popular culture

Call for Papers (Online Submission Deadline: March 30, 2009)

The "Women in Literature" panel of this year's PAMLA conference invites proposals for papers addressing the session topic from a broad range of scholarly perspectives.

Graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars from the United States and abroad are all welcome to submit a proposal via PAMLA's online submission form at http://www.pamla.org/2009/proposals. Please keep proposals to 500 words or less and include an abstract of your paper (no more than 50 words).

The How They Got Game Project at Stanford University is currently seeking for papers that explore the connections between mapping, cartographic practices, electronic gaming and virtual worlds for an illustrated book that will be published in 2010. Specifically, we are interested in essays that address the notion of representing spaces in video games and virtual worlds through the aid of maps and mapping tools. Video games and virtual worlds establish new topographies and geographies that - while often making references to preexisting models - create a new understanding of the fictional worlds that we explore. Our goal is to show and explain how digital spaces are being mapped by a new generation of cartographers.

Topics might include:

e-Utama, an online journal of the Malay Language and Culture Department of the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, is inviting submissions for its second issue (due to be published at the end of the year). The call for papers can be viewed at

http://mlcd.myplace.nie.edu.sg/instructions_eutama.html.

In today's world when governments are rethinking socio-political, economic, and ecological structures on the global level in the light of the recent financial crisis, it is of the most importance to raise the question of ethics. How does literary and artistic production of the French and Francophone world broach this subject? We invite you to investigate the role of ethics in the works of contemporary French and Francophone writers, thinkers, and artists. Please send a 250-word abstract as a Word document to Vera Klekovkina, Scripps College (Vera.Klekovkina@ScrippsCollege.eddu) by March 30, 2009.

Butch Voices will be holding its first ever multifocal conference and forum for all selfidentified butches, studs, aggressives, and other allied identities. We are a group of openminded, gender-bending social justice activists who share a commitment to critical thinking and a common goal of building a powerful, inclusive community for us all.

The conference will take place August 20 through August 23, 2009 in Oakland, California. We invite you to join us for four days of workshops, panels, and performances intended to reflect the diversity and complexity of butch gender, identity, and action. On the one hand, butch, stud, and aggressive are hyper-visible identities; on the other, our voices too often go unheard or are misunderstood.

We are pleased to announce an open call for submissions to the second issue of Shift, set to be launched 01 October 2009. Shift welcomes academic papers, as well as exhibition and book reviews, dealing with visual and material culture from graduate students in any discipline in the humanities. Papers may address a full range of topics and historical periods. Topics may include, but are not limited to, art and propaganda, patronage, gender and identity, spirituality and art, nationalisms and regionalisms, modernism and modernity, performance art, photography and film, perspectives in theory, methodology, and historiography, collection and representation, art and technology.

According to Terry Eagleton, English as a discipline was installed in England's universities to take up the slack when, in the 19-century, religion stopped providing the ideological glue required for social cohesion. Today there are increasing signs that, with its traditional emphasis on literature, English is going the way of religion as an agent of cohesion and unity. The question, not only of the future of English, but of the humanities as well, looms large.

Call for Submissions
Dash, Cal State Fullerton's annual literary journal, seeks submissions for its 2009 issue. It is our mission to publish works of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, criticism, and art (as well as hybrid texts) that push the boundaries of short, emphatic expression. We aim to communicate more with less. Waste not, want not. Submit.

Boundaries (push at your own risk)
Poems
30 lines or less. Submit up to 5.

Fiction, Nonfiction, Criticism
2000 words or less, double-spaced.
Limit: 1 submission per category.

Art
Digital images, 300 dpi.
Email as TIFF attachment.
Do not send original artwork.

Hybrid
Surprise us.

CFP: Shakespeare

Popular Culture/American Culture Association in the South Conference
Wilmington, NC October 1-3, 2009
Deadline: May 15, 2009

Proposals are invited for papers on teaching Shakespeare to today's undergraduates, on Shakespeare and film, on theatrical productions, and on other topics relevant to Shakespeare in popular and/or American culture. Send abstracts (maximum of 200 words) by May 15, 2009, to Prof. Emily Miller, Department of English and Fine Arts, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia 24450 or e-mail them to millerep@vmi.edu. Maximum reading time for papers: twenty minutes.

Anthology on the Corporate Academy Seeks Short Story and Poetry Submissions

5th Global Conference
Hope: Probing the Boundaries

Tuesday 22nd September - Thursday 24th September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Papers
This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference aims to explore contemporary definitions, meanings and expressions of hope. In particular, it will seek to examine the individual, social, national and international contexts within which hope emerges as well as its counterpart, hopelessness.

Call for Papers [DEADLINE April 24th 2009]:

Transatlantic routes of American roots music

University of Worcester, UK

September 12-13, 2009

We invite proposals for papers for this conference examining the impact and significance of American folk music(s) in Britain. We would especially welcome contributions that examine representations of such music in an interdisciplinary frame.

I am working on a Masters degree at Central Saint Martins in London and for my dissertation I am designing a hypothetical exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and I will also be publishing a corresponding catalog (200+ pages) to go along with the exhibition. Being a fan of Polynesian Pop and all things tiki for nearly half my life and given total free reign to chose whatever topic I want, I decided this would be a perfect opportunity to work on a major project I really cared about. My project will focus on the Polynesian Pop movement of the mid-20th century rather than today.

Antebellum popular print culture was notoriously fluid, as texts regularly migrated from one genre to another. For example, popular city-mysteries of the 1840s and 1850s drew upon sensational crime-reporting and were often first serialized in weekly story papers and then printed in a series of pamphlets before being compiled and sold as complete novels. This session invites papers that explore any aspect of genre migration during the rich emergence of the penny press, the black press, and the labor press in the pre-Civil War period. How does the migration of texts from one genre to the next affect their meaning and their reception? What common interests did these print sources share on questions of racial, ethnic, or class identity?