popular culture

We seek to delve further into the mind of Rowling and examine all aspects of the Harry Potter series that lend themselves to a lavender lens. With Dumbledore's ejection from the closet, queer scholars have taken up Rowling's decision at all three major Harry Potter Conferences (Accio, Portus, and Terminus) over the summer of 2008. As such, we seek papers for an interdisciplinary reader on queer and feminist issues in Harry Potter. We welcome critical and passionate papers catering to both students and scholars in the fields of sexual/gender diversity studies, cultural studies, children's literature, and literary analysis. A non-exclusive list of topics are

Deadline for full consideration: June 15, 2009
http://repositories.cdlib.org/acgcc/jtas/cfp.html

CALL FOR PAPERS
SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY, AND LEGEND AREA
2009 Conference of The Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA)
Queensborough Community College (Bayside, Queens, New York City) , Friday October 23 and Saturday October 24, 2009
Proposals by 1 June 2009

Proposals are invited from scholars of all levels for papers to be presented in the Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend Area. Presentations will be limited to 15-20 minutes in length and may address any aspect of science fiction, fantasy, and/or legends in popular culture.

Adoption has often, though not always, involved secrecy. How has secrecy or openness affected the history, experience, and representations of adoption? How have literature and film portrayed the impact of secrecy and disclosure on adoptees, birthparents, adoptive parents? What is the impact of recent revelations of secret histories in memoir, books such as _The Girls Who Went Away_, documentaries such as _First Person Plural_ (the creators of both will be keynote speakers)? How and why did adoption secrecy, and the practices it hides, develop differently in different cultures, countries, and even different states? Where are alternatives to secrecy practiced and how do they work?

For decades, scholars have studied popular romance, whether in romance novels, films, comics, or other media. They have studied its sexual politics and aesthetic structures, its audiences, its authors, and the industry that produces and distributes it world-wide. For the most part, however, they have done so in isolation, divided by boundaries of nation, genre, and academic discipline.

This is a Call for Papers for [Inter]sections, the online [under]graduate journal of American Studies at the University of Bucharest, Romania, available on the home page of www.american-studies.ro.

Since [Inter]sections is a monthly publication, this CFP is open throughout the academic year. Please see www.american-studies.ro for more details.

Proposals are invited that explore connections between Victorian and Caribbean novels that have not heretofore been put in conversation with each other. Proposals should be 300 words and submitted by 5/15/09 to Marc Muneal, Emory University (mmuneal@emory.edu).

This SAMLA special session invites papers on any aspect of southerners as represented in contemporary film. We are especially interested in essays that address the transnational turn in southern film, as well as issues of authenticity, mythology and folklore in southern film. Other topics might include (but are not limited to) the southern documentary impulse, expressions of race, class and sexuality in contemporary southern film, adaptation and re-imaginings of southern literature, and new southern studies and southern cinema. We welcome submissions considering independent or popular films. By June 1, 2009, please send 250-word abstracts, institutional affiliations, and contact information via email to Dr.

2nd Global Conference
Heavy Fundametalisms: Music, Metal and Politics

Tuesday 10th November - Thursday 12th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Call for Papers
What makes metal powerful? Is it the power of amplification, the brutality of the music, the violence of its discourse? Is power essential to the core of metal? Is metal a mechanism for the dissemination of power?

This is a critical and creative new online journal. It is created to find, edit and publish superior works of fiction, non-fiction, art, multi-media and the like. The Pennsylvania Literary Journal is created to make a positive contribution to literary criticism and to the arts around the world. There are no geographic boundaries or genre boundaries in the first, summer issue – only the restraints of a website template.

Southworth was one of the most popular novelists of the 19th-century, and her career was extraordinarily long -- she actively produced fiction for nearly forty years. However, her works and career have received relatively little attention from late 20th and early 21st century scholars, considerably less than some other 19th-century women novelists, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Fanny Fern. Furthermore, the majority of published scholarly work has focused on a single novel, The Hidden Hand. This edited collection will both remedy this deficiency and attract further attention to Southworth and her place in literary history.

Panel: "NOW SEE THIS!: the Visual Language of Modernist Aesthetics"
Conference: MSA 11, Montreal, Canada, Nov 5-8 2009


Recreating Oz

Annual Convention of the International Wizard of Oz Club

Manhattan, Kansas – October 2-4, 2009

Call for Papers
We invite submissions for presentations of 15 minutes in length on "Recreating Oz." Possible topics include:

* Adapting Oz for stage and screen

* Marketing and commemorating the Oz books

* Assembling the histories of Oz creators

* Teaching Oz

* Archiving Oz

* Re-reading the Oz books and earlier critical interpretations

* Re-imagining the world of Oz for contemporary audiences (Maguire's Wicked, Stauffacher's Harry Sue, the mini-series Tin Man, comics and graphic novels)

From the fin de siècle to the Second World War, the construction of alternative social and private spaces exerted a peculiar fascination for many British writers. The cataclysmic historical events of the period stimulated Utopian thinking and feeling even as they seemed to make them problematic or impossible. At the same time radical demands for new spaces, whether political, religious or aesthetic, also generated new ways of reading and writing the familiar urban and domestic spaces of everyday life.