film and television

Hybrid format: in-person and virtual presentations welcome

Sinners (2025): Critical Approaches to Ryan Coogler’s Groundbreaking Black Vampiric Horror Film

The 2025 Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will host its annual conference this fall as a virtual conference from Thursday, October 9th, to Saturday, October 11th, 2025.

Virtual sessions will take place via Zoom throughout the day on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Registration will open up in mid-July.

We are looking forward to another engaging and rewarding conference for new and seasoned members alike. We are seeking proposals for panels and presentations for this year’s conference.

The Film & History Permanent Panel seeks papers for presentation.

This virtual panel will discuss and argue how reality shows such as RuPaul’s Drag Race, We’re Here, Survivor, The Rehearsal, and Nathan for You challenge expectations and limitations of narrative and media, and how these shows impact social and cultural understanding of underrepresented communities through spectacle, queerness, race, and gender.

This panel welcomes papers, presentations, and works-in-progress (?!) on reality television and how this genre intersects with critical race and gender studies, critical media studies, fan studies, and digital fandom subcultures.

https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21837

We are pleased to announce our next essay-writing competition. The award is open to all post-graduate research students and to all early career researchers (up to five years after the completion of your PhD) who have yet to find a full-time or tenured position. The prize is guaranteed publication in Foundation in 2026. To be considered for the competition, please submit an original article on any topic, period, theme, author, film or other media within the (broadly defined) field of science fiction and its academic study. Approximate length should be 6000-8000 words. All submitted articles should comply with the guidelines to contributors as set out on the journal pages of the SF Foundation website.

From brainwashed assassins to complicated anti-heroes to villains on a redemption arc, comic books, films, television, and novels frequently present readers with complicated antagonists-turned-superheroes, many of which become beloved characters. Through varied processes of regeneration, former antagonists remake themselves into superheroes in fascinating and often unexpected ways.

In her essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers articulates the enduring violence of racial enslavement through the concept of the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (67). This term marks how the captive body, stripped of legal and social personhood, became inscribed with meaning through the violence of racial differentiation. This transformation rendered the Black body not only a surface upon which terror was written but also a metaphysical site from which alternative modes of being might be imagined. In attending to the duality of skin and flesh, Spillers distinguishes between Black skin as legible and social, and Black flesh as ungendered, unsovereign, and open—both wounded and full of radical potential. 

This year’s conference theme and location offer timely opportunities for creative engagement with the post-industrial city and (re)generations of the so-called “Rust Belt.” This session will enable participants to read/present and discuss original creative short-form work crafting and exploring narratives, concepts, identities, images, locations, perspectives, and/or experiences of the Rust Belt, a term coined in the 1980s to describe the decline of industries (particularly large-scale blue-collar production and manufacturing) and resultant economic decline and decay.

In her 1981 study of surrealist poetry, The Metapoetics of the Passage, Mary Ann Caws considers the capacity of poetic language to simultaneously arrest itself and enable forward movement: "The word is situated, as Jacques Garelli reminds us, between two deaths, so that each cluster of sounds located within this regenerating rhythm is able to resume its impetus, thus refreshed, as if it were starting again." It is the practice of architextural reading, Caws argues, that reveals the sustained surface tension at work in written texts, a tension often concealed beneath plot, message, the presence of characters, or particularly potent visual images.

In his essay “The Uncanny” (1919), Freud theorized the psychological implications of those aesthetic effects which disturb us without us quite knowing why.  While, according to Freud, the uncanny or das unheimlich evokes a peculiar form of affect within “the field of the frightening” (123), it is a type of fear distinct from that produced by horror and terror.  The uncanny, he argues, registers the traumatic return of “what was once known and had long been familiar” (124), but which had been repressed.  Explorations of the uncanny have linked the affect to repetition and the death drive (Royle 84), surrealism (97), uncertainty (Jentsch 7), and “a certainty that goes beyond any certainty that science can provide” (Dolar 22).  

Reminder:

Call for Papers

Haunted Cities: Spaces, Spectres, and Urban Hauntologies

Edited Collection

Call For Proposals

The CreArte hybrid conference seeks submission of proposals for papers, panels (3-4 papers), roundtables, workshops, and performances. We invite proposals from artists, educators, academics, and public scholars who examine various forms of Latino/a/e/x artistic expression, including but not limited to film, literature, music, visual arts, and dance, and how these artistic expressions have impacted the direction of society, broadly. Our hybrid conference is held in association with the CreArte Expo Latino Cultural Festival, a weekend-long celebration where attendees immerse themselves in Latino/a/e/x culture through literature, film, music, dance, cosplay, dance, comics and much more.

Date: 19-20 September 2025

Keynote Speaker: Hatim El-Hibri, George Mason University

Mode: In Person

Calling all children's literature scholars! The Children's Literature panel at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association conference is accepting papers until June 30th or when the panel is filled. PAMLA will meet November 20th-23rd in San Francisco. To submit a paper visit the online PAMLA portal and create an account: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/