The Vampire Studies Area of the PCA welcomes papers, presentations, panels, and roundtable discussions that cover all aspects of the vampire as it appears throughout global culture. This year's conference will be held April 13-16 in Seattle, WA.

This year the Vampire Community celebrates the centenary of Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.  We welcome papers, panel presentations, or creative pieces about this classic genre defining film.  As well as this broad theme we also welcome papers, presentations, and panels that cover any of the following:

      The Non-Western Vampire (i.e. Black, Asian, Latino/a/x, African)

      The Horror Vampire Byronic vs Hedonistic, or Horror vs Romantic

In the recent years, foreign language teaching has advocated for an increasingly intermedial and interdisciplinary approach, one that enables instructors to expand course materials and integrate a wide array of popular and current cultural products. Advanced courses in literature and culture can develop curricula that more liberally incorporate popular culture into teaching. On the contrary, lower advanced and intermediate courses must combine cultural components with the introduction or the review of grammar structures. This session seeks contributions that address the following: What are the challenges of transitioning from grammar-based to culture-based instruction in language classes?

This special issue of Women’s Studies: an interdisciplinary journal invites submissions that address how women in contemporary Spain challenge the political system and claim space in the public sphere. We are especially interested in work that questions traditional neoliberal narratives of the Transition period and beyond, as well as scholarship that engages contemporary discourse around national identity, cultural memory and/or political practices in Spain. We anticipate a truly interdisciplinary issue with a variety of articles from fields such as, but not limited to, literature, film, media studies, theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, visual arts, history, philosophy, anthropology and sociology.

This panel will explore the varying visual representation of transgender people in film and television. Peter Lehman’s Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body explains the visual shame of the male body and could also begin to understand the complexity of the transgender body. Lehman describes it as “men have managed to keep out of the glare, escaping from the relentlessness activity of sexual definitions” (6).  Newer shows like Sense8 and films like Hedwig and the Angry Inch, A Fantastic Woman, and The Danish Girl allow for characters that have visually and complex personalities along with their visual body. They explore trans struggles in storylines that do not end with death.

Book proposals are invited for a series called Gender and Culture in the Romantic Era, published by Anthem Press (http://www.anthempress.com/).

CALL FOR PROPOSALS FOR TOPICAL ISSUESOPEN CULTURAL STUDIES vol. 2022  Open Cultural Studies (degruyter.com/culture) invites groups of researchers, conference organizers and individual scholars to submit their proposals of edited volumes to be considered for publication as topical issues of the journal.  To submit your proposal please contact Dr Katarzyna Tempczyk at katarzyna.tempczyk@degruyter.com  Proposals will be collected by October 31, 2021.   ABOUT THE JOURNAL  

Having successfully launched the fourth edition of the ICARSH conference, we are happy to announce that the 5th International Conference on Advanced Research in Social Sciences and Humanities will take place in February 2022 in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

This interdisciplinary panel examines the rich relationship of music and literary texts in various world literatures focusing primarily on the 20th century, but presentations within a broader time frame will also be considered. We invite a wide range of papers investigating the author’s technique of representing music in literature, examining aesthetic, historical, and cultural interactions between music and literature, audience and performers, literary text and composer.

In 1818, the Shelleys exchanged their settled life at Albion House in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, for an Italian exile—a period distinguished by remarkable productivity and artistic achievement. To commemorate the bicentenary of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death on 8th July 1822, the Shelley Conference 2022 will centre on the final two years of the poet’s sojourn in Italy. Beginning with the summer of 1820, the last twenty-four months of Shelley’s life were populated by brilliance. Within that short lease fall such works as Prometheus Unbound, Swellfoot the Tyrant, ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, ‘Witch of Atlas’, Epipsychidion, Adonais, the late lyrics, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, accomplished translations, and The Triumph of Life.

Location: The Jerwood Centre at The Wordsworth Trust

Date: 13–14 May 2022

Keynote lecture by Robert Morrison (Bath Spa University, British Academy Global Professor)

A Haunted Structure: Contemporary Horror Film and Class Analysis

Landscapes, scenery, architecture, and locations are integral to the study of horror in fiction-- and yet, one might point out that they rarely recieve as much emphasis or attention as monsters that live within them. This panel is for these forgotten landscapes of horror and "weird" fiction--a place to observe and recognize the importance or triteness of the haunted house trope, the mysterious ineffability of Lovecraftian underwater temples, or the aged spirituality of Dracula's castle. This panel seeks to turn the paradigm of antagonist-focused readings of texts on its head, and start understanding place and location itself as a tangible and critical piece in the inculcation of horror.

Why Germany? What relation does Germany, a country, have with the African continent? The relationship between African countries and Germany dates back to the seventeenth century, long before the Berlin conference of 1884 under Otto von Bismarck—itself a historical turning-point in German colonial politics. The meeting resulted in the scramble for and partition of Africa by European nations like France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Great Britain. The nineteenth-century saw an explosion of adventurous trading enterprises that pushed Bismarck to start a more official, state-supported form of colonialism and ultimately to the Berlin Conference.

The tern Genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, in a context heavily influenced by the events of the Jewish Holocaust. The parameters of Genocide, and its legal consequences were gathered in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that recognizes that the following are factors that take place in a genocide:

-Killing members of the group

-Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group

-Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring physical destruction in whole or in part

-Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

-Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group