fan studies and fandom

SCMS Members are invited to join a proposal for a new SCMS Scholarly Interest Group (SIG) on Material Play.  An initial roster of at least 30 members is needed for a new SIG proposal to be considered, so if you are interested please send your name and email to jlee105@ucr.edu.  SCMS members may participate in as many SIGs as they like and there are absolutely no obligations to membership (besides being included on the roster and mailing lists).  The provisional mission statement is included below. 

Contact: Jonathan Rey Lee

When we say "adaptation", we often recall certain types of formulas that turn from literature to film. In recent years, however, adaptation has been taking place across literature-film-TV shows, and the distinct starting point of originality has been blurred. According to Darwin's definition, adaptation is "a process by which an animal or plant species is fitted to its environment.” If we expand the aperture to the field of humanities-based on this definition, adaptation is no longer merely an additive function that supports the original and extends its vitality to a minimum, rather, it has a new value in itself, and at the same time provides a healthy circulation in which the original can survive in a changing socio-cultural environment.

Saving the Day for Medievalists: Accessing Medieval-Themed Comics in the Twenty-first Century (Roundtable)

Sponsored by the Medieval Comics Project, an outreach effort of the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

55th International Congress on Medieval Studies

Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan

7-10 May 2020

Proposals due by 15 September 2019

The Early Proverb Society emphasizes the functions of that mobile, morphic form, the proverb.  EPS showcases our readings at a round table (three to four discussants and one respondent) and a panel of papers (three speakers) at the 55th Congress, May 7-10, 2020.  All methodological approaches are welcomed warmly.

Round table:  Medieval Proverbs:  Exchanges, Clashes, and Transactions

The International Congress of Fantastic Genre, Audiovisuals and New Technologies is an activity of scientific and academic divulgation that is part of Elche International Fantastic Film Festival – FANTAELX, and which has the collaboration of the Miguel Hernández University (Spain).

Its mission is to transmit research studies in all the different thematic lines of the Fantastic Genre, covering all its possible variants and platforms: cinema, television, theater, literature, comics, videogames, virtual reality, etc.

WAYS OF PARTICIPATION:

OPTION 1:

Editors: Erin M. Giannini and Amanda Taylor 

Written as a collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens(1990) had an active and long-term fanbase before the debut of the Amazon Prime miniseries. Its adaptation, brought to fruition by Gaiman as a promise to Pratchett before Pratchett’s 2015 death, however, has not only brought new fans into the fold, but increased the visibility of the original text.

Seeking 250-word proposals of essays for an edited collection aimed at a general-interest audience.

The Ray Browne Conference for Popular Culture Studies

Collections, Curation, and Collectors: An Exploration of Gathering

March 6th and 7th 2020

Pallister Conference Room, Jerome Library

Call for Papers

It might be observed that scholars who investigate popular culture often explore collections, curation, and collectors. In such explorations, popular culture scholars make visible the stories bound to material objects, the common interpretant of communities, and the negotiations of individuals.

This panel of the 2020 NeMLA convention (Boston, March 5-8) welcomes reflections on the process of adapting texts / films / graphic novels into video games, being open to theoretical analyses as well as to case studies (for example, of the narrative ecosystem of franchises). It seeks to bring together the most popular approaches to studying the medium -- narratological and ludological perspectives, as well as reflections on the translation of cinematic adaptation theory to the medium of video games – in order to ensure a rich conversation.

As medievalism has made its way into mainstream medieval studies, and the teaching of medievalist film alongside medieval texts has become commonplace, what new opportunities and challenges do scholars of medievalist film studies face? These shifts have prompted heated debates in recent years on the values and dangers of teaching Game of Thrones in medieval studies classes, the inadequate framing of medievalist films as adaptations in literature classes and as fiction in history classes, and the formal differences between cinematic and written texts. This roundtable seeks short presentations that address some aspect of this development in scholarship and teaching.

Editors - Dr Joshua Gulam (Liverpool Hope University), Dr Sarah Feinstein (University of Leeds), and Dr Fraser Elliott (University of Salford)

We are seeking chapter proposals for an edited collection on the culture, commerce, and ideology of The Fast and the Furious films.

Call for Papers

Special Edition of Celebrity Studies, edited by Renee Middlemost and Sarah Thomas

**Keanu Reeves**

This is a CFP for a panel proposal called “Non-binary Gender Approaches to Cult and Fan Media” to SCMS 2020 (Society for the Cinema and Media Studies conference) in Denver, April 1-5, 2020. 

Contributions are invited for a collection of original essays that explore race and blackness in American comic books, comic strips, and editorial cartoons from the turn of the twentieth century through the industry’s Golden Age in the 1940s and 1950s. The historical perception of black people in comic art has long been tied to caricatured images of indecipherable minstrels, witch doctors, and brutal savages, yet archives reveal a more racially complex narrative and aesthetic landscape, one that was enriched by the debates among comics artists, writers, editors, and readers about how blackness could be expressed on the page.