The Black Sitcom
The Black Sitcom: A Comprehensive Survey with Critical Essays
1950 – 2000
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The Black Sitcom: A Comprehensive Survey with Critical Essays
1950 – 2000
The relation between a theory and its so-called “object” always poses the danger of reducing an art form (in this case film) to a mere instance testifying to the validity of the theory. In this way, the theory provides the “genus” of which a given film will be a mere “species”. The application of psychoanalytic ideas or Marxist concepts to film would therefore run the risk of depriving the specificity and singularity of the object in favour of the hegemony of the theory. Here, theory would truly live up to its theological vocation (the “theo” in theory refers to God) standing transcendentally above its “object” upon which it would cast its daunting shadow.
Call for Papers
THE AMERICAN WEST
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
48th Annual Conference, February 17-20, 2027
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Submissions open: September 1, 2026
Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2026
Call for Papers for III TFO International Seminar Titled "Thinking Beyond Species: Cinema in the Anthropocene" in Collaboration with Alliance University, Bengaluru on 30-31 October, 2026
Call for Papers
Shakespeare in Pop Culture
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
48th Annual Conference, February 17-20, 2027
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Submissions open: September 1, 2026
Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2026
The graduate students of the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal
Nehru University, are organising an interdisciplinary conference on the theme
of Cracks & Crossovers, exploring their presence and reflection in visual
culture, performances and media practices. The theme responds to the
urgency of living in a time when systemic limits become visible through cracks.
It asks how we register the differences between categories such as crisis,
fragment and fracture. Do these terms signal a definitive rupture or an ongoing
change? Or do our times demand a new perspective that allows the cracks to
speak? Taking a cue from The Cracked Mirror (2012), the conference seeks to
CALL FOR PAPERS
In Brightest Day: Race, Justice, and the Speculative in HBO's Lanterns and the Green Lantern Mythos
Proposed for New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative -- The Ohio State University Press
Edited by Julian C. Chambliss, Ritesh Khandelwal, and Harry M. Foster (Michigan State University)
ABSTRACT DEADLINE: October 15, 2026
Send abstracts (300-500 words) and a bio (approx. 100 words) to greenlanternbookproject@gmail.com with the subject line "Lanterns CFP -- [your surname]."
OVERVIEW
CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS
Eating for a Green Future
Literature, Culture, and the Politics of Food in Contemporary India
Edited by
Dr. Manisha Mohanty (Assistant Professor, S'O'A University & Fulbright-Nehru Fellow)
Dr. Shashibhusan Nayak (MLA Bibliography Fellow, MLA)
Dr. Sonali Das (Assistant Professor, S’O’A University)
War does not end; it migrates even after the guns fall silent, crawling into bodies, landscapes, archives, and the grammar of storytelling itself. This seminar inquires into how societies of South Asia and the Middle East, so often positioned as sites of conflicts rather than as theorists of their aftermath, have produced their own vocabularies for narrating what survives war. Michael Rothberg (2009) argues that memories of distinct historical violence do not compete for scarce recognition but can be mutually constitutive.
Special Call for Book Chapters
We are pleased to announce a Special Call for Book Chapters for the forthcoming edited volume Beyond Pathology: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Dementia Studies in Humanities, which brings together interdisciplinary humanities scholarship that reconceptualises dementia through diverse representations of lived, narrated, and mediated experiences of the condition.
If American mass media is an ecosystem, we cast the press as predators, and the celebrity as their prey. We envision the reporters grouped in a posse, arranged for an ambush. Camera flashes crack as they capture their quarry. By now, these perceptions have become truisms that obscure our own role as consumers in a matrix of violence, spectatorship, and stardom. If we condemn the paparazzi for their alleged violence, we also continue to revise and revisit their heyday in the age of print media. This seminar seeks papers that explore how violent desire—of the spectator, the press, the star – shaped the profusion of tabloid and true crime print culture across the Americas.
CALL FOR PAPERS: OBSCURA - INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON HORROR AND CONTEMPORARY MEDIA CULTURE (EXTENDED SUBMISSION DEADLINE NOW OPEN)Dear Colleagues,We are pleased to invite you to participate in Obscura: International Conference on Horror and Contemporary Media Culture, organized by the research group at the University of Seville.This conference aims to establish an international and interdisciplinary academic forum to analyze horror as a backbone of contemporary narrative (cinema, television, video games, and digital platforms), bridging academic theory with professional practice and the media industry.We are currently in the second submission period (extended deadline).
This panel will explore Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and related texts at MLA 2027 Convention in Los Angeles. Please send your 250 word abstract on relevant themes like homecoming and the oceanic by August 30, to Ennuri Jo (she/her) at ennurijo@upenn.edu.
Christopher Nolan’s much-awaited film The Odyssey was released in IMAX on July 17, 2027.
Bloomsbury Publishing
Call for Book Chapters
Chapters from scholars of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives will be given preferences
Trees and Environment in Literature and Cinema
“Feel the Force”: The first 50 years of Star Wars
A PopCRN Conference
Join us for a free virtual conference exploring the Star Wars universe and its enduring cultural impact to be held online from 4th-5th May 2027.
