popular culture

Location and Date: May 20-23, 2027 University of Houston 

In-person and Virtual: This panel will meet in-person

Public understanding of American cultures—peoples, neighborhoods, languages, foods, histories, arts, religions—has always been vulnerable to myth and misinformation, in particular from the far right. Collectively the humanities work to establish an ever-more accurate/inclusive lens on culture, but the (re)mainstreaming of far-right voices has dangerously distorted the diverse American story.

CFP: Handbook of the Cultural Legacy of 9/11. (under contract with Springer)

 Edited by:

 Marc A. Ouellette, Old Dominion University, (mouellet@odu.edu) and Peter Pericles Trifonas, University of Toronto

Between Screens: Video Games, Film, Television and Transmedia Exchange

Edited by Dr Michael Samuel and Dr Richard Cole

Adaptation is a dialogic process, a creative exchange across content production and context rather than an attempt at fidelity. Recent trends in adaptation studies reflect this complexity. Videogames exist within a vast ecosystem of transmedia storytelling and experiences, yet scholarship on adaptation and video games remains limited.

In this modern moment, there have been a myriad of proposals exploring the contours of “speculative fiction”—be that social, environmental, &c. This session seeks to deconstruct the ways in which the speculative shapes the contours of the “real” or realized. Though sensationalization can be found in works of fiction, the threads of one’s reality—intersectional as it may be—provides a rich narrative that encourages further exploration and the fears provided in what we would safely relegate to fiction. However, there remains a “seeping out” of those fears that can eerily be represented in the real world.

Hosting Identity: Boundaries, Bodies, and Belonging in Popular Culture
Who—or what—do we let in?

This panel invites papers that examine how identity in popular culture is shaped through the logics of hospitality: encounters structured by thresholds, boundaries, and negotiations of belonging. From the body to the home to the platform, popular media repeatedly stages identity as something that must be received, managed, or refused.

As Jacques Derrida asks in Of Hospitality, “Must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language, in all the senses of this term, in all its possible extensions, before being able… to welcome him into our country?” (15). Derrida’s question is rooted in the conception of the foreigner as the cultural, and important to this panel, the spatial other. Coming up on America’s 250th anniversary, this question is particularly fruitful when considering the environment of the United States; historically (i.e. Indigenous land theft and mistreatment, slavery, capitalist implementation) and contemporarily (i.e.

This accepted panel for NeMLA 2027 (March 6-9, 2027. Newport, RI) seeks to investigate works of American drama that engage deeply with other (possibly more canonical) American plays. Engagement is defined broadly and might include subtle evidence of influence, extended allusions, plays within plays, or outright sequels, prequels, and revisions of earlier works. Also welcome are examinations of how American plays appear in pop culture texts like TV shows.

CFP NEPCA Monsters & the Montrous Area 2026 - UPDATED DEADLINE

The Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association (a.k.a. NEPCA) seeks proposals for inclusion in NEPCA’s 2026 annual conference.

The event will run as a virtual conference from Thursday, October 15th, through Saturday, October 17th. Virtual sessions will take place via Zoom throughout the day on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Registration will open up in mid-July. The registration fee is expected to be around 50 USD.

**DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 7/15/26**

The Writing, Speaking, and Argument Program, along with the Department of English and the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of Rochester are pleased to announce an upcoming undergraduate conference on horror, to be held October 23-25, 2026. The conference will featuring a keynote address by the University of Rochester’s own Jason Middleton, author of numerous articles on horror films, co-editor (with Aviva Briefel) of Labors of Fear: The Modern Horror Film Goes to Work (U of Texas P, 2023), and a featured expert on the AMC series Eli Roth’s History of Horror.

Global and Intersectional Framings of Disability in Comics & Graphic Narratives
Edited by Crystal Yin Lie (California State University, Long Beach) and Kai Qing Tan (Ghent University; Aachen University)

Green Day has often been treated as a problem in the “longview” of punk: too popular, too melodic, too commercial, too successful. Green Day and the Politics of Pop-Punk starts from the opposite assumption. Green Day matters precisely because the band’s career makes it impossible to separate punk from the mass-cultural conditions it has so often claimed to resist.

European Journal of Media, Art & Photography

ejmap.sk | Indexed in WoS Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) | Q1 in art journals category

About the Conference

The conference, “Narratives of the Mind: Media, Literature and Culture,” is conceived as an interdisciplinary platform for examining the complex and evolving representations of the human mind across diverse branches: literature, culture, and media . In this context, the “mind” is not regarded solely as a structural or biological entity, but as a dynamic site shaped by language, narrative, ideology, technology, and cultural practices. By foregrounding narratives, the conference aims to illuminate how mental experiences are constructed, expressed, mediated, and contested across time and space.