virgule's Journal

Call for Contributors: Twilight and History
Call for Contributors: Twilight and History

Edited by Nancy Reagin, Pace University

Proposal deadline: July 10, 2009

This anthology seeks to historicize Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, examining individual characters or aspects of the series against a historical backdrop, or analyzing how popular historical understandings inform the series. We welcome work from historians or those in cognate disciplines, including gender studies, Native American studies, religious studies, or cultural studies.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

masculine honor and gender roles in Edward’s world and Bella’s--- more than a generation gap: marriage and courtship in Edward’s youth ---- Twilight werewolves and werewolves in historical legend ---- essays that examine Jacob and his people against the history of the Quileutes and Northwest Pacific native cultures --- Carlisle and witchcraft persecutions in Early Modern England ---- Alice Cullen and the (mis)treatment of the insane in 19th century America ---- The Amazon coven and South American native cultures ---- The Cullens and European vampire folklore --- the Volturi, art patronage, and politics in Italian history (various periods are possible, here)

This anthology will be published by Blackwell Publishing, which will pay contributors an honorarium of $350.

Please email a 500-word proposal, a one-page c.v., and contact information to Nancy Reagin at nreagin [AT] pace.edu by July 10, 2009.

Notification of accepted proposals will be made by July 15, 2009.
Chapter drafts of approximately 5,000 words will be due by Sept. 15 2009.

--

Nancy Reagin, Ph.D.
Professor of History and Women’s & Gender Studies
Department of History
Pace University
New York, NY 10038
(212) 346-1676
Nreagin [AT] pace.edu

Announcing a new area for the MAPACA Annual Conference: Tattoos and Tattooing
The 2009 MAPACA conference will be held at: Hilton Boston Logan Airport in Boston, MA from Thursday, November 5 - Saturday, November 7, 2009

Tattoos and Tattooing
Loretta Lorance, Area Chair
llorance[@]earthlink.net
PO Box 461, Inwood Station
New York, NY 10034

Deadline: June 15, 2009 (contact Dr. Lorance if a 1 week extension is
needed)

Tattoos and Tattooing

Do you tattoo? Are tattoos body art? rebellion? personal expression?
clanship? tradition? decadence? reminiscence? invitation to look? disguise?
This session invites discussion of tattoos, their meanings, their creation, their role/s in our lives. Share your knowledge, tattoos, and techniques.

Undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals are encouraged to submit proposals for individual papers, full panels, round table discussions or alternative format

Loretta Lorance
<llorance[@]earthlink.net>

CFP: Race, Queerness, and Civil Rights
http://flowtv.org/?page_id=25

Race, Queerness and Civil Rights

At the same time that a discourse of inclusiveness and “colorblindness” appears to be reaching a zenith after the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, the simultaneous approval of constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage in three states as well as the banning of adoption by unmarried couples in one complicates the claim that, for all Americans, “Yes We Can.”

Flowtv.org seeks submissions that address how the media is implicated in the discourses around race and LGBT issues with a critical lens on politics post-election 2008. For example: Can we complicate the parallel drawn by LGBT activists between struggle for same-sex marriage rights and the U.S. Civil Rights movement? How is queerness raced, and how is the topic of race in the U.S. queered, if at all?

What is the interplay between queerness, race, and heteronormative structures such as marriage and the nuclear family? How can we comment on “colorblind” rhetoric that allows for a mixed-race African American president at the same time that it rolls back affirmative action? What of the troubling racially divisive discourse emerging after Proposition 8’s success in California?

Submissions, up to 1300 words in length, should be directed to Special Features Editor Alex Cho (alexcho47[@]gmail.com). Successful submissions will base their argument on some aspect of the media (TV, Web, print,etc) or a specific media text or texts. Submissions should be in .doc format, with the title and author’s name clearly indicated on the file.

Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF)
Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF)

Request for Faculty Field-Building and Student-Training Proposals

The Social Science Research Council seeks proposals from pairs of tenured faculty in graduate training programs of US universities to design and lead dissertation proposal workshops for graduate students within emerging or revitalizing interdisciplinary fields of the humanities and/or social sciences. Selected field directors will lead groups of 12 graduate students in two workshops to orient the students to the field, prepare them for summer predissertation research, and enable them to prepare dissertation research and funding proposals. Applicant field directors must have experience supervising dissertation research, be trained in different disciplines, and based at different universities.

Each field director will receive a stipend of $10,000. The SSRC will recruit students competitively and provide organizational logistics for the workshops and student research.

Proposals should describe the nature and significance of the proposed field, the disciplines from which the SSRC might recruit students, and the training activities that would be offered. Applicants should also submit a short field bibliography and Curricula Vitae.

Applications must be submitted via the online application portal by October 2, 2009.

More information about the program may be found at: http://program.ssrc.org/dpdf. Please direct any questions to program staff at dpdf@ssrc.org.

The DPDF Program is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Our mailing address is:
dpdf@ssrc.org
Social Science Research Council <http://www.ssrc.org>

Social Science Research Council
One Pierrepont Plaza, 15th Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11201

CFP: Race and Ethnicity in Fandom
Special issue: Race and Ethnicity in Fandom (Summer 2011)

Transformative Works and Cultures

editor AT transformativeworks.org

SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS

Sarah Gatson, Sociology, Texas A&M University Gatson AT tamu

Robin Reid, Literature and Languages, Texas A&M University–Commerce Robin_Reid AT tamu-commerce.edu

DESCRIPTION

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), an online-only, peer-reviewed journal focusing on media and fan studies, broadly conceived, invites contributions for a special issue on race and ethnicity to be published in summer 2011.

Academic scholarship on fan cultures and fan productions over the past few decades has focused primarily on gender as the sole category of analysis. There has been little published scholarship on fan cultures and productions that incorporates critical race theory or draws on the rich array of methodologies that have been developed during the past century in both activist and academic communities in order to incorporate analysis of the social constructions of race and ethnicities in fandoms.

In contrast, fan activism and fan scholarship (at cons, workshops, and on the Internet) has produced a growing body of work (personal narratives, essays, carnivals, and in recent months, a press) focusing on not only analyzing but also confronting hierarchies of race and ethnicity and their relationship to gender, sexuality, class, and disability. Submissions by academics, acafans, fan scholars, and fans are encouraged. In all categories, people of color are especially encouraged to submit.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

Online activism and the circulation of critical race theory and women of color feminisms in fan communities, in particular the relationship between fan online discourse and other online activist communities.

Critical analysis of the instantiation and critique of racial hierarchies in fan communities and the surrounding cultural productions.

Racist and antiracist issues in commercial transformative works (comics, film, mashups, remixes, machinima, etc.), especially recuperative race readings (e.g., Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea).

Race concerns in source texts (characters of color and their fannish reception, fandoms for work by authors of color, writing fannish original characters, etc.) and fannish responses (such as the Carl Brandon Society, Verb_Noire, and other panfannish and professional projects).

Intersection of race and ethnicity with gender, sexuality, class, and ability in fannish contexts in fan works and fan communities (pre-Internet, Internet, conventions, vids, fan fiction, artwork, etc.).

SUBMISSIONS

Submit final papers directly to TWC by October 1, 2010. Please visit TWC’s Web site for complete submission guidelines. Please contact the guest editors with questions or inquiries.

ARTICLE TYPES

Theory: Apply a conceptual focus or theoretical frame. Peer review.5,000–8,000 words.

Praxis: Apply a specific theory to a formation or artifact; explicate fan practice; perform a detailed reading of a specific text; relate transformative phenomena to social, literary, technological, and/or historical frameworks. Peer review. 4,000–7,000 words.

Symposium: Provide insight into developments or debates surrounding fandom, transformative media, or cultures. Editorial review. 1,500–2,500 words.

