The Seventh Biennial
Dr. Henry Armitage Memorial Scholarship Symposium
of New Weird Fiction and Lovecraft-Related Research
NecronomiCon Providence convention in Providence, RI
13-16 August, 2026
Location: Omni Hotel, Providence – Providence Ballroom, 3rd floor
Symposium Chair: Dr. Elena Tchougounova-Paulson, editor of Lovecraftian Proceedings (Hippocampus Press)
ARMITAGE SCHEDULE and ABSTRACTS – click here for a complete downloadable schedule with full list of abstracts. Presenter biographies will be available in the main presenter biography document. This schedule is revised for 8 August 2026
Friday 14 August
9.30am – Session 1: “We are all roamers of vast spaces and travellers in many ages” Weird Fiction Itineraries: Literary Geography and Archival Landscapes. Chair: Eric Steinhart
1. Daniel J. Holmes “From Quebec to Kadath: Echoes of Canada in Lovecraft’s Late Fiction”
2. Heather Miller “Vigilant and Insomniac Rationality” in Conrad and Lovecraft”
3. Katherine Kerestman “Galahad in the Rubble: Frank Belknap Long’s Letters to Donald Wandrei, 1927 – 1975”
11:00am – Session 2: “…the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents” Transcendence and Transgressions in Mythos-making. Chair: Eddie Guimont
1. Byron Nakamura “A Shared Bond through Greece and Rome: Classical References in the Letters of HP Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long”
2. Sean Moreland “Animi Terrores: The Lucretian Roots of Cosmic Horror and Folk Horror from M. G. Lewis to H. P. Lovecraft”
3. Luke Matthews “Lovecraft’s Influence on UFO/UAP Ontologies”
4. Eric Williams “Two-Fisted Horror: Baring-Gould’s Grettir the Outlaw and its influence on Robert E. Howard’s weird fiction”
3:30pm – Session 3: “…the beauty, the terror and the mystery of those obscure realms” H.P. Lovecraft and the Literary Traditions of the Gothic, Romantic, and Decadent Eras. Chair: Daniel J. Holmes
1. Dale Allen Crowley “Gothic Echoes, Spectral Narratives, and Daemonic Rats: Lovecraft’s “Rats in the Walls” as Mimesis for Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto”
2. Perry Harrison “H.P. Lovecraft and Mediaeval Literature”
3. Eric Steinhart “Liberation and Transcendence in Lovecraft’s Fiction”
4. Rosie Sentman “Degeneration and Decadence in the Dragon’s Court: How Fin-de-Siécle Paris’ Gay Cruising Scene Gave The King in Yellow’s Play its Cognitively Poisonous Power”
Saturday 15 August
9:30am – Session 4: “No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity” Shadow Over the Self: Uncanny Anatomy, Body Horror and Disability in Lovecraft’s Fiction. Chair: Carlos Gonzáles
1. Adia Reynolds “Hearing Horror: Disability Representation and Lovecraftian Horror in the Fiction Podcast Malevolent”
2. Benjamin Breyer “Cold, Circulation, and Cosmic Affect: Bodily Experience and Sensory Language in Lovecraft’s Fiction”
3. Bradley Will “Rehabilitating Cthulhu and Decodifying Fishpeople”
4. Warren Bingcang “Fishfolk and Kinsfolk: Trans Resonances in H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Thing on the Doorstep’ and Other Stories”
11:00am – Session 5: “…that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality” Filming the Unnameable: Adapting Cosmic Horror for the Screen. Chair: Dale Allen Crowley
1. Sean Lovitt “The Mooncussers of Antonio Bay: Weirding John Carpenter’s The Fog”
2. Seán Martin “Uncanny Wallops and Weirdly Perfect Embodiments: Archive, Memory and the Self in the First Lovecraft Documentary”
3. Taylor Province “Lovecraft in Louisiana: The Intersection of Cosmic Horror and Detective Fiction in True Detective”
3:30pm – Session 6: “Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden” Cosmic Horror and the Subconscious: Exploring Lovecraft through Jung and the Occult. Chair: Michael A. Torregrossa
1. Carlos González “Drawing Dagon Down: Lovecraft’s Presence in the Contemporary Occult”
2. Peter Muise “Unwholesome Nocturnal Meetings: H.P. Lovecraft, Margaret Murray, and the Witches’ Sabbath”
3. Kyle Gamache “The Universal Syzygy: Freud and Jung in The Masks of Nyarlathotep”
4. Taylor Walker “The Dream Quest of Carl Jung: Synchronicity in Jung’s Collective Unconscious and Lovecraft’s Dreamlands”
5:00pm – Session 7: “…the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age” Mythos, Misinformation and Conspiracy: Analysing Cosmic Horror through the Lens of Propaganda. Chair: Elena Tchougounova-Paulson
1. Angela Reitz “A Comparative Analysis of the Cthulhu Mythos and its Connection to Antisemitic Propaganda”
2. Eddie Guimont “Lovecraft and the UFO”:
3. Melissa Stuart “Lovecraft and Eugenics: for HPL, It was Personal”
4. Rolf Maurer “When Cognitive Dissonance Fails: Confronting the Inextricability of Lovecraft’s Imagination and Xenophobia”
Sunday 16 August
9:30am – Session 8: “…a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it” Eco-Horror and Cosmic Decay: Monstrous Environments in Lovecraft’s Works. Chair: Byron J. Nakamura
1. Fred Lubnow “In the Absence of Light…An Assessment of Lovecraftian Non-Photosynthetic Ecosystems”
2. Daniel Zygiel-Clague “Climate of Cthulhu: The Cosmic Horror of Environmental Disaster”
