Call for Presentations: Pulp Studies Area – Popular Culture Association National Conference

April 8-11, 2026, Atlanta, GA

https://pcaaca.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1960292

Abstracts Submission Deadline: November 30

Pulp magazines were mass-market periodicals printed on inexpensive pulpwood paper, featuring vividly illustrated covers and accessible fiction for a wide audience. While remembered for their lurid adventure, horror, and science fiction tales, pulps were equally known for best-selling genres like romance, western, and crime/detective fiction. Titles such as Love Story, Ranch Romances, Black Mask, and Dime Western shaped popular taste and defined genre conventions for generations.

The Pulp Studies Area of the Popular Culture Association invites proposals for presentations examining the pulps in all their variety and legacy. We especially encourage work that expands pulp scholarship beyond its familiar adventure and science-fantasy canon to include romance, westerns, detective fiction, and other popular genres that dominated the newsstands.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Genres and Magazines: Love Story, Ranch Romances, Black Mask, Dime Western, Spicy Detective, Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Argosy, All-Story, and many more

• Writers and Editors: Daisy Bacon (Love Story), Farnsworth Wright (Weird Tales), John W. Campbell (Astounding), Joseph Shaw (Black Mask), and influential authors such as Dashiell Hammett, Zane Grey, Nora Roberts (as a contemporary inheritor of the romance tradition)

• Pulp Marketing and Readership: Targeting of gendered markets, working-class readerships, regional variations, circulation data

• Themes and Social Issues: Gender roles and romance formulae, the cowboy mythos, urban crime and hard-boiled realism, race and ethnicity in pulp fiction, representations of class

• Visual Culture and Art: Cover artists, interior illustration styles, gendered marketing through imagery

• Periodization and Evolution: From dime novels to pulps to digest magazines, comics, paperback originals, and digital revival

• Transmedia and Adaptations: Film, television, radio serials, comics and graphic novels, RPGs, video games

• The Pulp Aesthetic in Contemporary Culture: Neo-pulp fiction, film homages, contemporary romance and westerns, hard-boiled and noir revival, fan fiction, indie publishing

• Defining the “Pulp Aesthetic”: What makes something “pulp”? Connections to gothic fiction, dime novels, popular magazines, and mid-century paperbacks

We welcome proposals that approach pulps from any disciplinary perspective, including literary studies, media studies, history, cultural studies, art history, gender and sexuality studies, and digital humanities. 

Abstracts are due by November 30 and can be submitted here - https://pcaaca.org/page/submissionguidelines

Dr. Jason Ray Carney – jason.carney@cnu.edu

Dr. Daniel M. Look – dlook@stlawu.edu