american

This international, peer-reviewed journal invites articles on all aspects of popular television, both fictional and non-fictional, from docudramas and sports to news and cultural programming. The first volume will be published in 2013 by Intellect (UK).

Published bi-annually, the journal is rooted in the belief that popular television continues to play a major cultural, political and social role, and thus seeks contributions that contextualise programmes, genres and phenomena. Analysis of national television cultures and style are welcomed, but the editors are particularly interested in interdisciplinary, empirical and comparative approaches to shows and developments across national boundaries.

There is no doubt that comics have made themselves a place in the realm of arts, among more traditional ones like literature, music or cinema. With hundreds of conventions all over the world taking place every year, international prestigious awards, some work with several thousands of copies sold worldwide, specialized literature and museums, comic, are stronger than ever, reassuring its place between the arts.

Call For Papers – "I Live Here!: Redefining and Negotiating Notions of Public and Private"
NC State English Graduate Conference
Conference Dates: Feb 22-23, 2013
Abstracts Due: November 15, 2012
contact email: aegs.conference@gmail.com

The Association of English Graduate Students at North Carolina State University is pleased to announce the call for papers for our fourth annual graduate student conference in the humanities, which will be held February 22-23, 2013 at Tompkins Hall in Raleigh, NC.

We invite Master's students from all departments to submit work on a range of topics related to Middle Eastern studies. We encourage papers that explore the political, linguistic, and cultural significance of the Middle East that transcend limitations across formal/generic cultural, ideological boundaries, and/or within varying aesthetic approaches. Book reviews, critical, analytic, creative fiction, creative nonfiction, photographic, artistic, narrative, and poetic pieces related to Middle Eastern studies are welcome.

Deadline: Friday, Oct. 5, 2012, 5pm

Please send submissions electronically to:
uchicagomessalights@gmail.com

AIZEN/University of New Orleans International Conference
"Emile Zola and Naturalism"

The AIZEN® (Association Internationale Zola et Naturalisme) and University of New Orleans (USA) solicit submissions for the jointly-sponsored conference "Emile Zola and Naturalism" to be hosted by
The Department of Foreign Languages, College of Liberal Arts, University of New Orleans

New Orleans, Louisiana, USA March 6-8, 2014

From Revolutionary Road to American Beauty and Desperate Housewives, some of the most popular works of fiction, television and film are those that focus in on the 'ordinariness' of suburban living. In drawing on this framework, these works expose the nature of human desperation, the values attached to American patriotism and the anxieties faced in adjusting to modern living. This panel will seek to question why suburban-based narratives have proven to be so successful within mainstream popular culture. Is it perhaps because we as readers/ viewers find a certain liberating accessibility in experiencing a social reality which reflects so closely on our own?

Body and Technology: Instruments of Somaesthetics

The Center for Body, Mind, and Culture invites proposals for papers to be presented at a 3-day conference, January 24-26, 2013, at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton.

1st Global Conference
Opportunity in Crisis: Finding Benefits in Difficult Life Events

Thursday 7th February – Saturday 9th February 2013
Sydney, Australia

Call for Presentations:

Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.
(Winston Churchill)

Abstracts due Oct 8, 2011 (250-300 words; include contact info and short bio)
Final essays due December 2012 (4,000-8,000 words)
We are specifically seeking two proposals examining representations of race and ethnicity in the popular culture of the Great Recession. Bust Culture: The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television is under contract with Lexington Books with a scheduled 2013 publication date.

[DATE CORRECTION]
Call for Papers: Eighteenth Century at CEA 2013
April 4-6, 2013 | Savannah, Georgia
CEA 2013 will be held at the Savannah Riverfront Marriott:
100 General McIntosh Boulevard, Savannah, Georgia 31401.
Phone (912) 233-7722; Fax (912) 233-3765.

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on [special topic title] for our 43rd annual conference. Submit your proposal at http://www.cea-web.org

"Travelling Back": History and the Contemporary Moment in the Work of Dionne Brand
Seeking to celebrate Dionne Brand's keynote address at NeMLA 2013 – and to complement the "Caribbean Literature and History" roundtable – this panel will take up the ways that Brand brings history (or histories) into a critical and profound engagement with the contemporary moment, on both individual and national levels. Submissions (max. 500 words) are invited that consider this or related questions in any of Brand's works. Rachel Mordecai, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

ACLA 2013 (Toronto, ON) – April 5-7, 2013
Seminar: ALTERITY BEYOND UTOPIA
Seminar Leaders: Gerry Canavan (Marquette University) and Ramzi Fawaz (GWU)
Deadline for proposals: November 1, 2012

Note: You must submit your papers through the ACLA website:
http://acla.org/submit/index.php

What cannot be taken up or kept alive? What is too used to reuse, too basic to break down further? What are the ideas at dead ends? Adaptations, translations, dead languages, genres fallen out of favour, tropes no longer sensical, ruins, methodologies in unremitting decline? Who are the guardians of garbage that monitor and control our cycles and recycles? What happens to an artifact too special to recycle, not special enough to reuse? Give us the histories, the institutions, the authorities who intervene to unmake the unrecyclable. Where do our capacities for metamorphosis fail us? What materials have run out of time? What materials have all the time in the world to stay unchanged? Plastic in the shape of an albatross? Manuscripts sealed into the walls?

As a popular genre, detective fiction often refers to or even uses as its foundation social issues, crises, and questions contemporaneous with its production. Recent examples of this, by authors such as Henning Mankell and Stieg Larssen, rely on even more extreme engagement, bringing attention in their plots to the rights and exploitation of political refugees, sex trafficking, and modern warlords. Such a dark turn in an already dark genre may cause one to wonder: is the genre foreshadowing the end of civilization, esp. given that such crimes and injustices occur in supposedly modern, just societies, such as Sweden and are often investigated by overtaxed, exhausted detectives and police systems?