Call for papers: Visual Culture, Popular Culure Association 2025

An inherently interdisciplinary field, visual culture studies investigates images, media, and art in the contexts of sharing, producing, consuming, saving, and communicating. What defines visual culture, perhaps, is its resistance to definition. WJT MItchell’s (2002) landmark essay summed it up coherently when we proposed 8 “counter-theses,” two of which read as follows:

“Visual culture encourages reflection on the differences between art and non-art, visual and verbal signs, and rations between different sensory and semiotic modes.

Imagining the Impossible: International Journal for the Fantastic in Contemporary MediaCFP for Volume 4, Issue 1 (2025)Theme: Old

This international, peer-reviewed journal is dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of the fantastic in today’s entertainment media, including film, literature, television, games, comic books, animated films, theme parks, and online forums. The journal is double blind peer-reviewed and has 1-2 issues per year.

Volume 4, Issue 1: Old (Fall 2025)

Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies (NCGS) is published three times a year—spring, fall and a specially-themed summer issue—and accepts both scholarly articles and book reviews year-round. We welcome articles of 5,000-8,000 words on gender studies and British literature, art, and culture during the long nineteenth century. Submissions should conform to the most recent MLA Handbook and must include a brief biographical note which will be posted if accepted for publication. Submissions must not have been previously published, in whole or in part, either in print or online.

Call For Paper

“History provides numerous examples of people who were convinced that they were doing the right thing and committed terrible crimes because of it.”

                                                 ---Christopher Paolini

Spaces and Contexts for Teaching African Literature

A Roundtable for the African Literature Association Annual conference

Nairobi, June 25-28, 2025

Call for Papers

The Department of English at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India, invites submissions for the upcoming issue on Literature and the Posthuman of its journal, Research and Criticism. 

The Conference for Young Adult Literature Louisiana (CYALL) is accepting proposals for papers, slide presentations, lightning talks, and 20x20 sessions. The conference is a forum to discuss, demonstrate, and champion learning strategies in teaching young adult literature. College faculty, graduate students, librarians, authors, K-12 educators, and scholars are invited to submit proposals for papers and presentations on all aspects of YA literature and media.

The deadline for submitting a proposal is February 15, 2025 

The conference will be held on April 11, 2025 and will be onsite.

Communities and the discourses they foster play a crucial role in shaping how games are both designed and experienced. Salen and Zimmerman (2004) describe how games are cultural artefacts engaged with dynamic exchanges of meaning with their surrounding cultural contexts. These open cultural contexts influence can transform both games and their environments. Consalvo (2007) expands this understanding by discussing how videogame paratexts, such as guides and fan-created content, serve as vital pedagogical tools that shape how players approach and engage with games.

There is no denying that contemporary audiences have an insatiable appetite for killers: myth, legend, and reality. The soaring success, and continued demand, for fictions and nonfictions that document the dealings of serial killers and murders provide ample evidence for this. We are fascinated by their narratives and by their psychologies, and it is perhaps this need or want to understand the killer’s thinking that, in part, makes them so attractive to read and view. However, delineation between fiction and nonfiction continues to be a greyscale area. There are no longer certainties in crime fiction, nor in true crime writing, when it comes to the factual and the fictive.

Panel at ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) 2025: Collective Atmospheres
July 8-11, 2025
University of Maryland, College Park

The Folklore Area of the Popular Culture Association is considering proposals for sessions organized around a theme, special panels, and/or individual papers related to Folklore Studies for the 2025 Popular Culture Association Conference by November 30, 2024. The conference will be held in New Orleans, Louisiana (April 16-19).

Sessions are typically scheduled in 1½ hour slots, with four papers per standard session. Presentations should not exceed 15 minutes. As always, proposals addressing any topic related to folklore or folklore studies are welcome, including but not limited to the following:

JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND AESTHETICS
Special Issue | Call For Papers

(De)Bordering Aesthetics: 19th-Century German Philosophy and the Migratory Turn
Guest Editor: Gabriele Schimmenti (Roma Tre University, Italy)

The Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) is currently inviting proposals for events that will take place between February 2025 and May 2025. The deadline for applications is November 1.

The BSA can offer financial and logistical support for a variety of events, including lectures, panel presentations, hands-on workshops, conference sessions, or other online or in-person events.  Examples of past and upcoming events can be found here. Please reach out to the Events Committee if you have questions about event formats, financial support, or topics.

Call for Papers 

ReFocus: The Films of Fred Zinnemann 

“Something that concerns me very much is human dignity…or the lack of it.” – F.Z.