Divination, Witchcraft & the Occult *SPECIAL TOPIC*

Popular Culture Association Conference

16-19 April 2025

New Orleans, Louisiana, US

The broad interest in divination, witchcraft, and the occult has been part of popular culture for centuries. Scholars’ discomfort with the topic is often palpable: they tend to focus on intersections that feel more legitimate, e.g. legal ramifications (laws against occult practice, witch trials etc), or archival documents, or simply sticking to fictional accounts.

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.

New Feminisms, Politics, and Pop Culture: An Intertextual Anthology This edited collection is interested in the intersections of feminism, American politics, and popular culture. Right now, as feminism in general is forced to shift back to a focus on reproductive rights, the fourth wave is being splintered into those prioritizing this issue and those still focused on empowerment, intersectionality, and other issues original to the fourth wave. As more and more strains of feminism emerge, how might we understand their origins and place them in conversation with each other? Is feminism finally intersectional? If not, how do we get there?

“In olden days a glimpse of stocking / Was looked on as something shocking. / Now, heaven knows, Anything goes.” This epigraph begins Chris Jenks’ 2003 work Transgression, exemplifying the sense in which acts of transgression can have real, tangible, palpable effects on society. Jenks defines “transgression” as violating, infringing upon, or going beyond the limits set by a boundary or convention (2). Transgressive fiction, then, is the genre of literature that depicts various acts of boundary-crossing in order to analyze and criticize them for the purpose of reflecting upon the ideological constructions that its characters react against or wholly reject.

Call for Papers: Art & the Public Sphere 

Special Issue: ‘Afterlives of Public Art’ 

Edited by: Cathryn Klasto, Maddie Leach & Mick Wilson 

(University of Gothenburg, Sweden )

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/art-the-public-sphere#call-for-papers

Call for Papers: Short Fiction Theory and Practice

Special Issue: ‘Uniquely Canadian Cultural Narratives’

Guest edited by Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka, University of Debrecen, Hungary

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/short-fiction-in-theory-practice