popular culture

CFP: Documenting LGBTQ Identity in Non Western Worlds (08/31/09; collection)Edited by Christopher Pullen Proposals are invited for essays forming part of a new reader focusing on LGBT and queer identity in the developing and non western world, apparent within varying documentary forms, such as film, television and new media.  A central concern is to explore the social agency of media producers and performers, who offer new narratives of potential and progression, challenging Western orientated and traditional worlds.  At the same time some chapters may explore the significance of Western constructions of LGBT and queer identity, which have offered archetypes of political engagement for world wide audiences.  As a consequence this reader intends to foregro

Although some scholarly work has investigated the ways in which various types of modernist ideas and aesthetic tendencies have found articulation and received exposure in the quotidian sphere via advertising, film, popular psychology, popular music, new (household and workplace) technologies, as well as in profound developments in travel and communication, this panel seeks to push such analysis further. Papers are sought that critically explore articulations of modernism as they occur and are experienced in the everyday lifeworld.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Sirens
Vail, CO
October 1-4, 2009
A conference on women in fantasy literature presented by Narrate
Conferences, Inc.

Sirens, a conference focused on literary contributions by women to the fantasy genre and on fantasy works with prominent female characters, will take place October 1-4, 2009, in Vail, CO. The conference seeks papers, panels, interactive workshops, roundtable discussions, and other presentations suitable for an audience of academics, professionals, educators, librarians, authors, and fantasy readers.

ManuScript is the peer-reviewed journal in English and American Studies from the University of Manchester. Since 1996, it has encouraged rigorous intellectual discussion and progressive research which reflects critical debates across a variety of disciplines. It aims especially to promote the work of postgraduates and early career academics, and to provide a forum for intellectual and cultural concerns.

ManuScript?s next journal edition, following on from the conference held on 20th February 2009, will be on the topic of ?Urges?. We hope that the theme will encourage and allow room for a wide variety of responses from different discourses and fields.

PopMatters Call for Papers: Pixelated Brains and the New Media
Pitch Deadline: 30 April 2009.
Contact: Karen Zarker / zarker@popmatters.com

CFP: El Paso in the Comics II: "The Southwest in the Comics"

Graduate students in all fields of study are invited to submit 200-word abstracts to the second-annual "El Paso in the Comics" conference and event, to be held on the campus of the University of Texas at El Paso, February 23, 2010.

Papers on all aspects of comics scholarship, theory, and pedagogy will be given attention, but those that deal with issues related to artists, creators, characters and/or themes associated with the American Southwest and/or Hispanic/Chicano culture in comics will be given top priority.

Call for Papers

Charlie in the Heartland
An International Charlie Chaplin Conference
October 28, 29, and 30, 2010
Ohio University Zanesville, Zanesville, OH USA
Conference Website: http://www.zanesville.ohiou.edu/Chaplinconferencesite/ccconfwebsite.html

Modernist Languages of Feeling

The modernists' innovations in art, literature, and design were not only aesthetic reactions to traditional forms—they were also critical responses to the idea of taste. Yet if the modernists were unable to endorse their predecessors' conceptions of "tastefulness," devising new models of taste proved equally difficult. This panel will explore the problems associated with articulating taste in the modern period. Rather than trying to capture a concrete "version" of modernist taste, however, the panel will focus on conceptualizing the process(es) of modernist tastes; in other words, how and why did various modernists arrive at their critical judgements? Questions to be addressed will include: What constitutes good/bad taste among the modernists?

Neo-Victorian Studies invites papers and/or abstracts for a 2009 special issue on neo-Victorianism's engagement with science and new/old technologies, especially as articulated through the genre of Steampunk. As a lifestyle, aesthetic and literary movement, Steampunk can be both the act of modding your laptop to look like and function as a Victorian artefact and an act of (re-)imagining a London in which Charles Babbage's analytical engine was realised. Steampunk includes applications of nineteenth-century aesthetics to contemporary objects; speculative extensions of technologies that actually existed; and the anachronistic importation of contemporary science into fictionalised pasts and projected futures.

Cultures of Recession
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference Hosted by The Program in Literature, Duke University
November 20 & 21, 2009

Keynote Speaker: Stanley Aronowitz (CUNY), author of How Class Works and Just Around The Corner: The Paradox of a Jobless Recovery

Collections and collecting occupy an important place in the development of modern culture, both at the personal and communal level. "Who collects?", "what does s/he collect?", "why does s/he do it?", and "what meanings are assigned to the act of collecting?" are questions which have significant implications for the construction of individual and communal identities, and in which the fields of aesthetics, ethics, politics, and erotics inter-cross. The next number of the journal "La Habana elegante" will include a special dossier with reflections on the topic of collecting, and it invites authors from the fields of literature, history, cultural studies, and other areas to send essays for their review, before the deadline of June 30, 2009.

For the College English Association's session at SAMLA, we are seeking papers exploring the power dynamic that exists between those in authority and those who are subjected to their rule, as represented in contemporary works of literature and/or film. By May 21, 2009, please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to Carol Osborne, Coastal Carolina University, at osborne@coastal.edu. All presenters must be members of both CEA and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association at the time of the conference, which will be held November 6-8 in Atlanta, Georgia.

European Journal of English Studies, Vol. 15
Matter and Material Culture
Deadline for proposals: 13 November 2009

Guest Editors: Maurizio Calbi & Marilena Parlati.

Cultural materialism has been adding much to our knowledge and understanding of the ways in which culture is informed by and conformed to and with matter, and so have the numerous analyses and histories of material culture from fields as varied as sociology, anthropology, museum studies, consumer studies, and so forth.