The list below is a compilation of CFPs (Call for Papers) relevant to pop culture studies, including, but not limited to, adaptation theory, graphic novels, genre studies, film studies, critical games studies, ecocriticism, theater studies, humor studies, fans and fandom studies, etc. This list will be updated as CFP deadlines are passed.
Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Submission Deadline: December 31, 2017
CFP Title:
Early Middle English Call for Submissions
Contact Info:
Location:
University of Victoria
Conference Date(s):
N/A - Call for journal articles
Submission Requirements:
Submissions can fall into one of two categories:
- Traditional long-form essays of 6,000-8,000 words
- "Pece & Oer" (piece-by-piece, one-bit-and-another) contributions: lexicographical notes, short analyses based on in-progress research, brief write-ups on manuscripts or manuscript discoveries, new editions of short texts in Early Middle English or related languages, and other items of interest to readers.
Call:
Announcing Early Middle English, a new biannual open-access journal published by MIP-Arc Humanities Press. EME is the first scholarly journal devoted to this vital period of linguistic change, literary and material experimentation, emerging genres, and multilingual interaction, and it takes the widest possible conception of the field. EME seeks to examine not only texts written in Early Middle English but also the historical and global situation of the literature of England and its production ca. 1100-1350. We are currently seeking submissions for the first two issues.
Submission Deadline: December 15, 2017
CFP Title:
Exploring the Renaissance 2018
Contact Info:
Location:
The Georgian Terrace Hotel, Atlanta
Conference Date(s):
April 12-14, 2018
Submission Requirements:
Submit abstracts only (400-500 words, plus a 100-word abstract for inclusion in the program) via the SCRC website's abstract submission form. Scholars whose papers are accepted must attend the conference; papers cannot be read in absentia. Program participants are required to join SCRC and are encouraged to submit publication-length versions of their papers to SCRC's fully refereed, independent scholarly journal, Explorations in Renaissance Culture. Shorter papers (up to 3,000 words) are invited for submission to SCRC's online newsletter, Discoveries.
Call:
The South-Central Renaissance Conference, which has met annually since its founding in 1951, is an interdisciplinary association of Renaissance scholars with members primarily from North America and Europe. SCRC takes pride in being one of the oldest and friendliest Renaissance conferences in North America.
SCRC welcomes 15- to 20-minute papers on any aspect of Renaissance studies(music, art history, history, literature, language, philosophy, science, theology, et al.) and especially welcomes interdisciplinary papers.
Comics and Graphic Novels Studies
Submission Deadline: January 1, 2018
CFP Title:
Mind the Gaps!
Contact Info:
Location:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Conference Date(s):
August 9-11, 2018
Submission Requirements:
A presenter's name may appear twice in the program. All proposals should be sent as Word files or PDFs by e-mail to: comicsstudiessocietyconference@gmail.com. Conference presenters need to be current members of CSS in 2018 at the time of registration.
Call:
This inaugural conference seeks to bring together scholars, artists, and other members of the international Comics Studies community for critical conversations about the futures of the field, in all its multidisciplinary and transcultural formations. Presentations should focus on gaps and opportunities in existing scholarship and may choose to address one or more of the following questions:
- What are the overlooked, understudied, and emerging areas of comics studies?
- How might comics studies expand its methodologies? What disciplines should comics studies engage with more fully?
- How can comics studies foreground issues of representation, equity and justice?
- How might new technologies and platforms change the way we define, read, teach, draw, and write about comics?
- What are the significant challenges and opportunities for the futures of comics studies?
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Regional gaps and understudied geographic areas
- Historical gaps and recovered cartoonists and comics
- Comics, illustration, and art history
- Collaboration in comics and comics scholarship
- Comics pedagogy and classroom canons
- Scholarship in comics form
- Comics, conflict, and geopolitics
- Webcomics and digital technologies
- Critical race theory, ethnicity studies, and comics
- Queer theory, sexuality studies, and comics
- Postcolonial theory, settler studies, and Indigenous comics
- Science in/and comics
- Disability studies and comics studies
- Educational, governmental, and religious comics
We are accepting submissions for:
- Individual papers
- Panels of three papers
- Roundtables of short (five-minute) presentations by four to five presenters followed by discussion
Submission Deadline: December 1, 2017
CFP Title:
"Queer" as Noun, Adjective, and/or Verb
Contact Info:
Location:
Sequentials Online Journal
Conference Date(s):
N/A - Call for journal articles
Submission Requirements:
Please upload a submission title, cover letter, and high-resolution image(s) to the "Sequentials 2 - Queer' as Noun, Adjective, and/or Verb" category of the submittable platform.