3. Matthew Buffington (ft Zachary Griebenow) “Towards a classification of the HP Lovecraft creature-universe”
4. Prema Arasu “The Antipodean Weird in Lovecraft and Others”
11:00am – Session 9: “We see things only as we are constructed to see them” Decoding Mythos: How Linguistics, Comics, and LLMs Reframe Cosmic Horror. Chair: Heather Miller
1. Eric LaFreniere “Lovecraft’s Unspeakable Grammar: Moore’s Excavation of the Alien Holophrase in The Courtyard”
2. Nathaniel Wallace “Eidolic Augmentation: Machine Generated Grimoires and Stage Plays”
3. Michael A. Torregrossa “New England Legends in Comics”
4. Timothy Jarvis “A Simple Obstinacy: Weird Fiction and Transgression”
3:30pm – Session 10: “The vengeance of the infinite abysses” Cosmic Pessimism: Investigating Lovecraftian Politics and Epistemological Critique. Chair: Kyle Gamache
1. Ethan Covnat “Correlating the Mind’s Contents: Lovecraft’s Challenge to Philosophers”
2. Robert Ames “From Theory-Fiction to Petropolitical Exegesis: Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia and ‘the Spouter’”
3. Troy M. Rondinone “Cryptid Country: Making Sense of America’s Monstrous Landscape”
The 2026 CALL FOR PRESENTATION ABSTRACTS can be downloaded here: Armitage-Symposium-CFA-2026.pdf
CALL FOR PRESENTATION PROPOSALS:
The Dr. Henry Armitage Memorial Scholarship Symposium seeks Lovecraftian and Weird Fiction related research for the NecronomiCon Providence convention. Providence, RI, August 13–16, 2026. The Lovecraft Arts and Sciences Council (organizer of NecronomiCon Providence) is seeking submissions of academic presentations that explore all aspects of the Gothic-Neo-Gothic-Weird-Uncanny, from literature and fine arts to the cinema and pop culture, including the life and literary legacy of world-acclaimed horror writer and essayist, H. P. Lovecraft, as well as any topics related to weird fiction, classic and contemporary, cosmic/folk/body horror, ghost stories and ghostlore, etc.
The Symposium is mainly dedicated to the life and works of the Providence-based weird fiction writer, the father of cosmic horror, H.P. Lovecraft, but also to his milieu: his literary predecessors, contemporaries, and current successors of the genre. From his premature death in 1937 until today, Lovecraft’s legacy has been a key theme for difficult conversations and challenging debates, which gave an opportunity to many prominent scholars to engage: it resulted in great insights and, subsequently, in critically important publications. The Armitage Symposium-2026 will continue to explore Lovecraft’s works in relation to classic and contemporary weird fiction, science fiction, dark fantasy, supernatural, and other similarly related genres as well as modern philosophy, cultural history, cultural and literary theory, linguistics, archaeology, ethnography, visual arts, media studies etc.
A small selection of potential topics for 15-minute presentations include:
- Lovecraft’s influence on the Western literary canon
- Lovecraft and the modern interpretation of Cosmic mythology
- Lovecraftian Mythos as a cultural phenomenon
- Lovecraftian grimoire as a precursor to modern metafiction
- Lovecraft’s literary criticism in relation to religion/mysticism
- Lovecraft and race/gender studies
- Lovecraft and pop-culture: from fandom to anti-fandom
- Lovecraft’s correspondence as a prime example of ego-documentation
- Haunted by the past – spooked by the present: the origins of Lovecraftian cinema
- Weird/Horror/Gothic fiction: defining a canon
- “Weird Tales” and other horror pulp fiction magazines: their origins and archival history
- Women in Lovecraftiana/weird fiction in the past, present and future
- Contemporary philosophy of horror and weird: exegetical approaches
Traditionally, the Armitage Symposium has aimed to foster explorations and disseminations of Lovecraft’s elaborate cosmic mythology, and how this mythology was influenced by, and has come to influence, numerous other fiction writers, historians, art critics, philosophers, archivists, bibliographers of the past and the present. However, all submissions that contribute to interconnecting new linguistic and literary theoretical concepts in academic Lovecraftiana/horror studies are very welcome.
Specifically for the Armitage Symposium, we are particularly interested in works by academics: undergraduates, PhD students, post-graduates, independent scholars, established researchers. Presenters should be prepared to deliver a fifteen to twenty-minute oral presentation and are invited to submit a manuscript for possible inclusion in the peer-reviewed Lovecraftian Proceedings no. 7. For consideration, interested scholars should submit an abstract (of around 250-300 words) in Word format along with a short bio (around 100 words) to the symposium chair, Dr Elena Tchougounova-Paulson, at tch.elena15@gmail.com.
The deadline for submissions is May 24, 2026. Early submissions are encouraged. For more information on the Armitage Symposium, or the overall convention, please visit our website:
necronomicon-providence.com
The 2026 CALL FOR PRESENTATION PROPOSALS can be downloaded here: Armitage Symposium 2026 CFA