CFP: Understanding Superheroes
CALL FOR PAPERS

Understanding Superheroes
An Interdisciplinary Conference at the University of Oregon

Location: The University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
Dates: October 23-24, 2009

“Understanding Superheroes” is conceived as an interdisciplinary multi-media event, held in conjunction with a simultaneous exhibition of original comic art at the UO’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.

This exhibition, “Faster Than A Speeding Bullet,” will feature over 150 pages of original superhero comic art from the 1940s to the present, with examples of key works by many major creators in the industry, including Neal Adams, Mike Allred, C C Beck, Gene Colan, Steve Ditko, Will Eisner, Bill Everett, Lou Fine, Ramona Fradon, Dave Gibbons, Don Heck, Carmine Infantino, J G Jones, Gil Kane, Jack Kirby, Joe Kubert, Mort Meskin, Frank Miller, Joe Orlando, George Perez, H G Peter, Mac Raboy, John Romita Sr., Alex Ross, Marie Severin, Bill Sienkiewicz, Matt Wagner, and Berni Wrightson.

Keynote Speakers include Danny Fingeroth (author of Superheroes On The Couch and Disguised As Clark Kent) and Charles Hatfield (author of Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature).

Guests Panelists include Kurt Busiek (author of numerous Superhero titles for Marvel and DC, and creator of the award-winning Astro City series), Greg Rucka (co-creator of Gotham Central, White Out, Queen & Country, and many projects for Marvel and DC), and Gail Simone (writer on Marvel’s Deadpool, DC’s Birds of Prey, co-creator of Welcome To Tranquility for Wildstorm, and current Wonder Woman scribe)!

Other guests TBA.

We invite 1-2 page proposals for 20-30 minute conference papers considering the implications of superhero fantasies for our understanding of such diverse topics as gender identity, queerness, theological yearning, and nationalist politics. We also welcome appreciative discussions of superhero comics as significant aesthetic achievements — particularly insofar as those discussions contribute to the ongoing project within contemporary Comics Studies, to map the unique conventions of the comic art form. Above all, we are interested in sophisticated, lucidly written analyses that utilize the conceptual tools and hermeneutic lenses of contemporary literary and cultural theory.

It is our hope that this conference will help all participants, student and professional, skeptic and fan, to understand the extraordinary imaginative appeal of the costumed adventurer — an appeal that overlaps significant distinctions of age, gender, nation, and culture, and which no amount of silliness or cynicism seems quite able to dispel.

Please address queries and submit proposals via email to Ben Saunders, Associate Professor, Department of English by Monday, June 30tth, 2009. (Email address: ben[@]uoregon.edu)

Call for Papers: Literature and Joss Whedon’s Angel (book collection)*
*Editors:* AmiJo Comeford and Tamy Burnett

*Description: *

We are currently accepting proposals for essays to be included in an edited collection tentatively titled *Literature and Joss Whedon’s Angel*, which will be published by McFarland in 2010. We are looking for essays that focus specifically on the literary traditions and influences that shape and are reflected in *Angel*. Our goal is to bring together a collection of essays that work primarily with *Angel* as a text to be addressed in the wider field of narrative and literature, since critical analysis of visual narratives in our culture is often related to our literary history and cultural consciousness. Often, our criteria for evaluating the quality of television draw heavily on the complexities of narrative structures and the reimagining of traditional tales or storytelling techniques. Whedon's works, including *Angel*, are rife with these types of older narrative structures and literary references, as some scholars have noted in the past.

As instructors of literature courses, we routinely examine new ways to help undergraduates, English majors and non-majors alike, to engage with literature and narrative in meaningful ways. In a world that is increasingly dominated by visual texts, how we approach students acculturated in this environment is crucial, and we believe that that our collection will highlight the importance of historically canonized and non-canonized literary texts, narrative structures, and themes, as well as their continued relevance today.