Call:
In the complex and rich history of queer theories, activisms, and practices, the term "queer" has been deployed in a variety of ways. In "Sex in Public," Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner look at queerness and queer culture as "a world-making project," a process of continual action with subversive potential (Berlant and Warner 558). Jos Esteban Muoz, too, considers queerness to be a sort of horizontal (rather than teleological) temporality that comprises a utopian futurity and potentiality. In Time Binds, Elizabeth Freeman discusses "queer" as simultaneously a way of being and a mode of action, positioning queers as "denizens of time out of joint," and queerness as "rhythmic improvisations of the social" (Freeman 19, 172). Judith Butler, in Bodies That Matter, looks at queerness' relations to discourse and performativity, arguing that "queering" is a "sudden gap in the surface of language" (Butler 130).
For Sequentials' second special Call for Comics, we seek visual interpretations of the complexity of queer existence, discourse, and theoretical concepts. We are particularly interested in submissions that comment on the relationship between various deployments of the term "queer" and concepts of visibility, visuality, and art-as-activism. Submissions must be illustrated in comics form and can visualize, for instance, a particular interpretation of a given theorist's concept(s), a unique contribution to the field of queer theory, or the possible connection between comics and queer theory.
Possible topics may include, but are certainly not limited to:
- "Queer" as noun, adjective, and/or verb
- Queer performativity
- Intersectionality (queerness as co-constitutive with race, class, gender, etc.)
- Queer futurity
- Queer utopias
- Theories of negativity and anti-relationality
- Queer time and/or space
- Queer history
- LGBTQ+ activisms
By "comics," we loosely mean illustrated, sequential images that may or may not incorporate words and may or may not be bounded within panels or other boundary markers. We invite submissions from individuals in all academic disciplines, regardless of their level of experience with comics or illustration "skills." Further, submissions will be welcomed from non-academics, as well, and the editorial team at Sequentials will consider all submissions equally. Submissions may be of any length and may be either a large, single image or a series of "pages" to be displayed sequentially. All submissions will be blind reviewed by the Sequentials editorial team.
We strongly encourage contributors to consider how the comics form can interpret, envision, or reflect meanings associated with the given topic.
Submission Deadline: December 22, 2017
CFP Title:
2018 Michigan State University Comics Forum
Contact Info:
Location:
Michigan State University
Conference Date(s):
February 23-24, 2018
Submission Requirements:
Individual submissions require a 250-word (maximum) abstract of the topic as well as name and affiliation. Panel sessions require one 250-word abstract for the overarching topic and a unique abstract for each presenter's specific topic, including name and affiliation, e-mailed together. Roundtable proposals should include a 250-word abstract that includes an explanation of the topic and the names and affiliations of the participants.
Due to the visual nature of the comics medium and diverse community engagement in the Forum, we ask that all presentations integrate visual content. Panel presentations should be .ppt, slides, .pdf, or .presi, and on USB or accessible online.
Call:
Submissions from a broad range of disciplines are encouraged; however, presentations must be focused on the medium of comics. The MSU Comics Forum is seeking a multitude of perspectives that represent the diversity of comics and the medium's social, literary, artistic, and theoretical contexts.
We seek proposals for presentations, which may include but are not limited to:
- Individual submissions
- Each presenter will have 15 minutes to discuss his/her topic along with five minutes for questions
- Presenters will be grouped with other participants into a panel
- Panel Sessions
- Will run for one hour and 15 minutes
- Must include at least three presenters
- Presenters must discuss similar or connected topics
- Those proposing a panel are responsible for finding their own panel session members
- Roundtables
- Will run for one hour
- Must include at least three participants
- Presenters must discuss one specific topic
- Those proposing a roundtable are responsible for finding their own session members
Submission Deadline: November 30, 2017
CFP Title:
The City: Images and Imaginaries
Contact Info:
Location:
Universidad Carlos III, Madrid, Spain
Conference Date(s):
March 12-15, 2018
Submission Requirements:
Proposals will be sent to the Conference Organizing Committee for their possible acceptance through the platform set up on the The City: Images and Imaginaries website. Authors are requested to include in their proposals an abstract with a maximum length of 400 words and a short biography of up to 150 words.
