popular culture

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY MEDIEVALISMS:
CONTEMPORARY RE-CREATIONS OF THE MEDIEVAL

CALL FOR PAPERS
PROPOSALS DUE BY 12/31/09

Sponsored by THE SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF POPULAR CULTURE AND THE MIDDLE AGES
For "Time, Temporality, History": 31st Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum, Plymouth State University (Plymouth, NH), 16-17 April 2010

NEMLA, Montreal, Quebec April 7-11 2010

Lost Pasts/Broken Futures: Forgetting as Narrative Crisis in Film
Numerous films--from Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to Manchurian Candidate and Spellbound--are preoccupied with acts of forgetting. More than just a plot element, forgetting serves as a narrative device that keeps afloat multiple narrative possibilities, forcing the viewer to engage manifold variables by denying the possibility of a singular narrative. This panel invites papers that investigate how the act of forgetting--rather than the attempt to remember--is used as a narrative device in film. Send abstracts to Thomas Knauer at thomas.knauer@sunyit.edu.

The group Colporteurs is pleased to announce their annual conference, which will be held on Wednesday, 23rd September 2009 at the Department of Italian Studies at Bologna University (via Zamboni, 32 – Bologna, Italy).
The chosen subject has been inspired by the theme (Declensions of Space) of this year PhD seminar in "Modern, Comparative and Postcolonial Literatures".

Pockets of Change: Cultural Adaptations and Transitions
13th Annual Work-in-Progress Conference
The University of Queensland, St. Lucia campus
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
September 4-6, 2009
http://www.emsah.uq.edu.au/wip2009

Rice Graduate Symposium
October 2-3, 2009
Rice University, Houston, TX

Call For Papers
Submission Deadline: July 1, 2009

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Sharon Marcus; Professor of Literature, Columbia University

As the citizen of the nation becomes the consumer of the multinational corporation, our roles as inhabitants of space become increasingly complicated. Our literature, our faith, our bodies all speak to the different ways that we find to occupy the shifting territories of the postmodern landscape. Looking both to the past and future can help us to discover the real and imagined ways our cultures can develop in more richly and defined ways.

"LITERATURE AND FILM" 2nd International Graduate Conference (Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey, November 2009)

Long marginalized as either not "literary" or conservatively pandering to bourgeois or other established interests, the genre of detective fiction has continued to defy doomsayers through its continued evolution, being produced by writers from a variety of backgrounds and likewise being set in a variety of milieux and so problematizing different sets of rules, conventions, and moral and other judgments. But what has been the cost or other outcome of this evolution? Has the genre truly become more inclusive, or has this rather happened through the hegemonization and repackaging of previously excluded authors, like various new voices from Asia, Latin America, and Africa?

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.