popular culture

The Politics of Light in Neo-Victorian Fictions - Call for Contributions

 The Victorian period saw the introduction of a multiplicity of overlapping technologies and cultural practices of lighting, which radically transformed labour and the medical sciences, reinvented the night and connected ideas of leisure and security, refashioned the domestic interior as well as the perception of public appearance, and greatly impacted architecture and urban planning, policing, warfare and, not least, philosophy and the arts.

Concept Note:

Storytelling, from the metamorphic narratives of the Indian epics such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and Ovid’s ancient transmutations to the evolving interfaces of the present, has been an act of survival through transformation. Metamorphosis is the underlying imperative of the twenty-first century; it is not just a biological inevitability but a relentless ontological pulse beating beneath the surface of our global narratives. We inhabit a world amid a grand moulting, where the traditional mediums of storytelling, like the printed page, the physical body, and the ancestral soil, are being reshaped under the pressures of a planetary crisis.

SEEKING BOOK CHAPTER AUTHORS: Women and social media through a global lens - edited collection (under contract)

We are seeking authors for an interdisciplinary edited volume examining women’s roles in social media as both producers and consumers across global contexts. This collection explores the personal, political, social, and economic dimensions of this digital activity through the examination of global regions.

Chapters are organized by region. Remaining regions include:

• Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands)

Each chapter will contain the following sections:

REMINDER: Submission deadline June 15th!

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: THE SOUTHERN GOTHIC AT PCAS/ACAS 2026

The Southern Gothic is not merely a regional offshoot of the Gothic tradition—it is a dynamic cultural mode shaped by the histories, violences, mythologies, and contradictions of the American South. Rooted in hauntings both literal and structural, the Southern Gothic interrogates race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, ecology, labor, memory, and the ongoing afterlives of history. Its borders—like its landscapes and bodies—are unstable, porous, and contested.

"Melville Revivals"

PAMLA 2026

November 12-15, 2026

Seattle, Washington (Hyatt Regency Seattle, 808 Howell Street)

Call for papers

Architectures of Deceit:

Impostors and Con Artists in Contemporary Film and Media

This panel title borrows from the article "Granola and Guns: The Rise of Conspirituality" hosted on McGill University's Office for Science and Society that attempts to define and locate in American society a perplexing mindset that blends countercultural mystical thinking and conservative paranoia. "Conspirituality," which PennState defines as "a belief system that blends new age spiritual beliefs and conspiracy theorizing," has also been branded the "crunchy-to-fascism" pipeline, demonstrating how an openness to crystal healing, chakra opening, sonic baths, and celestial alignment has led many—often well-to-do white women—towards "Pastel QAnon," anti-vaxx, and an embrace of alt-right beliefs.

Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association (MAPACA) 2026 Annual Conference, November 5-7, 2026 in Baltimore, MD

The Phenomenology of the Stand-up Comic: Toward a Sociology of Gendered Humour

Mike Flanagan has emerged over the past fifteen years as one of the most prolific and recognizable horror creators in film and television, working across low-budget independent cinema, studio-backed films, and prestige limited series. Yet despite his prominence, versatility, and authorial trademarks, especially his collaborations with recurring actors and other artistic partners, he has received little sustained scholarly attention.

The 2026 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium: “Artists On/Off the Record: Living Archives and Embodied Memory”
ImprovLab, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada
September 10-11, 2026
Deadline for Abstracts: May 31, 2026

SPECTATOR 47.1 — SPEED - CALL FOR PAPERS/BOOK REVIEWS

DIVISION OF CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Spectator is seeking papers and reviews for issue 47.1, Speed, themed around USC’s 2025 First Forum Conference on the same topic organized by Minji Kim and Tanushree Sharma. Their call for submissions on this theme is copied below:

The contemporary moment is often thought of synonymously with the idea of speed. The 20th

and 21st centuries were marked by rapidly ascending rates of movement: the movement of

Call for Papers: Representation of Violence in South Asian Graphic Narratives and Comics

Chênière journal call-for-papers

Volume 10

Chênière, an online, interdisciplinary undergraduate journal based at Nicholls State University, invites papers for its tenth volume. Chênière is an MLA-indexed journal that welcomes submissions from any humanities field, broadly speaking, from history, communication, English, religion, art, music, and everything in between. The journal welcomes submissions from any undergraduate work but particularly caters to students from the Gulf Coast and the American South, broadly speaking. The subject matter for this issue is completely open topic.