Call:
Cities are probably the model par excellence of modern social organization. A diachronic look allows us to recognize the existence of different ways of understanding, thinking about and experiencing cities. However, these constant processes have shown how the pace of urban transformation has increased exponentially in recent decades, at least in appearance, and the extent to which the new designs have created many of the new challenges and apprehensions that characterize our societies. In this respect, cities such as Las Vegas, Tijuana, Beijing, and Mexico City have not only distanced themselves from the Greek model of the city, but have also permanently called into question all the operational mechanisms of the known social order. Without necessarily traveling to these large population centers, which would even call into question the term "city," and considering urban models that are very different and of varying sizes, the truth is we can make an effort to understand what the common traits and distinguishing elements of the cities we inhabit and imagine might be, including the degree to which they determine the living conditions of their denizens.
This Conference aims to offer a diverse view of representations of cities. Such a view begins with the artistic perspective, but it is not far removed from technical perspectives, from the historical to the urban. It also addresses, from a cross-disciplinary approach, what modern cities are and the multiple relationships that are established among or imposed on the individuals who live in them: hybridization, clandestine nature, belonging/rootlessness, solitude, happiness, suffering, etc. These representations necessarily not only adhere to an esthetic order, but also implicitly or explicitly entail a political theory, or at least an ethical bias, which takes into account different realities such as the distribution of common and private spaces, the growing obsession with security or the configuration of transportation networks, and urban boundaries, among others.
This conference aims to study the city by focusing on the following central concepts and their corresponding sub-themes:
Urban space
Configuration
This sub-theme will reflect upon the different ways modern cities have adapted, and the location and function of each of their parts in the global configuration, forming a system that determines and molds the life of their inhabitants.
Design
The aim is to extract from the specifics the global picture that gives meaning to the form by addressing the conceptual design of cities and the different aspects and phases of their conception. The city is viewed as a collaborative project that has evolved chaotically and accidentally, like a palimpsest, but which responds to planning whose ramifications are in many cases ideological.
The legacy of the past
Cities are like palimpsests historically constructed. This sub-theme focuses on the legacy of the past: how does gentrification affect, embellish or hide the historical aspect of cities? Is the postmodern city a continuation ofor break fromthe modern city? How do today's cities respond to their own history?
Civic experience in modern times
Citizenry
The city is a primitive structure of social organization that is the backbone of our identity. Studying cities also requires delving into their forms of organization, along with analyzing what the ways of belonging to the broad repertoire of urban communities involve. This laboratory of political dialogue is the place to examine in the present how the citizenry of the future is being created.
Identities
Is the city a space that confers identities? Urban spaces not only give visibility to certain identities but also hide others. This sub-theme invites research papers and studies about the intrinsic relationship between urban spaces and gender, class or race identity.
Sustainability
Issues related to the environment usually present the city as responsible for its deterioration, forgetting that cities represent a somewhat more complex ecosystem. This sub-theme conceives of cities as spaces where experimentation with measures and designs makes it possible to find a more sustainable model of society.
Contemporary cities and their representations
Audiovisual
Audiovisual representation of cities is a mechanism for the creation of meanings. This sub-theme considers studies about the representation of cities in films, radio, television and digital audiovisual media, ranging from the analog era to the culture of convergence of digital media, and from historical reconstructions to the spontaneous images of YouTube and social networks.
Visual arts
How do the visual arts confront the challenge of cities? This sub-theme considers research about this contribution of visual artists' past and present. It addresses different topics of research, from architecture, painting and sculpture to advertising images, photography, design, comics, and graffiti.
Writings
The (post)modern city has produced great works of fiction in which the author's personality intermingles with the visions of their characters. It is important to reflect upon how the written arts face the challenges of cities, not only through fiction, but also other forms such as reports, comments, "tweets," etc. This sub-theme invites research papers and studies about the representation of the city in different literary genres and sub-genres, from novels and poetry to the written press and different Internet applications.
Humor Studies
Submission Deadline: February 1, 2018
CFP Title:
Humor in America 2018
Contact Info:
Location:
Roosevelt University, Chicago
Conference Date(s):
July 12-15, 2018
Submission Requirements:
The conference registration fee will be $40 for graduate students, adjunct faculty, and independent scholars, and $75 for tenure-track faculty members.
Papers:
Proposals for paper presentations of 15-18 minutes should consist of a 250-word proposal and A/V requests.
Panels:
Proposals for organized panels of 15- to 18-minute papers moderated by a chair should include individual 250-word proposals, an overview of 100 words, a proposed chair (not required), and A/V requests.
Roundtables:
Each roundtable participant will speak for seven to nine minutes on a topic related to the larger theme (see below). Participants may present both a paper and participate in a roundtable, should space allow. If you wish to participate only in a roundtable, please indicate with your submission. Please submit a title and 100-word abstract.