While several published books currently engage critical explorations of *Buffy the Vampire Slayer* and* *intersecting themes in Whedon’s *Buffy*, *Angel*, and *Firefly/Serenity* (in addition, of course, to the wealth of articles published in peer-reviewed journals), the publications that support Whedon Studies contain an obvious gap—books devoted to *Angel*. Though over a dozen full books devoted to *Buffy* have been published in recent years, only one edited collection has thus far been focused on its companion series, *Angel* (*Reading Angel: The TV Spin-off with a Soul*, ed. Stacey Abbott, I.B. Tauris, 2005). We aim to narrow that gap.

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CFP: Film and Science
CFP: Film and Science
Visions of Science and Technology in Film

Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal

First-Round Deadline: June 1, 2009

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Call for Papers, special issue of Transformative Workers and Cultures
Special Issue: "Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction": Special Historical Issue

Transformative Works and Cultures (Spring 2011)

Initial Abstract Submission Deadline: May 15, 2009

Guest Editors: Nancy Reagin, Pace University, and Anne Rubenstein, York University

Scholars of literature and popular culture, along with ethnographers and sociologists, have produced a rich and sophisticated body of literature about fan communities and creativity over the last twenty years, but most of this work has focused on groups of fans who have been active since the 1960s, and very little of it has been produced by historians. This special issue will focus on the rich history of fans and their engagement with a variety of objects of fandom. We seek to expand the range of topics and methodologies available to studies of fans and their communities, and we hope to understand fans better by studying them in their historical contexts.

We invite contributions that focus on fan works and/or fan communities from any place and time since the late eighteenth century. This periodization is informed by Walter Benjamin's idea that—thanks to the invention of lithography—the original artwork, with its unique aura, came into being at that point precisely because of the availability of cheap copies. He argued that the distinctions between original and mass-produced commercial art and media created the boundary between high and popular art, and between mass and bourgeois tastes. We wonder whether the historical study of fans and fan works might modify Benjamin's formulation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Does the long-standing existence of fan fiction, fan art, and other forms of community-generated fan works clarify or muddy his argument?

The special issue will be divided between scholarly contributions of 4,000 to 7,000 words, and oral histories of older fans. We will seek to include scholarly articles and oral histories that can be read against or with each other. For example, an interview of a present-day cosplayer might be juxtaposed with an article on nineteenth-century amateur drama.

We especially encourage historians and those in cognate fields whose usual research would not include anything relevant to this topic to consider contributing an oral history.

Materials: Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words, along with a 1-page CV and contact information.

Due Dates: Abstracts should arrive via e-mail no later than May 15, 2009. Notifications of accepted proposals will go out by June 15, 2009. Final submissions will due May 15, 2010, and will undergo peer review before publication.

Contact Information:

Nancy Reagin, Professor, Department of History, Pace University, New York, NY 10038, USA; (212) 346-1676; nreagin AT pace.edu

Anne Rubenstein, Associate Professor, History Department, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada; (416) 736-5123; arubenst AT yorku.ca

For more information on Transformative Works and Cultures, click here.

Call for Papers: FAN STUDIES
Call for Papers: FAN STUDIES

2009 Midwest Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference Friday-Sunday, October 30 - November 01, 2009 Detroit, MI http://www.mpcaaca.org
Deadline: April 30, 2009

The Fan Studies area of the Midwest Popular Culture and Midwest American Culture Association is now accepting proposals for its upcoming Conference in October./November

The MPCA/MACA conference will be held in Detroit, MI October 30-November 01, 2009.

Topics can include, but are not limited to fan fiction, multi-media fan production, fan communities, fandom of individual media texts, sports fandom, or the future of fandom. Case studies are also welcome.

Please send 250 word abstract proposals on any aspect of Fan Studies to Paul Booth, at pbooth81[AT]gmail.com.

More information about the conference can be found at http://www.mpcaaca.org/ Please include name, affiliation, and e-mail address with the 250 word abstract.

