popular culture

The Institute for Comics Studies is soliciting proposals for presentations, book talks, slide talks, roundtables, professional focus discussion panels, workshops and other panels centered around comics or comics related areas of study for Wizard World University—Philadelphia and Wizard World University—Chicago, the academic tracks of Wizard World Comic Book Conventions.

Panels that include participation by comics industry professionals are especially encouraged. ICS will provide assistance with recruiting professionals for participation in WWU panels.

The Harry Potter area of the Midwest Popular Culture and Midwest American Culture Association is extending its deadline for its upcoming conference. The MPCA/MACA conference will be held Friday-Sunday, October 30-November 1, 2009 at the Book Cadillac Westin in Detroit Michigan.

Please send proposals on any aspect of Harry Potter Studies to the area chair via email or mail. Emailed proposals should be sent to Kathleen Turner, Department of English, Northern Illinois University at turner8kathleen@gmail.com. Mailed proposals should be sent to Kathleen Turner, Department of English, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115.

The Center of Interdisciplinary Research in Languages, Arts and Humanities (CRILLASH) of the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, welcomes proposals for papers for the 3rd Symposium of the Young Caribbean Researchers to be held October 15-16, 2009 on the campus of Schoelcher in Martinique, French West Indies. The conference is a biennual event for the fostering of innovative research among academics, artists and writers who either belong to the Caribbean Diaspora or have dedicated an important part of their studies to the "Sixth Continent".

In her study of voice, Adrianna Cavarero writes that "there is a realm of speech in which the sovereignty of language yields to that of the voice. I am talking, of course, about poetry." Taking Cavarero's philosophical cue as its jumping-off point, as well as Charles Bernstein's related call for "close listening," this panel welcomes papers that attend, in material ways, to the vocal performance of modern and postmodern poetries. That is, how do poets "voice" or perform their poetry? How does vocal performances inflect andor complicate textual readings of poems? Voice, then, for the purposes of this panel, is disarticulated from homogenizing metaphors of disembodied selfhood (i.e. finding your voice) and community (i.e. vox populi).

The Story of the Story: Ethics, Therapy, and Life Writing

28th-­30th September 2009.

Flinders University, Adelaide. South Australia.

Convenors: Dr Kylie Cardell and Dr Kate Douglas

Keynote Speaker: Dr Margaretta Jolly, University of Sussex UK.

UPDATED
New submission deadline for abstracts: 20 May 2009

The Rhetorics of Place: Public, Private, Secular and/or Sacred.

"Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities" calls for papers for the second issue on the following areas: English Literature, Literature written in other languages, Postcolonial Literature, Critical theories, Aesthetic Studies, Literature and environment, Visual arts, Photography, Digital arts, Philosophy and Art, History of Art. Articles should focus on interdisciplinary connections of a specific topic.
Contact info:
Journal address: www.rupkatha.com
Contact: info@rupkatha.com
Last date of Submission: July, 2009.

CALL FOR PAPERS REOPENED

2009 Postgraduate Conference: History, Mystery & Myth

Saturday 14th November 2009 at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

In recent years trends in biography have shifted from the desire to present a definitive life to a more self reflexive approach. Metabiographies such as Lucasta Miller's The Bronte Myth, Sarah Churchwell's The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe and Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder provide alternative renderings of both the biographical subject and his or her entry into collective cultural consciousness.

This one day postgraduate conference intends to respond to these recent innovations in life writing by offering the opportunity to explore such questions as:

Speaking of New York

EXTENDED DEADLINE

The Indian Popular Culture area of the Midwest Popular Culture and Midwest American Culture Association is now accepting proposals for its upcoming conference. The MPCA/MACA conference will be held Friday-Sunday, October 30-November 1, 2009 at the Westin Book Cadillac in Detroit, Michigan.

Keynote speakers

Ruth Amossy (Tel Aviv University)
Jean-Louis Dufays (UCL)
Charles Ramírez-Berg (Texas Austin)
Maarten van Delden (USC, California)
David Oubiña (UBA, Buenos Aires)
Joep Leerssen (Amsterdam University)

General Presentation

Over the past ten years, the concept of the 'stereotype' has become a subject of intense debate in literary studies, especially in Europe. Although in daily usage the term 'stereotype' often has a negative connotation, the theoreticians of stereotyping (Amossy, Dufays, Lippman) emphasize its indispensable and constructive role in processes of social communication, including art.

We are calling for academic papers, submissions of short stories and poems, and visual art that contemplate the intersection of the regional and the popular in regional Australia but also in terms of regional/global intersections more generally.

The small town, the local, and regionalism have long been considered precious territory to be guarded by grassroots music and local art movements, enshrined in high letters, and embalmed in obscurity. This issue of LiNQ (Literature in North Queensland) seeks to challenge and update this notion of the regional. As the Internet connects us in a global village of downloadable ephemera, the local community is redefined. How does the region connect with the popular?

Shechem Ministries' Matter '09: A Creative Theology Event is now accepting submissions of papers and artwork for the conference September 17-19, 2009, at the Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas.

Selected papers and artwork will be presented at the conference and will be published in the anthology of the conference, Matter, published by Shechem Press.

All abstracts and digital image samples are due by noon CST on June 15, 2009, with completed artwork and papers due by August 31, 2009 at noon CST.

NEW DEADLINE: June 20

This call is for the Irish literature panel affiliated with the annual South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference to be held November 6-8, 2009 in Atlanta, Georgia.

This session seeks to explore the ways in which death, dying, or the denial of death show up in modern to contemporary Irish literature. Papers may include studies of the practices of and attitudes toward death and/or memorialization, the link that exists between living and dying, the contradictions and paradoxes that exist in attitudes towards death, the ways in which the finality of death is denied, avoided, or confronted in life, etc.