Call:
We welcome proposals for paper presentations and panels on any topic related to American humor and/or Mark Twain, broadly conceived. Scholars across the humanities are invited to present research on any of the following topics (or others related to humor, comedy, laughter, etc.):
- Literary humor (including, but not limited to, Chesnutt, Fanny Fern, Parker, Faulkner, Melville, Vonnegut, Ellison, Morrison, Kingston, Beatty, Ephron, Sedaris, etc.)
- Humor and gender, race, sexuality, class, religion
- Stand-up comedy, sketch comedy, and other humorous performances
- Radio comedy, television, and film comedy
- Visual humor, comics, and graphic narratives
- Podcasts, internet humor, memes, and other new media
- Satire, ridicule, parody, and other forms of humor
- Humor in "serious" contexts or works
- Humor in regional, national, transnational, international, and other spatial contexts
- All topics related to Mark Twain (especially the following topics: Mark Twain language play, MT and Political humor, MT and stand-up, MT and gendered humor, Laughter and the Color Line: Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson, the Fantastic and the Comic in MT, the Comic Rhetoric of MT's Speeches and/or Interviews)
We especially welcome proposals from scholars of color, junior scholars, and independent scholars.
Fandom Studies
Submission Deadline: November 30, 2017
CFP Title:
The Business of a Woman's Life: Female Authorship, Celebrity, and Fandom in the Long Nineteenth Century
Contact Info:
authorshipcelebrityfandom@gmail.com
Location:
University of Reading, UK
Conference Date(s):
March 2018 (for some reason none of the available CFP's are more precise than that)
Submission Requirements:
We invite proposals of 300 words for 20-minute presentations relating to the conference theme. Please send your abstracts and a 100 word biographical note to organizer Evan Hayles Gledhill at authorshipcelebrityfandom@gmail.com.
Call:
This interdisciplinary conference, to be hosted by the University of Reading in March 2018, aims to explore the wide variety of women's engagement with literary and theatrical cultures in the long-19th century as authors, performers, and audience members. Literary and dramatic pursuits brought women into the public consciousness not only as creators and critics, but also as fans and consumers. This conference develops the transdisciplinary perspectives of fan studies and audience engagement research back into the pre-20th-century era. Scholars are invited from the fields of literary studies, social history, cultural studies, readership studies, book history, fan studies, and history of leisure and recreation to foster dialogues on the subject of 19th-century female creativity.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Responses to women's literature - reviews, articles in periodicals and newspapers, letters written to female authors, advice on reading offered to women.
- Women's ephemera - scrapbooks, commonplace books, marginalia, correspondence, diaries.
- Female authors in conversation - intertextual references to other works, correspondence between authors and/or publishers.
- Gender and performance - theatrical and musical fandoms, public readings of poetry and prose, women's public speaking.
- The promotion and marketing for cultural events and publications featuring women, and/or aimed at a female audience.
- Women and the literature of professionalization - scientific articles, monographs, medical treatises, autobiographies/biographies of prominent female professionals.
- Gender and performativity - writing under gendered pseudonyms, the "feminisation" of genres such as the gothic and the romance.
Submission Deadline: January 15, 2018
CFP Title:
The Future of Fandom
Contact Info:
editor@transformativeworks.org
Location:
Transformative Works and Cultures
Conference Date(s):
N/A - Call for journal articles
Submission Requirements:
- Theory: Conceptual essays. Peer review, 6,000-8,000 words.
- Praxis: Case study essays. Peer review, 5,000-7,000 words.
- Symposium: Short commentary. Editorial review, 1,500-2,500 words.
Call:
This special 10th-anniversary issue of Transformative Works and Cultures seeks to explore the future of fandom while looking back to its past. How might scholarship on fandom's past and present invite speculation about its future? And what might the possible futures invoked by technological, ecological, and political discourses mean for fandom's communities and practices? Science fiction in particularthe field whose strategies spawned fandom, and the genre in which much fan activity occurshas used imagined futures to shed new light on the present and the past. In turn, studying where we are and where we have been allows us to imagine where we may be heading.
We invite essays that seek to historicize and contextualize fans, fan works, and fandoms across past, present, and future. Scholarship on fandom's futures can open connections between technology and interfaces, fannish discussions and trends, fictions of imagined futures, and cultural and political changes in order to illustrate how fandoms may be understood in their historical contexts and cultural interactions.
This issue will feature a special section, "Predictions," that will allow fans and academics to imagine fannish futures. We particularly invite personal and creative responses, including essays from the future, documenting trends that haven't yet come to be.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- How have interfaces affected fannish communities and production, and how may these change in the future?
- How do demographic shifts in fandom and new voices change fan works and communities? How have new generations of fans changed fandom?
