film and television

Conventional cinematic views of New York City are often characterized by aerials, panoramas, and long shots of the archetypal Manhattan skyline, montage of crowded sidewalks, and quick shots of the yellow cabs in congested traffic. Scholars have regularly linked such city views to their historical urban contexts: studies of city symphonies emphasize the concomitance of capitalist modernity, scholars of film noir associate the genre with Cold War anxieties magnified by urban disorientation, while studies of Blaxploitation link the films to the immediate precedents of urban crisis in the 1960s and 1970s.

2026 marks multiple milestones for the legacy of legendary Afrofuturist author Octavia E. Butler: fifty years since the publication of her first novel, Patternmaster (1976), and the twentieth anniversary of her passing, on February 24, 2006. It also marks the announcement of a film version of one of her most famous and most prophetic works, Parable of the Sower (1993), as well as the surprise republishing of her disavowed novel, Survivor (1978), for the first time since the 1980s. These anniversaries arrive at a moment when Butler’s work continues to gain public attention for its prescience and political relevance, and as she continues to amass scholarly attention across scholarly disciplines.

While tragedy and horror are often treated as distinct genres, both traditions ask audiences to look steadily at what ordinarily repels them. From unburied corpses and undead monsters to violated kinship and failed agency, these spectacles produce fear, pity, disgust, and sorrow alongside fascination. This session explores what might be understood as a tragedy–horror continuum, examining the aesthetic, affective, and ritual overlaps between tragic and horrific representation across historical periods and media.

Still Screaming: An Online Conference Celebrating 30 Years of Scream

2026 marks the 30th anniversary of Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), which has had a profound impact on horror films and the slasher subgenre specifically. In the past three decades, Scream has become a franchise of seven films and a television series (2015-16, 2019). Scream has also expanded beyond the screen, reverberating throughout the popular culture landscape and serving as the foundation for a game, collectible figures, multiple Ghostface mask variations, and an entire collection of merchandise at Spirit Halloween (and elsewhere). 

We are pleased to announce an open call for bids to host the 2027 Post45 Graduate Symposium. The Post45 Graduate Symposium is a two-day event, typically held in Spring, which brings together graduate students and faculty members working on post-1945 arts, literature, media, and culture. Around fifteen graduate students each submit a work-in-progress and convene in a workshop-style setting along with faculty respondents to discuss each participant's work. 

RISING ASIA JOURNAL is a peer reviewed journal published three times a year in January, May, and September. 

Reviewers are welcome to submit book reviews on any aspect of Asia, covering India's Northeast, Southeast Asia, and East Asia (China, Japan, the Koreas, and Taiwan). 

For details on our book reviews and manuscript preparation guidelines, please go to SUBMIT ARTICLES in our website www.rajraf.org 

Send your reviews to Professor Tuan Hoang at tuan.hoang@pepperdine.edu and to the Editor Dr. Harish Mehta at hmehta76@yahoo.ca

Call for Abstracts/Chapter Proposals

SCREEN STORYTELLERS: The Works of Jaco Van Dormael

Edited by Albert Lee

Panel on Bill Lawrence for SCMS 2027 Since Spin City, the shows of Bill Lawrence have navigated the complexities of workplaces, friendships, grief and family. This panel intends to explore the Bill Lawrence universe from a diverse range of angles, with the overarching aim of seeing the series as part of a collective body of work. Papers are welcomed on Scrubs, Scrubs: The Revival, Rooster, Ted Lasso, Shrinking, Spin City, Cougar Town and Ground Floor.  Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent, with a 100 word bio to c.wilkins@bham.ac.uk by 20th July. 

Childhood is often imagined as a period of innocence, protection, and dependence. However, across many historical and contemporary contexts, children experience various forms of violence, including interpersonal abuse, structural inequality, displacement, war, and environmental harm. Recent scholarship in childhood studies has challenged the tendency to view children solely as vulnerable victims, emphasizing their capacity for agency, resilience, and political engagement. Understanding how cultural narratives represent these experiences is essential for examining broader questions of justice, rights, and social belonging.

Congreso Estética(s) del Horror: Filosofía, Cine y Literatura.

Invitación a envío de propuestas. Congreso presencial

 (English version below)

En los últimos años, el terror ha experimentado una renovada visibilidad cultural. El éxito del cine reciente, la consolidación de una auténtica edad de oro de las series televisivas y la aparición de nuevas voces literarias, impulsadas también por el trabajo de editoriales especializadas, evidencian que el horror ocupa hoy un lugar central en el imaginario colectivo y mantiene una extraordinaria capacidad para dialogar con las preocupaciones estéticas, sociales y políticas de cada época.

On January 19, 2022, Sheila Heti published the first of ten weekly installments of “A Diary in Alphabetical Order” in The New York Times. Each installment included an author’s note explaining that Heti had “loaded all 500,000 words of [her] journals into Excel to order the sentences alphabetically,” hoping to “see the self in a new way.” Over time, the project “grew into something more novelistic,” and the note concludes that “the self’s report on itself is surely a great fiction.” Heti is hardly the first author to challenge or destabilize autobiographical conventions.

As we meet in Newport, an island at the edge of the Atlantic, this panel invites papers about ocean-based horror media. Oceans, seas, and other waterways have been central to human culture throughout history, offering both opportunities to build communities across the waves and the threat of lonely, painful death through drowning or isolation through shipwrecks.

Call for Papers

The 2026 Multi-ConTEXT International Graduate Conference

“Interweaving Voices and Worlds:
English Studies in Transformative Contexts”

The Winter's Tale: From Page to Stage

 IASEMS Tempera Seminar 2027

 University of Padova, Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Letterari

 7-9 June 2027