Technological systems are routinely narrated through a rhetoric of the “high-tech”: futuristic, frictionless, dematerialized, and planetary in scale. Such rhetoric directs the attention of media technologies toward the newest platform, the most advanced infrastructure, the most spectacular feat of engineering. Yet every high-tech system is sustained by processes that are decidedly low-tech: extraction of raw materials, energy consumption at industrial scale, manual and low-wage labor, informal repair and maintenance, grassroots appropriation, and amateur practice operating at the margins of official technological narratives. The “high” is never self-sufficient; it is built on, and constantly obscures, the “low.”
The Lives and Legacies of Medieval Comics: A Commemoration of Ninety Years of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant (Hybrid)
62nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI), Thursday, 13 May, through Saturday, 15 May, 2026
Co-sponsored by Medieval Comics Project, Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture
Co-organized by Michael A. Torregrossa, Bristol Community College, and Carl B Sell, University of Pittsburgh
Rationale
20032. The Picaro and Picaresque Fiction "The Picaro and Picaresque Fiction" examines variations on theme of the picaro from its sixteenth-century Spanish origins to the present day. What does this recurring impish rapscallion have to offer readers in different political and historical contexts?
Deep Cut Magazine, an independent literary magazine, is seeking academic articles on horror for its inaugural issue, to be published December 2026. Academic work will be published alongside original fiction and reprints (by invitation) in an open-access electronic magazine.
While the focus must be on some element of horror as a genre, the scope of the call is purposefully broad: research may focus on literature, film, popular culture, gender studies, history, and more. Interdisciplinary approaches are strongly encouraged.
Call for Papers: Interdisciplinary Symposium on “Reproducing Dystopias”
Deadline for Submission: September 7th at 5:00 PM
Institution: The Center for Modern Studies PGR Forum, University of York
Organisers: Brianna Frentzko, University of York (brianna.frentzko@york.ac.uk) and Megan Woodward, University of York (megan.woodward@york.ac.uk)
AP Photo from Jacquelyn Martin (Deadline; 25 June 2022)
Abstract
The II International Congress of Videogames, Virtual Environments and Interactive Creation is an event of scientific and academic dissemination whose objective is the diffusion of studies related to the field of videogames, digital art and online and virtual environments, in its wide range of topics and media: development of ludic and interactive platforms; video game studies (Game Studies); initiatives around eSports; expressions of Digital Art, Virtual and Augmented Reality, and Artificial Intelligence applied to ludic or plastic creation; projects in networked communities and mobile devices; e-learning platforms; games and digital artistic works and their imbrications with cinema, animation, music, comics, etc.
New Perspectives on Creature Features (additional chapters)
Edited by
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
Project Overview and Rationale
2026: 09-15-26: CFP Holy Grail, Batman? Expanding Knowledge of the Grail Legends in Popular Culture (Online) (9/15/2026; ICMS Kalamazoo/Online 5/13-15/2027)
Holy Grail, Batman? Expanding Knowledge of the Grail Legends in Popular Culture (Online)
62nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI), Thursday, 13 May, through Saturday, 15 May, 2026
Co-sponsored by Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain, Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture
The rise of the superhero is one of the most significant cultural developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since the debut of Superman in Action Comics #1 (April 18, 1938), superheroes have evolved from colorful comic-book figures into powerful global symbols that shape conversations about politics, morality, identity, technology, gender, race, mythology, trauma, and resistance. What began with the imaginative vision of Jerry Siegel (writer) and Joe Shuster (artist) has expanded into a worldwide phenomenon spanning comics, film, television, literature, gaming, digital media, and academic discourse.
Workshop at the Renaissaince Society of America's annual meeting (Philadelphia. March 11-13, 2027)
Gothic Nature is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that engages with the Gothic conceptions of, and relationship to, the natural world. For the TV and film review section of its sixth issue, the journal seeks reviews for ecoGothic television series and films released in the last couple of years (2023–2026). Issue VI of the journal is unthemed, so there is no restriction on the types of film and TV we’d like reviews for. As a general guideline, we’d be interested to see reviews of the following (please note that this is not an exhaustive list, reviews of other relevant films and programmes are more than welcome):
Film:
Nonfiction film and media have played a crucial role in advocating for animal welfare, rights and liberation. Although short videos and a number of documentaries were produced and distributed with activist purposes during the 1980s, it is during the so-called “documentary renaissance” of the early twenty-first century, together with the communicative advances of digital media, that nonfiction moving images emerged as a medium capable of reaching more mainstream audiences, becoming a central cultural tool for instigating transformative change in humans’ speciesist practices and attitudes toward nonhuman animals.
Call for Chapters – Edited volume
The Cultural Life of Beds: Interdisciplinary Perspectives of Materiality, Bodies and Power
University of New England, Australia
For publication with an international publisher