popular culture

DEADLINE EXTENDED THROUGH DECEMBER 15!

              “To be neurodivergent is to reclaim the pathologizing aspects of a long-term cognitive diagnosis and to reclaim one’s neuro-status as a possible position from which to claim resources, representation and recognition” (Stenning and Bertisldottir Rosqvist 1535).

Nancy Drew and Sookie Stackhouse. The Executioner and Sweet Valley High. Warhammer or Star Wars tie-in novels. Franchise series like these occupy a unique position, inspiring voracious (often young) readers while often complicating traditional scholarly approaches to literature.

We seek 15-minute papers for a prospective panel on franchise fiction, mass market books, and pulp at the American Literature Association conference in Boston, May 21-24, 2025.

The study and analysis of creative fan production (e.g., fanfiction, fanart, cosplay, etc.) is a cornerstone of fandom studies. These practices enable fans to assert a level of authorship over their favorite media – to reimagine, recontextualize, and reconceptualize their canons to better reflect their desires, wants, interests, and demands. They provide voice to individuals who cannot necessarily shape source texts directly (Vinney & Dill-Shackleford, 2018), allowing fans to carve out space for themselves within the pop-culture landscape that celebrates/embraces their identities. This is particularly poignant for marginalized fans.

Eco-environmental criticism has now become a staple presence in the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary landscape, calling for ongoing reflections on the human impact on the environment. A distinct aspect of these conversations has been the growing focus on the concern of ecological destruction for the planet, with all the inevitable consequences that this entails.  Within changing contexts that feel increasingly more precarious, conceptualisations of the ‘eco-futures’ have become central to our cultural discourses,  from film to television series, from literature to comics, from animation and video games to digital narratives, from architecture to design, from socio-ecology to animal studies. 

This collection seeks essays on paleontologists in film, literature, and contemporary media. The Jurassic Park franchise solidified the presence of paleontology in the pop cultural imagination, but there have been other media and portrayals that have captured the public's imagination. Topics can include, but are not limited to:

-Studies of specific films

-Studies of specific novels

-Studies of fictional and/or real-life paleontologists in modern media

Chapters will be due in September 2025. Chapters should be approximately 5,000 to 7,000 words, with Chicago-style endnotes and a bibliography page.

 CFP: 59th Annual Comparative World Literature Conference 

Ecocriticism and Popular Culture: Cool Trends in a Warming ClimateVenue: California State University, Long Beach. Hybrid Dates: 23-25 April 2025; two days of in-person and one day of Zoom panelsKeynote Speaker: Kaniehtiio Horn.

OGOM Conference 2025: CFPSea changes: The fairytale Gothic of mermaids, selkies, and enchanted hybrids of ocean and river

Conference page: https://www.opengravesopenminds.com/sea-changes-2025/

Venue: The British Library, London, UK (and online) Date: 5–6 September 2025

Call for Papers: International Conference "Sounds of a Lifetime: Exploring Life Writing in Audio Media" (29–30 January 2026, Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

This conference aims to expand the boundaries of life writing studies by focusing on the often overlooked domain of audio life narratives. As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson highlight in the preface of Reading Autobiography, “[l]ife narrative studies has become an expansive, transnational, multimedia field” (xi), going far beyond the written word. In the latest edition of this seminal work, they touch upon the concept of mediated voice and the aural qualities of social media messages, indicating the varied manifestations of auto/biographical acts (129).

Representing Bridgerton:

Intersectional Perspectives on the Popular Phenomenon

Edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Lisa J Hackett, Jo Coghlan and Huw Nolan

The Fantastical Constellations After Magical Realism research  group (formerly known as Post-Magical Realist Worlds) of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association (CCLA) invites submissions to our sessions in the upcoming CCLA 2025 Conference taking place June 7-9, 2025 at Trent University, Peterborough/Nogojiwanong, Ontario and online.  

The conference, entitled “Comparative Literature Off-Kilter,” considers “our often off-kilter positionality in (and out of) academia,” and the precarity of the balancing act of comparison. We are asked to conceive the conference “as a playground on which marginal practices, thoughts, works and formats can form revolutionary friendships.”

An Archaeology of the Gaze
Studying the evolutions of the Iconography of Violence and Brutality

Anyone familiar with the war iconography of ancient sovereigns—from the Assyrian palaces and temples of Ramses II to Trajan’s Column—would not be surprised by these powers' claims to legitimate violence. It was entirely endorsed by the sovereign, reducing the victims of the conquering arm to mere foils for the political power asserting itself through force. In stark contrast, the photographs that journalists share from contemporary conflicts are often characterized by a specific focus on the victims, whose suffering has become central to the interpretation of violence.

Deadline: December 20, 2024

Contact: Cynthia Patterson (cpatterson@usf.edu) or Jim Berkey (jhb5255@psu.edu)

The World of Bob Dylan returns to Tulsa from July 24-27, 2025 and, in cooperation with the Bob Dylan Center, will celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival.  We now seek proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, and creative sessions that will run across the event’s four days.

https://ideasworthsaving.org/