War has long occupied a central place in the Gothic imagination. Building on interdisciplinary conversation at the crossroads of Gothic studies, war studies, memory studies, and postcolonial studies, this seminar seeks to examine how war and military violence are represented through Gothic modes across literary, cinematic, visual, and cultural texts, with particular attention to what may be understood as the “war Gothic.” Drawing on our recent volume (Russo-Soviet Imperialist Hauntings: Neo-Gothic Geographies in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989, Manchester UP, 2026), which places Eastern Europe at the intersection of Gothic and postcolonial studies, we particularly encourage submissions on the literary and cultural works from the former Eastern Bloc that touch on World War I, World War II, the Cold War, the Yugoslav Wars, and Russia’s present imperialist war against Ukraine, among other conflicts. However, contributions that engage any historical period or cultural tradition and encourage comparative, transnational, interdisciplinary, and postcolonial approaches are welcome, as the seminar is envisioned as global in scope.

We are especially interested in the relationships between transformative states that the war Gothic (as a subgenre of Gothic fiction) demonstrates: the decomposition and destruction of identity, the body, and the environment, as well as the dissolution of boundaries between the living and the dead, human and machine. The questions that we would like to explore concern how ghosts, ruins, and uncanny landscapes reveal the persistence of violence after wars formally end and how war Gothic narratives articulate histories that official discourses seek to suppress. In addition to our own research, the seminar draws inspiration from existing scholarship on war and postcolonial Gothic, approaching it as a framework for examining the transnational afterlives of conflict and violence.

Possible topics may include:

• War Gothic and imperial, colonial, and neo-imperial hauntings
• War testimony, witnessing, and spectral memory
• Memory politics, monuments, and spectral heritage
• Gothic representations of invasion, occupation, and resistance globally
• Gothic and totalitarian hauntings
• Eastern Europe and decolonial Gothic aesthetics
• Gender, sexuality, and war Gothic
• EcoGothic warscapes