At the close of the twentieth century, the proliferation of networked digital technologies has led a number of critics to call into question the future of reading. However, in the last several years it has become increasingly clear that reading continues to be an important aspect of our cultural practice, even as it manifests itself in multiple forms. This panel invites papers that concern themselves with both the history and the future of reading. Paper submitted to this panel may address the following questions: How have reading practices changed over time in a given historical period? What kinds of reading practices are specific to print culture and/or networked digital culture and what practices span both?

The horror genre is structured around encounters with the unknown. Yet the meaning of these encounters (narratively, as well as in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality) remains in flux, even within overarching myths such as that of the vampire. One example is the Swedish novel Let the Right One In, which centers around a boy's encounter with a MTF transgender vampire. This text simultaneously employs the threat of Cold War ideologies, with the possible invasion into Sweden by Soviet missiles triangulated around the drama of "encountering," and befriending, the vampire. This panel invites papers that analyze such complex modern encounters within horror, and how the genre stages encounters with social, political, and economic concerns.

Video games are a space in which encounters are enacted on many different levels. There are encounters within the game's narrative space; encounters at the interface of player and narrative; and encounters within the external gaming space (think two-player games). These encounters can also be broken down into player-computer and player-player encounters. This panel invites papers that explore these different spaces of encounter in video games. How do these spaces disrupt normative discourses on sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, and social class? How do these encounters disrupt or challenge the player's identity? What are some implications of network-mediated encounters in massively multiplayer online games?

When we encounter dolls as grown-ups, what is it that we are encountering? What might personal and cultural doll-identifications betray about relationships with the past, with gender and sexuality, with play, with tenderness and with terror? This panel invites submissions which reflect upon the sociocultural meaning of the doll as text, as artifact, or, more traditionally, as an enduring literary and filmic obsession. In psychoanalysis as well as in the popular imagination, dolls have long played the role of uncanny object. This panel is particularly interested in the way in which new technologies, products and markets have uncannily reproduced, intensified and responded to anxieties and hauntings from the past.

This panel invites papers that explore the notion of encounter within the context of Critical Digital Humanities. The conference theme theorizes that encountering is related to, but hardly synonymous with interaction and mediation - two theoretical lenses more frequently deployed within the Digital Humanities field. As such, one area in which papers on this panel might focus, then, is in further explicating the theoretical constellation made up by these three terms. How can we further theorize the differences and similarities within mediation, interaction, and encounter?

**SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED UNTIL JANUARY 21, 2013**

"Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy." – F. Scott Fitzgerald

"You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." – Harvey Dent, Batman: The Dark Knight

Keynote Speakers:

Richard Harrison, Mount Royal University

Aruna Srivastava, University of Calgary

www.writing.buffalo.edu/sunycow

Friday Evening Speaker
Kelly Kinney, Binghamton
"Back to the Future: How a Nascent Program Built a Culture of Writing--and Won the CCCC Writing Program Certificate of Excellence"

Saturday Luncheon Speaker
Richard Miller, Rutgers
Author of As if Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education (1998) and Writing at the End of the World (2005).