Paul Booth
pbooth81[AT]gmail.com

CFP: Bitten by Twilight: Youth culture, media, and the Twilight saga
CFP: Bitten by Twilight: Youth culture, media, and the Twilight saga

Edited by Melissa Click, Jennifer Stevens Aubrey, and Lissa Behm-Morawitz

Proposal deadline: April 10, 2009

The editors seek essays that explore Stephenie Meyer¹s wildly popular Twilight series. We are particularly interested in essays that explore the cultural significance of the Twilight phenomenon and its impact on youth culture. The collection will feature scholarly work from a diversity of theoretical and methodological perspectives, including: analyses of the series¹ messages, production and marketing processes, and audiences. We welcome work from a wide variety of disciplines, including: communication, sociology, cultural studies, psychology, religious studies, and gender studies.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

--Representations of gender, race, class and sexuality --Religion, morality, and values --Feminist and anti-feminist themes in Twilight --Intended and unintended audiences --Fans and anti-fans --Genre and vampire/werewolf folklore --Relationship models (romantic, friendship, and familial) --Space and place in Twilight --Celebrity culture and Stephenie Meyer, Robert Pattinson, and Kristen Stewart --Translation of the series for the screen --The Twilight franchise

This collection will be proposed to Peter Lang's "Mediated Youth" series.

Please email a 250-word proposal, short bibliography, brief author¹s bio, and contact information to Melissa Click at clickm[AT]missouri.edu by April 10, 2009.

Notification of accepted proposals will be made by May 15, 2009.
First chapter drafts of 6000 to 8000 words will be due in early fall 2009.

--
Melissa Click, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
203D Switzler Hall
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211
phone: 573.884.4694
fax: 573.884.5672
clickm[AT]missouri.edu

CFP: Chinua Achebe
Feel free to pass on to any lists, groups, etc. where people might be interested!

Call For Papers: Chinua Achebe

The editors of Perspectives, a literary-critical journal published by the English Department of Raja Peary Mohan College, India, are looking for literary critical/theoretical papers on the work of Chinua Achebe for the forthcoming issue of the journal.

If you are interested in submitting an article (MLA style) for inclusion in this issue please contact: Dr. Evert Jan van Leeuwen, Leiden University, the Netherlands, at: e.j.van.leeuwen [AT] hum.leidenuniv.nl

CFP: Makeshift
PLEASE FORWARD

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: make/shift no. 6

Make/shift—a magazine creating, documenting, and engaging with contemporary feminist culture and activism—is seeking submissions for its sixth issue (fall/winter 2009/10).

Issue 5, due out in March, will feature the art of Celeste Rapone; thoughts on queering geography, starting in Detroit; creative nonfiction by Jen Benka, brownfemipower, and Rachel Burgess; an intimate dialogue by a couple of self-identified "queer fat femme bitches"; and "What You Started: Letters to Black Feminist Ancestors," with letters curated by Alexis Pauline Gumbs from Moya Bailey, Lisa C. Moore, and Aishah Shahidah Simmons. As always, there will be new columns by Erin Aubry Kaplan, Nomy Lamm, and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore; extensive book, film, and event reviews; and much, much more.

( For Issue 6, we are seeking )

CFP: DR. Who Anthology
The Unsilent Library: Adventures in new Doctor Who

Published by the Science Fiction Foundation
edited by Simon Bradshaw, Antony Keen, and Graham Sleight

The Science Fiction Foundation, which has published a number of books on sf (including The Parliament of Dreams: Conferring on Babylon 5 and Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature) is now seeking contributions for a new book, proposed for publication in 2010, on Doctor Who. This book will focus on the series' revival since 2005. Contributions are invited on all aspects of the new series, including its scripting, production, and reception, as well as links to the "classic" series. A variety of critical approaches/viewpoints will be encouraged.

Potential authors are asked to submit brief proposals (max. 250 words) for chapters by 1st March 2009. Final chapters (max. 6,000 words) will be due by 1st August 2009. Please send proposals to sjbradshaw[@]mac.com.

