ask: when does the language of haunting expose colonial violence? And when does it risk reproducing colonial ways of seeing?

We welcome papers on literature, film, oral storytelling, digital media, and other forms across geographic and historical contexts. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Colonial and postcolonial Gothic
• Indigenous literatures and land-based storytelling
• Climate horror and speculative fiction
• Migration and haunted homelands
• Ruins and abandoned landscapes
• Environmental memory

Ultimately, this seminar invites us to question why some places refuse to stay silent, what returns when violence is buried, and what happens when haunting becomes not only a figure for unresolved violence, but also a demand for ethical attention, accountability and more just ways of inhabiting the world.