Kylie: The Symposium

An academic conference at Maynooth University, IRELAND, Saturday 16 November 2019

Kylie Minogue is an international pop star, with over 80 million record sales worldwide. With a career spanning 30 years, plus the recent announcement that she will star in the Glastonbury 2019 Festival’s ‘Legend’ slot, Kylie has given the late 20thcentury and early 21stcentury some its most iconic pop songs and videos, from “Confide in Me and “Spinning Around” to “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” , “All the Lovers” and her latest album, Golden. Minogue’s status as an audio-visual pop star, as a female singer with a capacity for reinvention whose decades-long career shows little sign of slowing down, as well as a gay icon, celebrity, and cancer-survivor,  mark her out as a distinctive popular figure and invite critical appraisal. This symposium invites proposals for papers on Kylie from a range of perspectives, including popular music studies, media studies, cultural studies and queer studies. Papers from a musicological perspective might address topics such as Kylie as singer, performer, songwriter, her status as a pop diva, her artistic reinventions over the years, questions of voice, liveness, and technological intervention, as well as popular music and notions of legacy. Proposals from the perspectives of media and cultural studies might attend to context and also reception, and explore fan cultures, and the legions of #lovers and online communities, or Minogue's location in and negotiation of the culture industry. Papers might also address Kylie via celebrity studies, and explore questions of age, race, gender, and branding in the songs and in Minogue’s own public image. This one-day academic conference aims to explore these and other issues, and to mark Kylie’s status as an enduring pop star. 

The organisers intend to develop a publication arising from this event in the form of a collection of academic essays. Further details about the publication will be provided at a later date. 

Abstracts of 250 words, along with a 100-word biography (including selected publications) should be sent to conference organisers Antonio Cascelli, Stephen O’Neill, and Laura Watson at the email kyliemaynoothsymposium@gmail.comby Friday 15 March 2019.