fan studies and fandom

The call for papers for the next general issue of the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture (ISSN 20455852 , ONLINE ISSN 20455860) is now open. 

The deadline for submissions of full articles (5-6k words) is August 31 2024. The Journal is indexed in SCOPUS (among others), and its remit is broad and international. Please submit your articles for consideration (together with a short bio and institutional affiliation) to both Professor Lorna Piatti-Farnell (lorna.piatti-farnell@aut.ac.nz) and Dr Ashleigh Prosser (ashleigh.prosser@murdoch.edu.au).

Critical Worldbuilding

Call for Proposals

Stanford University TDR Consortium Issue

"Critical Worldbuilding" edited by Matthew Smith

Proposal Submission Deadline: 15 September 2024

Submission Email: mwsmith1@stanford.edu

After the encouraging success of last year’s panel, we want to continue our discussion on “bad art.” Scholarship on the politics of literature has, in recent decades, increasingly come to focus on whether texts from the past conform to the values of the present. Some texts are praised for modeling, even anticipating, our own progressive values, while others are subject to critique for the way they ignore, license, or justify forms of inequity, injustice, and subordination. This disciplinary impulse has come to seem not only justified, but natural. Yet it has also resulted in a growing corpus of books being dismissed or maligned within the academy (books that are often, and importantly, still being read and revered outside the academy).

UPDATED Call for Papers: Preternatural in Popular Culture

Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association 

2024 Annual Conference of the Northeast Popular Culture Association 

Nichols College (Dudley, MA) and Zoom, 3-5 October 2024

Proposals due by 1 July 2024

The Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) invites submissions under the general theme of the Preternatural in Popular Culture.

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.

**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.

The Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) Sports Area invites submissions for NEPCA’s annual conference to be held online October 3 – 5, 2024, and in person at Nichols College, MA. Virtual sessions will take place on Thursday evening and Friday morning via Zoom. In-person sessions will take place on Friday evening and Saturday morning with broadcast via Zoom.

From G. I. Joe workout routines and Sailor Moon wedding gowns to Bratz doll make-unders and Ferby modding, toyetic, merchandise-driven television from past decades has proved remarkably resilient. Toyetic television clearly holds a far greater and more enduring cultural significance than definitions such as “glorified half-hour commercials” (Hilton-Morrow & McMahan 2003, p. 78) might suggest. It is meaningful to individual viewers, it becomes “social lubricants facilitating communication between one child and another” (Steinberg 2012, p. 90), and it can connect generations through shared viewing and playing pleasures.

The Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will host its 2024 annual conference this Fall as a hybrid conference from Thursday, October 3 – Saturday, October 5. Virtual sessions will take place on Thursday evening and Friday morning via Zoom, and in-person sessions will take place on Friday evening and Saturday morning at Nichols College, Dudley, Massachusetts.

Medieval Comics Team-Up: The Values of Comics for Medieval Studies

Session proposed for The Medieval Academy at 100: The 2025 Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America (Harvard University, Cambridge MA, from 20-22 March 2025)

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

Organized by Michael A. Torregrossa

Paper Proposals due 1 June 2024

Dear Scholars and Creatives,

We are excited to announce the call for papers for The Liminal Age; the 26th Annual Graduate Conference hosted by San Francisco State University’s CINE Colloquium. Submit your work and join us on October 25th & 26th for a multidisciplinary exploration of the unique cultures, genres, and relationships fostered by the ever-shifting terrain of the online world. See the information below for a description of this year’s theme and instructions to submit your proposal.

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2025 will be a milestone year celebrating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Through this Call for Papers, the JASNA Maryland Region invites submission of proposals for breakout sessions at the 2025 Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) and applications for the New Voices Breakout Speaker Grant.

The AGM theme: Austen at 250: Austen's Life, Novels, Juvenelia, & Surviving Letters

Date: Oct. 10-12, 2025

Location: Baltimore Inner Harbor, Baltimore MD

LFA 2024: RECOGNITION AND EMPATHY

LITERATURE / FILM ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE 

YORK COLLEGE OF PENNSYLVANIA, YORK, PA

SEPTEMBER 26-28, 2024 

Film screening and Conversation: Dina Amer, director of You Resemble Me (2021)

Keynote: Elsie Walker, Salisbury University, author of Life 24x A Second: Cinema, Selfhood, and Society (Oxford UP, 2023)

In answer to the evolutionary portrayals of superheroes in our cultures, histories, and narratives, the editors welcome chapter proposals for selection and inclusion into The Routledge Companion to Superhero Studies, for which a contract has already been signed.

The volume will be a part of the prestigious Routledge Media and Cultural Studies Companions series: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Media-and-Cultural-Studies-Companions/book-series/RMCSC.