- How have the intersection and interactions between industry and audiences changed, and how may they change in the future?
- How do fannish futures look from different global locations, and what will transnational landscapes of fandom look like in the future?
- How is the fannish future gendered and racialized? How have fans created or imagined different futures for queerness, transness, disability?
- How have fandoms engaged with Afrofuturism, Chicanafuturism, Indigenous futurism, and other literary, cultural, and social movements challenging the whiteness of the imagined future?
- How has the commercialization of fan works changed over time, and how will it play out in the future legally, economically, or socially? Is there still a clear distinction between fan and pro writers?
- How have social and cultural changes affect the intersections between politics and fandom? How do these changes connect to fannish social activism?
- What changes in the source material and media, in fannish social organization, platforms, and technology, in fannish access, culture, and demographics do we see emerging as we look ahead?
- How does the increasing mainstreaming of fannish behavior affect fannish identities and behaviors? How does it alter mainstream audiences' engagement with fannish subcultures and media industries?
- What will fandom be 10 years from now, or 20? Are there some things that never change, that make us what we are--and if so, what?
Genre Fiction Studies
Submission Deadline: November 13, 2017
CFP Title:
A Study in Sidekicks: The Detective's Assistant in Crime Fiction
Contact Info:
Location:
N/A - Essay collection
Conference Date(s):
N/A - Essay collection
Submission Requirements:
Please submit an abstract of 300-350 words and biography of 50-100 words to Lucy Andrew (l.andrew@chester.ac.uk) and Sam Saunders (S.J.Saunders@2014.ljmu.ac.uk). Completed essays of 7,000-8,000 words will be due by Monday, June 4, 2018.
Call:
This collection aims to explore the changing representations and functions of the detective's sidekick across a range of forms and subgenres of crime fiction from the 19th century to the present day. Forms may include: magazine short stories, serial or non-serial novels, "penny dreadfuls," juvenile story papers, dime and half-dime novels, comics and graphic novels, radio drama, stage plays, film and television, and video games. Genres may include: sensation fiction, the locked-room mystery, Golden Age detective fiction (including the clue puzzle and the hard-boiled detective novel), the police procedural, historical crime fiction, supernatural crime fiction, the serial killer thriller, and the psychothriller.
The collection aims to pose and explore a number of questions, including:
- When did the detective's sidekick first appear and why?
- How do we define the sidekick? What is the distinction between the partner and the sidekick?
- What functions does the detective's sidekick perform? (How) do these functions change over time?
- (How) does the representation of the sidekick vary between different forms and subgenres of crime fiction?
- At which point in crime fiction's development was the sidekick's importance at its peak? Is the sidekick tradition declining in the twenty-first century?
Topics may include:
- The origins and development of the sidekick
- The functions of the sidekick
- Detective/sidekick relationships
- The female sidekick
- The child sidekick
- The animal sidekick (e.g., Jerry Lee (K-9); Diefenbaker (Due South); Pedro the bloodhound (Sexton Blake); Snowy (Tin Tin); Flash (Valerie Drew))
- The sidekick in sensation fiction (e.g., Gabriel Betteredge/Ezra Jennings (The Moonstone); George Talboys (Lady Audley's Secret); Captain Wragge (No Name))
- The supernatural sidekick (e.g., Bob in The Dresden Files)
- The criminal as sidekick (e.g., Dr Hannibal Lecter)
- The sidekick as suspect/villain (e.g., Dr James Sheppard)
- The sidekick as narrator and/or biographer (e.g., Dr John Watson)
- The sidekick as hero(ine)
- The sidekick as victim (e.g., George Talboys in Lady Audley's Secret)
- Multiple sidekicks (e.g., Mervyn Bunter, (Chief) Inspector Parker and Harriet Vane)
- Modern interpretations of classic sidekicks (e.g., Joan Watson in Elementary)
- The sidekick's comic potential
- The sacrificial sidekick
- The corruption of the sidekick
- The marginality of the sidekick
- The absence and/or loss of the sidekick
- Romance, sexuality and the sidekick
Sidekicks under scrutiny may include:
- Gabriel Betteredge/Ezra Jennings
- George Talboys
- Dr. John Watson
- Captain Arthur J. M. Hastings
- Mervyn Bunter/Chief Inspector Parker/Harriet Vane
- Robert Robbie' Lewis/DS James Hathaway
- Robin (in his various incarnations: Dick Grayson; Jason Todd; Tim Drake; Damian Wayne)
- Maddy Magellan, Carla Borrego, Joey Ross, Polly Creek (Jonathan Creeksidekicks)
Submission Deadline: January 1, 2018
CFP Title:
The Urban Weird
Contact Info:
Location:
University of Herfordshire, UK
Conference Date(s):
April 6-7, 2018
Submission Requirements:
Abstracts (200-300 words) for 20-minute papers or proposals for two-hour panels, together with a 100-word biography, should be submitted by January 1, 2018, as an e-mail attachment in MS Word document format to all of the following:
- Dr. Sam George, s.george@herts.ac.uk
- Dr. Bill Hughes, bill.enlightenment@gmail.com
- Dr. Kaja Franck, k.a.franck@gmail.com
- Dr. Karl Bell, karl.bell@port.ac.uk
Please use your surname as the document title. The abstract should be in the following format:
- Title
- Presenter(s)
- Institutional affiliation
- Abstract.
