popular culture

WOMEN'S STUDIES AT MAPACA
The Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association Conference
Boston, MA
November 5-7, 2009

Women's Studies seeks papers, panels and roundtables that investigate and discuss any of the many overlaps between gender and popular culture. Topics include, but are certainly not limited to:
*women and the media
*women and politics
*portrayals of motherhood
*working women
*women and religion
*women writers, written women

Ezra Pound once wrote, "Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market." As if in response, Robert Frost wrote, "Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market." How do market forces or market values function in twentieth-century English/Anglophone, American, or Canadian literature? Emphasis on literary representations of the marketplace and/or the tensions and contradictions that emerge when artists attempt to exploit the marketplace. 250-word abstracts to Steven Canaday at sbcanaday@aacc.edu.

MP Journal, an online international feminist journal (http://www.academinist.org/mp/) is currently seeking book reviews for future issues. We welcome reviews of books that are relevant to feminist or womanist issues from a variety of disciplines. Reviews must be academic in nature and provide an examination of the books' strengths and weaknesses, raising important and relevant questions about the subject under discussion. While no author likes to be overly criticized, reviewers should offer an honest appraisal of the books' argument, readability, research, and overall approach using professional language that is rich and robust without an overabundance of jargon.

MISSED CONNECTIONS

The Graduate Humanities Forum of the University of Pennsylvania invites submissions for its 10th annual conference: "Missed Connections." The one-day interdisciplinary conference will take place on Friday, February 19th, 2010 at the Penn Humanities Forum in conjunction with its 2009-2010 topic: "Connections."

CFP: Unlikely Bedfellows: Unexpected Collaborations Within the Information Environment
ALISE Conference 2010 – January 12-15, 2010; Boston, MA

From the American Library Association's alignment with "Hustler" publisher Larry Flynt, to YALSA reading programs with the World Wrestling Federation, information workers have historically enjoyed – or, perhaps, tolerated – improbable partnerships and alliances. The Historical Perspectives SIG invites papers on this topic, for a panel at ALISE 2010. Papers should explore the unusual collaborations information workers in all venues or environments have built or been part of in order to accomplish their goals.

According to mythographer Lewis Spence a myth explains "our relation to the universe, the environment or a social programme". In the Irish context, this definition of myth helps to understand the interrelationship between the retrieval of the Irish mythological lore and the construction of communal identity that characterised twentieth century Irish history, literature and socio-political reality. Spence's broad definition of myth, though initially referring to gods or supernatural beings, can easily be adapted to explain the construction of contemporary myths.

Fairy Tale Economies

An interdisciplinary, international conference
October 1—3, 2009
University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg MS

Mindful of our own global economies, this colloquium addresses economies in fantastic literature and culture. We shall identify economy both as a theme within literatures and as a way of thinking about the value of fantastic literature itself.

ENTERPRISING CREATIVITY:
INNOVATION AND THE FUTURE OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH

University of Leeds
6-7 November 2009

"Utopian Spaces of British Literature and Culture, 1890-1945"
18 September 2009
University of Oxford

***NOTE: The deadline for submission of abstracts has been extended until 15 July. Registration will open after this date; the registration form will be available for download on the conference website.***

Deadline extended to July 14.

Call for Papers
Early Modern Culture, 1450-1850

The Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies (GEMCS)

"Tracing Footprints"

October 22-25, 2009
Dallas, Texas

GEMCS was formed in 1993 to promote the study of literature, history, art history, and material culture from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century across disciplinary, geographic, and cultural boundaries.

This year's theme, "Tracing Footprints," is intended to be suggestive rather than prescriptive. As always, GEMCS welcomes panels and proposals on all aspects of culture between 1450 and 1850.

Department of Childhood Studies
Rutgers University, Camden

Call for Papers – Exploring Childhood Studies

The graduate students of the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University, Camden invite submissions for papers and poster presentations for their first formal graduate student conference on April 9, 2010. Graduate students from all disciplines who are engaged in research relating to children and childhood are encouraged to submit proposals.

The figure of the silent person endures as one of fascination. The silent character is a site for the projected voices, concerns, investments and anxieties of others. The silent character is thus powerful, in the Foucauldian sense. This session invites papers which offer close readings of texts which privilege or contain a silent figure in literature, film or in popular narratives. The aim of the panel is to present papers which are not wholly theoretical but rather offer a discussion of the powerful effects of those figures through an elaboration of the narrative trajectory through and around them. Send a 200-250 word abstract to Prof Berkeley Kaite at berkeley.kaite@mcgill.ca

In current debates about the War in Iraq, it has become commonplace for politicians and journalists to conjure the specter of the Vietnam War as a means of quantifying the impact of the current war in American culture and throughout the world. Surprisingly, though, few have scrutinized these comparisons to examine the differences between the popular music of the Vietnam era and the music of the current post-9/11 era. While the Vietnam era found countless bands and musicians responding in protest to that war, there has arguably been a significantly smaller amount of contemporary musicians who have taken overt stances, in their music, about the politics of post-9/11 life, in America and elsewhere.

Passions: Promises and Perils

Conference hosted by the Graduate Program in Communication
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Date: October 16-17, 2009
E-mail: passions_conference@googlegroups.com to contact organizers

Deadline to submit abstracts has been extended to Monday, June 29, 2009.

Abstracts need not explicitly engage "passions." The conference theme is used to organize panel discussions of the scholarly investments that inform our work. While this is the organizing theme, we use it to signify broadly the social, cultural, and economic investments that organize the things we study, and how we study them,

Concept