Over a span of 35 years, the international settings of Andrea Lee's fiction and non-fiction have helped situate her as a black cosmopolitan writer. From her first publication, a 1981 New Yorker essay about a B. B. King concert in Leningrad, to her most recent novel, Lost Hearts in Italy (2006), about an interracial love triangle in Rome, Lee has redefined the bounds of black female subjectivity by crossing racial and geographical boundaries. While critics have placed Lee, a native of Philadelphia, squarely outside an African American literary protest tradition, Lee's novels, story collections, travel memoir, and essays do not fail to engage the ostensibly "domestic" concerns of U.S. civil rights history and racial integration.

From sci-fi epic to swords and sorcery, from urban ghosts to time travel, fantasy dominated the cinema of the 1980s. Hand-in-hand with these wild flights of imagination came the rise of new technologies of spectatorship (particularly VHS and the home VCR) and dramatic political change in both the West and the East. This two-day conference aims to interrogate the place of fantasy in the history of the 1980s – its construction, context and legacy.

Abstracts are sought for 20-minute papers that consider any aspect of fantasy and film in the long 1980s (roughly understood as 1977-1992, though films that fall outside these dates may be considered). Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Bad Signals: Collected Essays on the Work of Warren Ellis

CFA: Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century (abstracts: 31 November 2013, articles: 31 March 2014)
full name / name of organization:
Supernatural Studies Association Journal
contact email:
supernaturalstudies@gmail.com

The Supernatural Studies Journal is now accepting proposals for a themed issue on the supernatural in the nineteenth century (due Winter 2014), guest edited by Janine Hatter and Sara Williams.