popular culture

In this special issue of the BFS (British Fantasy Society) Journal we take a hard look at War in Fantasy. Conflict, from skirmishes to mass battles, tavern brawls to planet-wide apocalypses, is a staple of Fantasy: The Battle of the Five Armies in The Hobbit, The Last Battle in Narnia, The War in Heaven by Charles Williams, and Lyra Belacqua’s fight against death and the consciousness-stifling strictures of the Magisterium, are a few examples.

Cinema and Posthuman Bodies

Edited by Asijit Datta 

Call for Papers

Taylor Swift & Swiftie Studies 

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

2025 SWPACA Summer Salon

June 26-28, 2025

Virtual Conference

https://swpaca.org/ 

Submissions open on March 25, 2025

Proposal submission deadline: April 15, 2025

Taylor Swift is everywhere, it seems, and teachers at all levels have begun to Taylor-tailor their courses to harness her popularity for student learning. At the K-12 level, the TeachersPayTeachers site boasts TS figurative poetry lessons, TS-themed reading comprehension mystery games, TS rhetorical analysis units, and pages more of TS-specific materials (“Taylor Swift”). At the college level, courses devoted explicitly to Taylor Swift are proliferating, from BYU’s political science offering, “Ms.

The critically acclaimed science fiction series Severance (produced by Ben Stiller and created by Dan Erickson, 2022-) explores the idea of surgically dividing a person’s memories between their work and private lives. It raises many thought-provoking questions, embedded in a rich environment of cultural references and equipped with a distinct visual style, nuanced storytelling, and outstanding performances of its cast. With its second season, it has become the most successful production by Apple TV+ so far and is widely discussed by critics and fans. A large part of the fascination for the series comes from the multitude of possible readings it elicits.

"Sin City": Las Vegas in Popular Culture

PopCRN (the Popular Culture Network) will be holding a free virtual symposium exploring the many faces of Las Vegas in popular culture. The conference will be held online on 30-31 July 2026.  

Las Vegas, a city of spectacle, excess, and reinvention, has been depicted in myriad ways across popular culture. From its neon-lit casinos and extravagant performances to its depictions as both a playground for high-stakes drama and a symbol of the American Dream, Las Vegas occupies a unique cultural space. This symposium seeks to examine the diverse representations of Las Vegas through a multi-disciplinary lens.

The way our current globally interconnected and digitally enabled capitalist formation continuously reshapes itself to reinforce categories of class and overarching capitalist structures requires analyses that engage and critique these adaptive forces of capital. Responding to this need, this seminar seeks to examine the relationship of texts to a global capitalist economy by asking how class and capitalism function within and exert force upon texts and their contexts—in film, literature, art, video games, social media, and other extratextual spaces such as fan sites.

Online 25-26 September 2025

PopCRN (the Popular Culture Network) will be holding a free conference online exploring representations of food in popular cultures in history and today, on 25 and 26 September 2025.

Delicious, Nutritious and Fictitious: Food in Popular Culture is asymposium that aims to interrogate the ways that food, recipes, cooking, eating and nutrition are evident in popular culture. This may be representations of food in television, film, literature, art, music, as text, narrative, discourse or any other scholarly form or genre.

CfP: Fafnir: Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research - Issue 2/2025ISSN: 2342-2009  Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research invites authors to submit papers for issue 2/2025. Research into any and all aspects of science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative genres is welcome from a range of disciplines. Please see below for details.  Fafnir is a peer-reviewed academic journal published online twice a year. It is a completely open-access, non-profit publication of the Finnish Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research (FINFAR).

Call for Papers

Medievalisms Area

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

2025 SWPACA Summer Salon

June 26-28, 2024

Virtual Conference

https://swpaca.org/

Submissions open on March 25, 2025

Proposal submission deadline: April 15, 2025

Proposals for papers are now being accepted for the SWPACA Summer Salon. SWPACA offers nearly 70 subject areas in a variety of categories encompassing the following: Film, Television, Music, & Visual Media; Historic & Contemporary Cultures; Identities & Cultures; Language & Literature; Science Fiction & Fantasy; and Pedagogy & Popular Culture. For a full list of subject areas, area descriptions, and Area Chairs, please visit https://swpaca.org/subject-areas/

Critical Arts: south-north cultural and media studies 

【Special Issue】Global thinking and regional acting: From eco-aesthetics to cultural discourses of the Asian natural environment

Guest editor

Goutam Karmakar, University of Hyderabad, India; Durban University of Technology, South Africa
GoutamK@dut.ac.za

CALL FOR PAPERS

Bonkbusters and Soap Operas: Representing Sex, Glamour, and Melodrama on Screen 

Saturday 21st June 2025 

Falmouth University 

This freein-person symposium will be an interdisciplinary and global exploration of Bonkbusters, Soap Operas and Made-for-TV Melodramas. 

The Superhero Project: 9th Global Meeting 

THE MULTIVERSAL SUPERHERO 

Friday 5th to Sunday 7th September 2025 

The View Hotel, Eastbourne, East Sussex, United Kingdom

“Anyone can wear the mask. You can wear the mask. If you didn’t know that before, I hope you do now. Cuz I’m Spider-Man. And I’m not the only one. Not by a long shot”. – Miles Morales, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)