Panel proposals should include
- Title of the panel
- Name and contact information of the chair
- Abstracts of the presenters.
Call:
The conference will explore the image of the supernatural city as expressed in narrative media from a variety of epochs and cultures. It will provide an interdisciplinary forum for the development of innovative and creative research and examine the cultural significance of these themes in all their various manifestations. As with previous OGOM conferences, from which emerged books and special issue journals, there will be the opportunity for delegates' presentations to be published. The conference organising committee invites proposals for panels and individual papers.
Possible topics and approaches may include (but are not limited to) the following:
- The urban weird
- The English eerie
- Folk horror's encroachment on the city
- Magical cities
- Alternative/parallel cities
- Urban folklore/legends
- Urban fantasy and genre
- YA and children's magical cities
- Monsters and demons at large in the city (Dracula, Dorian Gray, Angel, Cat People, King Kong, Elephant Man, The Werewolf of London, Sweeney Todd, Jack the Ripper, Lestat, Zombie R', mummies, witches, etc.)
- Psychogeography
- Gothic architecture
- Cities and the incursion of the wilderness
- Civilisation and nature
- Alternative urban histories; neo-Victorianism and steampunk
- Gothic/magical fashion, music, and subcultures of the city
- Supernatural city creatures (demons, gargoyles, ghosts, vampires, angels)
- Animal hauntings and city spectres
- Decay, entropy, and economic collapse
- Supernatural cityscapes in video games
- Gotham City/comic books/dark knights
- The disenchantments of modernity and re-enchantment of the city
- Dark spaces/borders/liminal landscapes
- Wild, uncanny areas of the city
- Drowned/submerged cities
Theater Studies
Submission Deadline: January 15, 2018
CFP Title:
American Literature Society: Off and Off-Off Broadway
Contact Info:
Location:
Hyatt Regency, San Francisco
Conference Date(s):
May 24-27, 2018
Submission Requirements:
Please send abstracts to foertsch@unt.edu and ndib@umail.ucsb.edu.
Call:
Call for papers discussing the birth of Off-Broadway in the postwar decades, important Off-Broadway plays and playwrights, Off-Broadway-Broadway crossovers, the importance of Papp and the Public Theater, the Obie Awards, notable Off-Off New York playhouse (La Mama, Caff Cino) and regional theater productions, 1945-75.
Submission Deadline: December 3, 2017
CFP Title:
Comparative Drama: Text and Presentation
Contact Info:
Location:
Rollins College, Orlando
Conference Date(s):
April 5-7, 2018
Submission Requirements:
The 2018 pre-registration fees (through March 6, 2018) are as follows:
- Presenter, Reader, or Presenter Session Chair: $125 for faculty members, $100 for graduate students
- Non-presenter Session Chair: $80
- Guest: $70
- Student Guest: $40
- One-day guest passes: $30 for non-students ($20 for students)
For those who wish to register after March 6, 2018, or at the conference, the fees increase to $145 (faculty)/$110 (grad student), $90 (Non-presenter Session chair), $80 (guest), and $50 (student guest) respectively.
Scholars and artists in all languages and literatures are invited to e-mail a 250-word abstract in English to Dr. William C. Boles at compdrama@rollins.edu. Pre-organized panels and roundtables will also be considered.
A pre-organized panel should include three papers. Each paper should be 15 minutes in length. Panel proposals should include
- a copy of each panelist's 250-word abstract with paper title, author's name, institutional affiliation, status, postal address, and e-mail address at top left, and
- a succinct, 50-word rationale for the grouping of the papers.
The panel organizer should e-mail the abstracts and rationale to compdrama@rollins.edu.
A pre-organized roundtable should include at least four participants. Roundtable proposals should include
- a succinct, 50-word explanation of and rationale for the roundtable topic,
- a timeline of the program, including time for audience interaction and Q&A, and
- clear evidence of each participant's expertise in the topic area.
