2025 Festival of Monsters Call for Papers

October 15-18, 2025 at the University of California, Santa Cruz

The Center for Monster Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz is an interdisciplinary research, arts, and outreach organization focused on the ways monsters and tropes of monstrosity both perpetuate and contravene forms of social and cultural injustice. Each year we host a Festival of Monsters that brings together scholars, artists, students, and members of the general public to consider these issues.

Our 2025 Festival of Monsters (Oct. 15-18 in beautiful Santa Cruz, California) is an academic conference that includes scholarly panels as well as performances, readings, and presentations from monster-makers in theater, literature, film, games, television and other media.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers or presentations on any aspect of monsters or monster studies. In Academic Year 2025-26, the annual theme for The Humanities Institute at UCSC is “Nourishment.” Presentations on the relationship of monsters to nourishment, consumption, and cannibalism are particularly welcome. 

Papers and presentation proposals from all disciplines are welcome. Because participants in the Festival include members of the general public as well as people from within the academic community, we ask that proposals consider the Festival’s mixed audience. We welcome complex theoretical concepts, project postmortems, and scholarly interventions, but please make sure your abstract articulates the terms and stakes of your presentation as clearly as possible.

Keynote presenters this year will be Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Monster Theory), Kim Lau (Spectres of the Marvelous), and David Livingstone Smith (Making Monsters). 

Please submit 250-word abstracts and 50-word bios at this LINK by April 1, 2025.

Examples of past papers and presentations at the Festival of Monsters can be seen on our YouTube Channel, @ucscmonsters.