cultural studies and historical approaches

After the encouraging success of last year’s panel, we want to continue our discussion on “bad art.”  We are not interested in "bad" as a judgment of quality or technique, but rather "bad" as a judgment of ethics or politics.

The adaptation of short stories goes back to the beginning of cinema and continues today, yet the practice receives relatively little critical attention. While much energy has been spent theorizing film adaptation of the novel, there exists virtually no systematic treatment of the practice of adapting short fiction.[1] Despite this lack, a close look suggests that the adaptation of short fiction represents differences of kind, and not just of degree, from that of the novel, differences that yield fertile ground for the adaptation-critic.

Open Call for Papers – European Journal of Theatre and Performance (EJTP)

EJTP currently welcomes submissions for the Essays Section for Issue 8. This issue will feature one of EJTP’s “open” Essays Sections (instead of a “themed” one), which means that authors can submit contributions on a topic of their choice. If interested, send your article by 15 July 2024 to ejtp_editors@eastap.com. 

PAMLA will meet next within a year of the sixtieth anniversary of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which appeared in August of 1965. We will also be within a year since the appearance of the second part of Denis Villeneuve’s widely praised adaptation of it, in anticipation of part three of his projected trilogy adapting its sequel Dune Messiah (1969).

Indian Literatures and Cultures: New Theories and Reflections:  An International Conference organized by  The Department of English, Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia Dates: September 11 and 12, 2024 The evolution of the studying and understanding of Indian Literatures and Cultures has always accompanied the global social, political or aesthetic theories. Starting from assuming nationalist trends in determining the horizons of Indian literature rooted to ancient myths, legends or epics and creating a cultural heritage against the superiority of the colonialist culture, various theories of determining the “Indianness” of the Indian literature and culture have been invoked.

Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts, Cultural Histories, and Contemporary Contexts, one of the major global publications exploring the reception history of religious texts, is making plans for a special issue devoted to the Bible and Contemporary Fiction

I will serve as the guest editor.

I hope to feature 4-6 essays (8000 words each, including references) on how biblical patterns, themes, and trajectories surface in works of contemporary fiction, broadly construed, from the non-western as well as western world.

**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.

Call for Proposals for a Special Issue of Peitho, Summer 2025:

Girlhood and Menstruation            

One, two, Freddy’s coming for you…

A Nightmare on Elm Street @ 40
Hosted by The University of Nottingham in association with Fear2000
8-9 November 2024

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

Dr Bruna Foletto Lucas (Kingston University)

Dr Steve Jones (Northumbria University)

Special Guests

Mark Swift and Damian Shannon (screenwriters of Freddy vs Jason)

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.

Call for Journal Articles Now Open

Every year after our symposium, we invite authors to submit papers for consideration for publication. 

We are now inviting submissions for part two of the theme 'connections, interconnections, and disconnections'. To be published in Volume 3 of the Journal of Festival Culture Inquiry and Analysis by the end of 2024, 

Whether ancient or modern, we continue to examine festival culture around the world. Papers should explore how these connections, interconnections, and disconnections may shape and influence cultural practices, traditions, and norms.

Call for Papers: Form and its Discontents, a special issue of Qui Parle

Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. 

— Georges Bataille, Informe (“Formless”), 1929

British Marxism and Cultural Studies Today

Call for Contributions

Journal for the Study of British Cultures 32.2 (2025)

edited by Sebastian Berg & Claus-Ulrich Viol