Those proposing a staged reading should submit the play's title, character list, a 200-word summary of the play, a 100-word rationale for staging a reading of the play at this conference, and an exemplary scene or act in Word document form to compdrama@rollins.edu.
Call:
The Comparative Drama Conference is an international, interdisciplinary conference founded by Dr. Karelisa Hartigan at the University of Florida in 1977. Every year, approximately 175 scholars are invited to present and discuss their work in the field of drama, and two new plays receive a staged reading. The conference draws participants from both the humanities and the arts. The papers delivered range over the entire field of theater research and production. Over the past 40 years, participants have come from 32 nations and all 50 states. Each year a distinguished theater scholar or artist is invited to address the participants in the keynote event.
Holocaust Studies
Submission Deadline: November 15, 2017
CFP Title:
The Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches
Contact Info:
annualscholarsconference@utdallas.edu
Location:
University of Texas, Dalls
Conference Date(s):
March 3-5, 2018
Submission Requirements:
Please e-mail presentation proposals to annualscholarsconference@utdallas.edu with "ASC Proposal" as the subject. The proposal should include the title of the paper with a short abstract of 250-500 words and the presenter's bio or CV. Proposals may be for a panel, roundtable, or individual paper.
Call:
The Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies is proud to announce that the University of Texas at Dallas is the new home of the Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches (ASC). The Ackerman Center invites you to join fellow scholars March 3-5, 2018, as we continue the important legacy established by Franklin H. Littell and Hubert G. Locke nearly 50 years ago. This conference offers the opportunity to address the historical significance of the Holocaust through scholarship that is interfaith, international, and interdisciplinary. The ASC provides an invaluable forum for scholars to discuss and advance Holocaust research, ensuring the valuable lessons of the Holocaust remain relevant for today's world.
The central theme of the 2018 ASC is "Critical Moments in the History and Memory of the Holocaust." Next year marks significant anniversaries of several pivotal moments in the history of the Holocaust, including Hitler's coming to power in 1933, Kristallnacht in 1938, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. These anniversaries are critical moments in the unfolding of the Nazis' endeavor to exterminate the Jewish people and provide timely lenses through which to revisit the Holocaust. The ASC invites proposals that explore these events and others that may lie outside these anniversary events of 1933, 1938, and 1943, as well as papers that more generally address the memory of the Holocaust.
Ecocriticism Studies
Submission Deadline: November 20, 2017
CFP Title:
Ecofictions and Ecorealities of Latin America and the Hispanic/Latinx Worlds
Contact Info:
Location:
N/A - Edited Volume
Conference Date(s):
N/A - Edited Volume
Submission Requirements:
Abstracts (400-500 words) and brief bio should be submitted by November 20 to Ana Maria Mutis (amutis@ trinity.edu), Elizabeth Pettinaroli (pettinarolie@rhodes.edu), and Ilka Kressner (ikressner@albany.edu).
Call:
We invite contributions to an edited volume on comparative ecocritical studies of Latin American writing, film visual art, and performance that address the topic of ecological violence. How do writers, filmmakers, visual, performance artists, and practitioners of other forms of material culture conceptualize, visualize, and describe ecological vulnerability and insecurity? What are their strategies to convey the acts of violence on the environment that, as Rob Nixon explains in his definition of "slow violence," are all too often invisible because they are "dispersed across time and space"? Which forms of expression are chosen, alongside and beyond conventional genres, to help apprehend ecological destruction and threats? And how do certain vernacular expressions and agencies position themselves in relation to international organizations that operate in the region?
The volume will bring together examinations of diverse artistic strategies that look into the precariousness of humannon-human relationships and peril of ecocide from a Latin American viewpoint. In particular, we seek contributions on environmental destruction, threats, and aftermaths of catastrophes that occur gradually over long periods of time and might go unnoticed, during what Edward Said termed the "normalized quiet of unseen power." Ecocriticism challenges the fundaments of modern humanism, and highlights the dense web of material relations into which we are enmeshed. Such a stance has deep implications on perceptions of locale, notions of the self and the other, and cognition (oftentimes envisioned to be embodied, collective, and relational). Contributions may include theoretical and vernacular approaches to assess the material relations portrayed in the works chosen, specifically in light of existing critical discourses that emerged mostly in the Global North (posthumanist, phenomenological or new materialist studies, queer ecocriticism, and postcolonial thinking, among others) as well as contestations to Western frameworks and worldviews. This book fathoms the breath of creative imaginings and critical strategies proposed in fiction, film, visual, and performative arts from Latin America, including vernacular approaches, to enrich contemporary ecocritical studies during our era of resurgent imperialism.
