Special dossier | to be published in vol 5 no 2 (May 2024)

A fundamental element of the American imaginary, superhero and heroic narratives have seen a new apogee since the turn of the century. New and old heroes and heroines have populated popular culture, giving rise to a variety of texts that tackle diversity, nostalgia, and the need for imaginaries and narratives that help us deal with the struggles inherent to our current times.

This special dossier, edited by Marica Orrù, will collect essays on (super)hero figures in twenty-first century US popular culture, with a specific focus on diversity, cross-genre texts, and transmedia representations. 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Call for Papers: Narratives of Coercive Control

University of York, 19-20 April 2024

Bringing together literary critics, legal historians, and creative practitioners, this conference will provide the first in-depth analysis of literary representations of coercive control. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers or creative submissions that draw out ways in which coercive control has been identified and interrogated by writers from the 1800s to the present day. 

REVISED - Call for Book Chapter Proposals

Editors: Dr. Animesh Roy, Assistant Professor, Department of English St. Xavier's College (Ranchi University), Ranchi, India

              Srija Sanyal, Research Scholar, Ronin Institute for Independent Research, NJ, USA

Women and Literature in India: A Critical Perspective (Working Title)

In this roundtable session, we intend to prompt a conversation about the prevailing beliefs concerning “digital natives” in the context of the pandemic-era college writing classroom. As most current college writing students have had some experience, typically for the first time, with online learning in high school during the pandemic, we want to foster a discussion about college instructors’ experiences of their students’ abilities, including the associated opportunities and pitfalls, in attempting to navigate these online academic environments.

We would like to invite proposals for chapters for a forthcoming edited collection on animals, fashion, and colonialism. Our project investigates the way that colonialism was inscribed on the female body through animal fashions in the long nineteenth century and beyond. Contributions are welcome from a wide variety of fields, with interdisciplinary approaches preferred. 

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:  

Extended deadline

CFP: Edited volume on Vikingism: Viking-Age Scandinavians in Modern British and North American Media  

Vikings — their history, traditions, mythology and material culture — have taken contemporary media by storm. Popular culture is awash with Viking tropes and themes which have generated explosive interest in cinema, television, video games, music, literature, genre fiction and comics. This volume aims to provide a ground-breaking and innovative understanding of twentieth- and twenty-first century Vikingism. We are inviting scholars with relevant expertise to contribute essays which address any of the following questions:

American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) — Montreal, March 14-17, 2024

On Modes of Being Human: Liberal Orthodoxy, Capitalist Empire, and the New Humanities

Deleuze notes in Negotiations that he did not have the chance to write “the book [he’d] like to have done about literature” (143) as he had done for other artforms like cinema and painting. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of great thinkers who “lay out a new plane of immanence” and “draw up a new image of thought” to “change how we think” (What Is Philosophy 51), this seminar takes up Deleuze’s desire for new images of thought focused explicitly on literature. This seminar invites participants to consider the relation between Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and commentary on art (e.g., painting, cinema, and literature) and a variety of literary writers to establish new ways of thinking and navigating within literature.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim claimed, “My Westernization took place in my body.” This panel seeks to theorize the female Korean American body as a racialized and excluded site--a biopolitical site for trauma and haunting. More specifically, we seek to investigate representations of Korean women’s bodies in Korean/Korean American women’s writing and how these representations come to embody fidelity, disloyalty, and/or negotiate multiple affiliations and the movement between allegiances.

As such, this panel asks:

How is the Korean female figure situated between Westernization/Americanization and Asian alliances?

Call for Papers for volume 16, n° 1(33)/ 2024: Digital Methods and Fields: Feminist Perspectives

Guest editors:

Audrey BANEYX, Research Engineer, Médialab, Sciences Po, France, audrey.baneyx@sciencespo.fr 

Hélène BOURDELOIE, Associate professor, CIS (CNRS) & LabSIC, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, France, Helene.Bourdeloie@univ-Paris13.fr 

Mélanie LALLET, Associate professor, UCO Nantes, Arènes, CHUS & Irméccen, France, melanie.lallet@yahoo.fr

Any philosophical consideration of the current zeitgeist requires an assessment of the quasi-object ( Latour 1993) constellation of Artificial Intelligence and its affordances without giving in to either knee-jerk optimism or unchanneled pessimism. For if doomsday was indeed near (as social media discourses want us to believe), and human labour progressively redundant to the machinations of human-made artificial intelligence, what is the limit case scenario, which makes such a provocation real, tangible and material beyond fatalistic projections of obsolescence? How does that reconfigure the idea of the Human as both the object and subject of cybernetic capital?

Novels and literary works that adapt Classical figures and text continue to be very popular, such as Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships, Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy, Madeline Miller’s Circe, Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy, and others demonstrate. Many of these retellings focus on Classical women, putting these characters at the center of the narratives. These relatively recent works show one way in which the Classical tradition can still be relevant, especially as it adapts to and includes new histories, viewpoints, and situations.

Call for Papers

Special Topic: Happiness and Culture

National Conference 

of the Popular Culture Association (PCA) 

Chicago, IL

March 27-30, 2024

We are seeking paper proposals for the 2024 PCA conference in Chicago. The papers may focus on any aspect of the relationship between happiness (tentatively understood as subjective well-being) and broadly defined popular culture.

Monsters, Monstrosities, & the Monstrous CFP

Do you do monster scholarship? If so, we encourage you to consider submitting a paper to the new Monsters, Monstrosities, & the Monstrous area of the Popular Culture Association for the PCA National Conference in Chicago, March 27-30, 2024. https://pcaaca.org/page/nationalconference