Stranger Things-Related Call for Papers
Here are some ideas to consider:
• Mothers and mothering: good mothers, evil mothers, avenging mothers
• Strong women, beweaponed and weaponized girls, and the Ripley (Alien) trope
• Fathers and fathering, and masculinities in general
• Groupings of generations and cohorts, and how their different story arcs work together
• Nostalgia and audience engagement
• Mythic patterns in storytelling
• Music used in the show and its significance; music as weapon and lifeline
• Resonances with other texts: A Wrinkle in Time, The Lord of the Rings, the Indiana Jones movies, the Star Wars movies, Carrie, The Goonies, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Ghostbusters, the Whedonverse, and on and on and on. Not just a recap of inspirations, but digging into the how and why.
• The show’s use of Dungeons and Dragons, and the early D&D panic
• Queer characters, queer theory, queer history
• Race in the 1980s: what the show got right, what it got wrong
• US/Russia/world relations in the 1980s and what the show does with them
• Crazy science and conspiracy theories
• The stage play Stranger Things: The First Shadow and the canonicity of other supplemental texts
• The independent-kids-on-bikes motif in Stranger Things and its sources
• The midwestern setting and its callbacks to sources like Breaking Away
• The suburban shopping mall: its significance in 80s teen culture and its use in horror films like Dawn of the Dead
Editors for this special issue are:
Dr. Kristine Larsen is distinguished Connecticut State University Professor of Earth and Space Sciences at Central Connecticut State University, where she has taught since 1989. Her teaching and research focus on the intersections between science and society, including science in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Her latest books are Science, Technology and Magic in The Witcher: A Medievalist Spin on Modern Monsters (McFarland, 2023), and The Sun We Share: Our Star in Popular Media and Science (McFarland, 2024).
Janet Brennan Croft (ORCiD 0001-0001-2691-3586) recently retired from the University of Northern Iowa as Librarian Emerita. She is the author of War in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien (recently reissued by Bloomsbury; 2005 Mythopoeic Society Award for Inklings Studies). She has also written on the Peter Jackson Middle-earth films, the Whedonverse, Orphan Black, Terry Pratchett, Lois McMaster Bujold, and other authors, TV shows, and movies, and is editor or co-editor of many collections of literary essays, the most recent being Loremasters and Libraries in Fantasy and Science Fiction, co-edited with Jason Fisher (Mythopoeic Press, 2021). She edits the refereed scholarly journal Mythlore, is archivist and associate editor of Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy+, and chairs the Tolkien in Popular Culture Area at SWPACA.
Send abstracts of 400 words plus selected preliminary references to Kris Larsen and Janet Brennan Croft at janet.croft@uni.edu and larsen@ccsu.edu by January 30, 2026. Decisions on abstracts will be made by February 4. Initial submissions are due by April 15, and final revisions completed by June 10 for publication at the end of June.
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