Submission Deadline: December 15, 2017
CFP Title:
Rethinking Nature: Literary Studies in an Age of Ecological Crisis
Contact Info:
Location:
University of Ottawa
Conference Date(s):
March 9-11, 2018
Submission Requirements:
Please submit proposals of 250-350 words along with a brief (150 words) bio to uottawa.conference@gmail.com.
Call:
This conference will consider how writers in different historical periods have used literary form to respond to changing environmental realities and the ways literary texts in different times and places have both recorded and shaped the non-human world and our perceptions of it. We hope to explore how literary studies should respond to the current renewed sense of ecological crisis, to challenge the binary opposition between the so-called human and natural worlds, and to consider how literary studies can help foster alternative frameworks and more environmentally conscious epistemologies.
From the recurring medieval allegories of Nature to the Romantics' idealization of the pastoral to the rise of ecocriticism, the relationship between humans and the rest of the more-than-human world has been an ongoing site of debate and conflict. For instance, in his apocalyptic poem "Darkness" (1816), Lord Byron responds to the Year Without a Summer and imagines a world that is "Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless /A lump of deatha chaos of hard clay" to suggest that a collapse of the ecosystem can only result in the destruction of human relations. In recent discussions about the Anthropocene era, questions of our own place in the natural world seem evasive, and the once held promise of modernity based on technological progress and human exceptionalism has become unsustainable. Responding to current ecocriticism, Timothy Clark asks, "how far a change in knowledge and imagination entail[s] a change in environmentally destructive modes of life" (18). What are we missing when we segregate ecological concerns from our pursuit of human development and technology? How has this segregation influenced the ways we understand and interact with nature? How have our interactions with the more-than-human world been shaped through innovative thinking and sensibilities throughout history? We welcome submissions from students, professors, and independent scholars in all disciplines. We also invite submissions for academic posters, creative writings, and performances.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Ecocriticism
- The Anthropocene
- Anthropomorphism
- Natural and Divine Law
- Rural and Urban Spaces
- The Local and the Global
- Imperialism, Colonialism, and Land Exploitation
- Modern Fantasy and Sentient Nature
- Animals, Animality and Animal Theory
- Nature and Technology
- Indigenous Epistemologies and Land Practices
- Climate Change and Global Warming
- Bucolic and Pastoral Literature
- Romanticism and Nature
- The Enlightenment and the Scientific Rationalization of Nature
- Ecofeminism
- Queer Ecologies
Submission Deadline: February 15, 2018
CFP Title:
Contested Modernity: Place, Space, and Culture
Contact Info:
concentric.lit@deps.ntnu.edu.tw
Location:
N/A - Online journal
Conference Date(s):
N/A - Call for journal articles
Submission Requirements:
Please send inquiries to concentric.lit@deps.ntnu.edu.tw. Final essays of 6,000-10,000 words, five to eight keywords, an abstract, and a brief bio will be due on February 15, 2018. Manuscripts should follow the latest edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Except for footnotes, which should be single-spaced, manuscripts must be double-spaced in 12 -point Times New Roman. Please consult our style guide.
Call:
Among the challenges to Modernity is the contested nature of space and place, both real and imagined, the lived landscapes and built environments and border areas where our economic and political transactions take place, where we educate our youth and heal our sick and profess our various faiths. Political priorities, class differences, gender relations, and historical factors all have an impact on the construction of spaces and places, and invest these with meaning that in turn affects the ways in which we experience and recreate the world. The consequences of transnationalism and globalization are particularly apparent in the urban landscapes of Asia, for example.
For Concentric's September 2018 issue, we invite submissions from a range of disciplines including literature, archaeology, architecture, urban geography, the visual and creative arts, philosophy, and politics. We particularly welcome papers that discuss the use of space and place in Taiwan and modern Asia in general, as depicted in film, literature, and other media.
Submissions are sought on any aspect of space and place, including the following:
- Historic representation and preservation of space and place
- Urban space and diaspora
- Theorizing space and place
- Surveillance, sight and the panoptic structures and spaces of contemporary life
- Situated identities
- Work spaces and hierarchies of power
- Contested places, for example the construction of gated communities as a response to real/imagined terrorism
- Transnational and translocal places
- Barriers, obstructions and disenfranchisement in the construction of lived spaces
- Haunted spaces/places and non-spaces
- Future cities/futurology and space
- Representations of city/countryside/suburbs in the media and creative arts
- Space and place in computer games