popular culture

Dragons in Gaming and Online Culture

I have several chapters for this collection, but I am looking for four or five more. Please send abstracts or inquiries by May 1, 2025. Chapters will be due by September 15, 2025.

All topics about dragons will be considered.

Please send abstracts and a brief bio to Rachel Carazo at rachel.carazo@snhu.edu

This collection seeks essays on dinosaurs in film, literature, and the arts. The Jurassic Park franchise solidified the presence of dinosaurs in the pop cultural imagination, but there have been other media and dinosaur portrayals that have captured the public's imagination. Topics can include, but are not limited to:

-Studies of specific films

-Studies of specific novels

-Studies of special effects renderings of dinosaurs

-Artwork with dinosaurs

Chapters will be due in September 2025. Chapters should be approximately 5,000 to 7,000 words, with Chicago-style endnotes and a bibliography page.

The 17th Annual Conference of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association

Heights, Depths, and Extremes

The Birmingham & Midland Institute, Birmingham UK

14th-16th July 2025

The Victorian Popular Fiction Association (VPFA) is delighted to announce its 17th annual conference for 2025, inviting scholars, researchers, and enthusiasts of Victorian literature to explore this year’s theme, Heights, Depths, and Extremes. This theme encourages an examination of the limits, boundaries, and expanses of Victorian popular fiction, encompassing everything from physical and metaphorical heights to the extremities of human emotion, imagination, and social structures.

The Popular Arts Conference (PAC) invites submissions for our 18th Annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, August 28 – September 1, 2025.

PAC is an annual academic conference for the studies of comics and the popular arts, including science/speculative fiction and fantasy literature, film, and other media; comic books; manga; graphic novels; anime; gaming; etc., presented to a mixed audience of scholars and fans. The mission of PAC is to promote scholarship on popular culture and to encourage the engagement between scholars and fans in order to deepen our understanding of the popular arts. PAC presentations are peer reviewed, based on scholarly research.

International Society for Philosophy in Film (ISPiF) Fourth Annual Symposium

Call for Abstracts August 28-30, 2025 London, England

https://www.philosophyliterature.com/ispif

Theme: Comedy: Darkness and Light

Abstract Deadline April 15, 2025

Completed papers due July 30, 2025 

YOUNG RESEARCHERS CONFERENCE

CINEMA STUDIES

SCHOOL OF ARTS AND AESTHETICS

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY

The twentieth anniversary of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) was an important moment in film history, for it not only marked a great film and work of art, but it also reminded audiences how peplum and historical epics still mattered. The edited collection “A Hero Will Endure”: Essays at the Twentieth Anniversary of ‘Gladiator’ (2023) provided insights on the film two decades after its release.

Yet now there is a sequel. This CFP therefore serves to build on the work done in the 2023 essays and provide a further avenue of exploration for connections between the two films as well as innovative readings of Gladiator 2 on its own.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

Although initially dismissed as “a holiday from history” (Will), a “frivolous if not decadent decade” (Rich), and a “time of trivial pursuits” (Halberstam) (cf. Chollet and Goldgeier 2008), the 1990s have increasingly been recognized as a pivotal historical moment. Scholars have underscored its defining impact, with Wegner characterizing the decade as “life between two deaths,” framed by the end of the Cold War and the events of 9/11 (2009).

Working Title - Planet Flanagan: Essays on the Netflix Series of Mike Flanagan

Mike Flanagan has steadily made a significant name for himself in horror, garnering praise for his originality in films such as Oculus (2013) and Hush (2016), and further critical acclaim for works like Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016), Gerald’s Game (2017) and especially his adaptation of Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep (2019).

DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 15 FEBRUARY 2025.

Submissions are invited for a scholarly conference on domestic cats in literature to be hosted online 13-15 March 2025 by the Troy University Department of English.  

Papers may address any aspect of the subject, including—but not limited to—the following:

This chapter will be part of an edited collection that aims at examining (the intersections between) the notions of monstrosity and evil in the literary and artistic depictions of non-human and hybrid (or post-human) intelligence in different cultural and historical contexts. It focuses on the representation of monsters and creatures that have cognitive abilities as well as on the demonizing and vilification of artificially or magically enhanced human intelligence. It also deals with the depiction of malignant non-human entities interfering with human thoughts and evil non-human cosmic intelligences interfering with human destinies.

PopCRN (the Popular Culture Network) will be holding a free virtual symposium exploring the 1950s in popular culture. Held online on Thursday 27th and Friday 28th of March 2025.

The 1950s was the decade where the world began to recover from the tragedy of the Second World War. This conference aims to explore both the popular culture of the 1950s, and how the 1950s have been depicted in the popular culture of other eras.

Horror Studies Now: A Two-Day Conference (29-30 May 2025, Northumbria University, UK)

Researchers working in the broad field of “Horror Studies”, are invited to submit abstracts about their research for an in-person conference, hosted by the Horror Studies Research Group at Northumbria University (https://research.northumbria.ac.uk/horrorstudies), on 29-30 May 2025.

What can books teach us about character? The people in literary works face moral dilemmas—choosing between personal gain and doing the right thing, whatever the consequences. Fictional heroes often explore the boundaries of character, asking us which traits we deem noble. The same choices and internal struggles appear in nonfiction works such as biographies or histories, deepened by the impact of character on the real world. Looking at character in books helps us stay true to our values, even in the most threatening of circumstances. By immersing ourselves in the stories of others—be they true or imagined—we develop a stronger moral compass and a deeper understanding of how to live with character.