In the world of Tomb Raider adventure awaits around every corner, waiting for the extraordinary to be uncovered. This has been the story of Lara Croft for nearly 30 years. Recent announcements regarding the upcoming live-action series by Amazon Prime (Maas & Otterson, 2024) and an officially redesigned character hinting at a new game release (Dinsdale, 2024) have thrust Tomb Raider back into the forefront of mainstream public consciousness. Since its inception in 1996, fans of the game series and the iconic Lara Croft have embarked on a journey together, solidifying her status as one of the most iconic game characters ever created.

Crossed Borders, Changed Lives: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Twenty-First Century Young Adult Immigrant & Refugee Literature seeks scholarly and artistic articles for publication in a collection that focuses on depictions of images of immigrants and refugees in American Young Adult (YA) novels published, preferably after 2001 (9/11).

Topics (not exclusive):

**Extended DEadline - June 16**

Fantasy and the supernatural, broadly defined, shape many popular narratives and universes—from Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones, from World of Warcraft to The Witcher, from classical and medieval tales of monsters and dragons to the worlds of N.K. Jemisin, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Nnedi Okorafor, and Ursula K. Le Guin. As a genre, fantasy engages with questions of rhetoric, identity, and power in multiple ways, across media, subgenres, and cultural traditions; the enchantment of fantastic and supernatural narratives casts a persistent and global spell.

Although a monster with a head of swarming snakes, Medusa has been firmly embraced as a snake sister by more women. In her 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous pioneeringly urges women to re-visit their mythological snake sister - Medusa - who has long been (mis)construed as ugly and sinful. Cixous writes, "You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing” (885). In current feminist terms, Medusa is often read sympathetically: “The ugliness she first experienced as an unjust punishment” is transformed into her greatest strength she “learned to use as a weapon” (Zimmerman 3).

Zentrumstage 2024

The Historicities of Security and Peace

Philipps University Marburg (Germany)

October 9-11, 2024

Deadline for paper submission is June 16, 2024

Conference Topic

This volume of essays would like to celebrate the role played by writers and other artists in initiating the kind of intercultural conversations necessary to transcend the political, geographical and cultural borders erected in the name of nationalism. The collection is based on a conference held on the theme in April 2024. I have a contract with a publisher and am looking for a final few essays to complete the collection.

The Centre for Creative Technologies, University of Galway
May 22nd and 23rd 2025

Technology and Film Labour: Crafting the Look of the Film
Investigating the impacts of technological change on below the line film labour.

Recent technological developments such as the widespread adoption of virtual production processes and the use of generative AI have had a transformative effect on film production workflows and below the line film craft. The relationships between production departments as well as the roles and functions of cinematography, production design, sound design costume, location and visual effects have all been affected by technological change.

"Framing the Unreal: Exploring Graphic/Visual Science Fiction and Fantasy"

ICLA Research Committee  on Comics Studies  and Graphic Narrative 20th Anniversary Conference

Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy - November 11-15, 2024

https://www.comics-studies.com/events/sff2024

Call for Papers

Panel #9: "Nightmares from the Past, Visions of the Future: Alternative Futurism & Comics"

The Aesthetics of Disaster

Special Editor: Lucia Morawska (Richmond, The American International University in London)

"The Polish Journal of Aesthetics" Volume 77 (2/2026)

Submission deadline: 30 September 2025

New Perspectives on Hawthorne and Utopia

Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, Spring, 2025

Editors: Monika Elbert and Andrew Loman

In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne writes, “The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably found it among their  earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison” (CE 1:47). This famous sentence deploys a number of key terms – the colony, virtue, happiness, projection, necessity, virginity, the cemetery, the prison – all of them interlinked with the sentence’s key term, Utopia.

Even today in the age of political correctness and amidst cancel culture censures, people with mental disorders are one of the few social groups still to be consistently misrepresented, ostracized, and demeaned. The social consequences of stigmatization should be studied through autobiographical narrative acts to reveal what it means to live with mental illness in America. By utilizing everyday language and literary tropes, mental illness life narratives humanize portrayals of mental disorder; by doing so, they appeal to the sympathies of broader audiences than medical narratives, such as case studies or examples in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Femspec seeks both scholarly and creative submissions for its upcoming Issue 24.2.

Femspec is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed feminist academic journal dedicated to science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, surrealism, myth, folklore, and other supernatural genres.  Femspec publishes both academic scholarship and creative writing.

Creative writing submissions could include short fiction, poetry, or experimental forms.

To submit work for consideration, please review Femspec’s submission guidelines at the following link: SUBMISSION GUIDELINES | Femspec

NEW Deadline: Thursday, July 11, 2024 (Pete Murphy's B-Day!)

(Tentative) Conference Date(s): Friday August 16, 2024 

Format: Online (via Zoom, PST)

Abstract: 150 words + short biographical statement + time zone

Submit to: bld45conference@gmail.com

Contact for inquiries: Noah Gallego @noahrgallego@gmail.com, cc: Rachel Birke @ rbirk001@g.ucla.edu (Subject Line: BLD45 Conference)

"Undead, undead, undead"

Sustainability: Which Way Now?

Bhabani Shankar Nayak

Dr Samuel O Idowu

Dr Amr Khafagy

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