fan studies and fandom

In the spirit of deepening and broadening its roots, TitanCon 2020 is adding a formal academic track to its programming. The convention began as a collaboration between the Brotherhood Without Banners, who wanted to put on a fan convention for Game of Thrones, the Belfast SF/F society The Other Ones, who wanted to put on an SF/F convention, and Arkham Gaming Centre, who wanted to put on a gaming convention. In keeping with that spirit, our theme “On the Shoulders of Giants” hopes to encourage that spirit of collaboration.

Calling all Gunters! The past few years have seen a growing number of scholarly interventions on Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011), exploring topics that range from his portrayal of dys/utopias (see Nordstrom, Ue) to his use of Pac-Man as a metaphor (Ue and Munday), and from Cline’s treatment of masculinity (Condis) to his invocation of Arthurian romance (Aronstein and Thompson). In 2018, the novel was adapted into a critically and commercially successful hit, earning an Academy Award nomination.

Dear Colleagues, 

We are extending the deadline for our Call for Papers for the Comics in Community Conference until January 10th, 2020. Thank you to everyone who has submitted an abstract so far, and we look forward to reading them all. We are also very pleased to announce that Dr. André Carrington will be our first keynote speaker. Do not hesitate to get in touch with any questions, and please see below for our full CFP.

17th Annual UF GCO Conference: "Comics In Community"

Updated Deadline for Submissions: 1/10/2020

Hosted by: Graduate Comics Organization at the University of Florida

The Comics and Popular Arts Conference (CPAC) invites submissions for our 13th Annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, September 4-7, 2020.

CPAC is an annual academic conference for the studies of comics and the popular arts, including science/speculative fiction and fantasy literature, film, and other media, comic books, manga, graphic novels, anime, gaming, etc., presented to a mixed audience of scholars and fans. The mission of CPAC is to promote scholarship on popular culture and to encourage the engagement between scholars and fans in order to deepen our understanding of comics and other popular arts. CPAC presentations are peer reviewed, based in scholarly research.

Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Conference on Baseball in Literature and Culture

April 3, 2020

On the campus of Ottawa University, Ottawa, Kansas

Keynote Performance: Kevin Kane, singer/songwriter and author of "Breaking the Line with the Mudville Nine"

Keynote Address:  Emily Rutter, Assistant Professor of English at Ball State University and author of Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line

We are delighted to announce that the Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya at the Universitat de València and the Institut Interuniversitari de Llengües Modernes Aplicades de la Comunitat Valenciana (IULMA) will be hosting, on the 3th-6th November 2020 in Valencia, Spain, the International Conference on Discourses of Fictional (Digital) TV Series. The conference will address series originally produced in English.

Special Panel CFP : “Pop Culture Magic: Chaos, Memes, and Social Media”

In the Esotericism & Occultism Area of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association

Annual Conference, Albuquerque, February 19-22, 2020

An interdisciplinary workshop on Fan Fiction

14 – 15 February 2020

                                                              English Department, University of Zurich

Call for Papers

Apocalypse, Dystopia, and Disaster

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

41st Annual Conference, February 19-22, 2020

Hyatt Regency Hotel & Conference Center

Albuquerque, New Mexico

http://www.southwestpca.org

Proposal submission deadline: EXTENDED to November 20th

Penumbra is an annual journal edited by weird fiction scholar S. T. Joshi and published through Hippocampus Press. About 75% of its content will consist of articles (scholarly or otherwise) on all aspects of weird fiction; the other 25% will be original fiction. The journal will in all likelihood be indexed in the MLA [Modern Language Association] Bibliography and will consist of up to 100,000 words.

Deadline for the first issue of the journal is May 31, 2020. Submissions can be sent to S. T. Joshi at stjoshi45@hotmail.com

Call for Papers:
Annual Conference of the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics
Western University
June 3–4, 2020

La version française suit

The Canadian Society for the Study of Comics / Société canadienne pour l’étude de la bands dessinée invites proposals for papers on any and all aspects of comics, broadly conceived (including cartoons, comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, manga, webcomics, picture books, and visual poetry) to be presented at our 2020 annual conference, which will be held at Western University (London, Ontario) on June 3–4 as part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

2020 Call for Papers / Proposals

The Comics and Popular Arts Conference (CPAC) invites submissions for our 13th Annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, September 4-7, 2020.

CPAC is an annual academic conference for the studies of comics and the popular arts, including science/speculative fiction and fantasy literature, film, and other media, comic books, manga, graphic novels, anime, gaming, etc., presented to a mixed audience of scholars and fans. The mission of CPAC is to promote scholarship on popular culture and to encourage the engagement between scholars and fans in order to deepen our understanding of comics and other popular arts. CPAC presentations are peer reviewed, based in scholarly research.

The Washington Irving Society invites proposals for a panel connecting Washington Irving and his contemporaries to the theater. As a native New Yorker, Irving was a lifelong theater goer and even aspired to become a playwright while living abroad. His relationship with playwright John Howard Payne and Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, in fact, developed during this time in England when he attempted to write for the theater. As we continue to celebrate the 200th anniversary of The Sketch Book (1819-1820), stage performances of stories from the collection, such as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” are welcomed, but we open the panel to stage productions of Irving and his other writing, too.

As the popularity of mythical creatures in films and literature grows, there is one creature that remains prominent: the dragon. Dragons have become most visible recently in the cinematic versions of The Hobbit and in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones Series). However, there are other films, such as Dragonslayer (1981), Reign of Fire (2002), Dragonheart (1996), and the How to Train Your Dragon series (2010-2019), and numerous adult and children’s literature series that feature dragons.