american

Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference
Hilton Atlanta, March 30 - April 3, 2016

The irony of the title A Star Is Born is no longer surprising, as new histories have examined the way that publicity before, during, and after the Hollywood Classical Cinema has changed and developed the reception of films, stars, and more. While studying films can tell us much about the way they figure into larger histories, studying the way studios, agencies, and other distributors have presented and sold their work to the public can reveal much about both the economic and social issues of the time.

This panel seeks to explore the category of disability as something that is perceived and performed in the visual sphere. Papers might include discussions of voyeurism, spectacles and spectatorship, self-fashioning, visual art, undetectable or ambiguous disability, the body as evidence, erasure and exposure, sensory impairment, perception and interpretation, and questions of legibility and truth. Open to scholars working in any geographical region or period.

Please submit abstracts up to 300 words with a short (1-2 sentence) bio. DO NOT EMAIL YOUR ABSTRACT. You must go through the NeMLA site:

For this collection, three more papers from any discipline are welcome; however, advantaged are those focusing on a gendered or religious moral message. And I am looking for ONE paper which is willing to argue that the monsters represented are simply that, monsters, and that utilizing them as a tool toward acceptance of diversity is not a good thing. The latter is, I understand, a controversial view. This book wishes to explore all views and not promote one view by excluding another.

100 Years of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance

Metaphors make the detective. Whether Poe's "clew," Doyle's game metaphor ("the game's afoot"), or film noir's labyrinths, the governing metaphors of the great fictional detectives encapsulate the underlying social, hermeneutic, and cultural assumptions that govern their methods.

This roundtable seeks papers on any aspect of the guiding metaphors of detective fiction from the genre's origins to the present day. Short presentations on detective narratives in any genre, language, or medium are welcome; talks on a single metaphor, author, or nexus of metaphors and authors are of particular interest.