When American movies made their way across the Atlantic after World War II, the French film critics couldn't help but notice their dark and brooding quality, dubbing them noir. Classic noir texts by authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler featured characters that take on the big dark city as alienated, angst-ridden antiheroes.

Classic noir faded in the late 1950s, but during the 1970s, we find a resurgence of noir with the emergence of a new form dubbed neo-noir, a form set in the near future where a gloomy dystopia with an environmentally corrupt aesthetic reflects the characters' personalities as they question the essence of human nature. When set in the past, such as Polanski's neo-noir, Chinatown, the concerns are contemporary, most decidedly. Neo-noir, in turn, has spawned cyberpunk, retro noir, and steam punk as aficionados still debate whether noir is a genre, style, or movement.

From classic to neo-noir, this issue of Interdisciplinary Humanities will examine from a diversity of perspectives, themes, and approaches, the history, issues, and theories of the noir vision in American culture as exemplified by literary and mass cultural fiction (films, texts, art, pulps, comics) and explore a wide variety of interactions with historical, social, political, psychological and literary-cinematic contexts.

The Humanities Education and Research Association, Interdisciplinary Humanities' parent organization, requires that authors become members of HERA if their essays are accepted for publication. Information on membership and the journal may be found at www.h-e-r-a.org.

Submission deadline: November 15, 2015 to be published in the Spring 2016 edition of *Interdisciplinary Humanities*

Please send inquiries and submissions to Doré Ripley at dore.ripley@gmail.com.