Contributions should follow the style guide at

http://www.sf-foundation.org/publications/styleguide.html

Call for Papers: The Velvet Light Trap, Issue #65, Spring 2009 – Celebrity!
Stars are dead! Long live … celebrity?! It has been nearly two decades since Richard Dyer's influential Stars reinvented our theoretical approaches to film stardom. In his text, Dyer interrogated the social meanings we attach to screen icons and demonstrated how those meanings contribute to our
understanding of ourselves and others. While his project remains central to star studies today, its exclusive focus on Hollywood stands at odds with a media environment in which the cinema's role in circulating the star image has been increasingly marginalized. In the years since Dyer's original publication, we have witnessed the emergence of a global paparazzi culture that revels in the conflation between traditional notions of stardom and a more ambiguous obsession with "fame" for fame's sake. It is time to investigate this awkward tension and consider the ramifications it holds for the field of star studies. Does our current celebrity culture amount to a new epoch in the evolution of "the star" or is it simply more of the same?

Issue #65 of The Velvet Light Trap will explore our contemporary understandings of "celebrity." While the editors maintain a very broad definition of this phenomenon, special attention will be given to contributions that consider celebrity's present manifestations in tabloid culture, online gossip, and scandal or rethink previous engagements with stardom from fresh perspectives. Whether papers approach celebrity as a discursive category, a commercial commodity, and/or an object of consumption, the editors anticipate submissions that connect these strategies to the historical, industrial, political, and cultural impetuses that underpin a society's values.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:( Read more... )

CFPP: Special Issue of Learning, Media, and TEchnology
CALL FOR PAPERS

special issue of Learning, Media and Technology

issue theme: Learning in Virtual Worlds

Edited by Jeremy Hunsinger and Aleks Krotoski

Virtual worlds are learning worlds.

There is substantial evidence that people learn in virtual worlds.
While most learning in these spaces is informal, existing outside the school curriculum, formalised learning environments have also been developed in textual worlds, MOOs, MUSHes, MUDs and multi-media spaces like ActiveWorlds(R), Second Life(R), World of Warcraft (R) to support educational goals in primary, secondary, higher and lifelong learning contexts.

The extensive writings on virtual reality and virtual worlds over the past four decades have covered the breadth of the phenomena and experiences of learning via CMC in these situated spaces; this call for papers seeks scholarship that builds upon and extends those accounts. We seek research that deals with learning and research in social networks or among friends, learning through play, learning through artistic creation and learning in unconventional virtual realities. We seek papers that examine learning or modes of learning that occurs in unexpected ways.

For example, workshops have been transformed with the inclusion of new materials, like clay or other art equipment, encouraging participants to express themselves through different modes of communication. Such physical practices mirror the opportunities afforded in virtual environments, increasing potential outcomes by breaking down borders of expression, creating a place for play, and expanding discourse. We seek research that aims to capture similar alternative practices in learning within virtual worlds.

While all forms of scholarship and research are welcome, we prefer theoretically and empirically grounded study in the social or behavioral sciences. We seek a special issue that exemplifies methodological pluralism. The use of visual evidence and representations is also encouraged.

Submission guidelines:

This special issue is edited by Jeremy Hunsinger and Aleks Krotoski.
Please contact them at jhuns[@]vt.edu and akrotoski[@]yahoo.com to discuss your submissions. The editors welcome contributions from new researchers and those who are more well-established. Submitted manuscripts will be subject to peer review.

Length of papers will vary as per disciplinary expectations, but we encourage papers of around 6000 words.

Short discussion papers of 2000 words on relevant subjects are also welcomed for the 'Viewpoints'
section.

Learning, Media and Technology submission guidelines and referencing styles will be followed [see: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/17439884.asp]

The guest editors will consider papers received by March 15, 2009.

Fewer than 10 papers will be accepted. The special issue will be published in early 2010. Please send papers to jhuns[@]vt.edu, clearly indicating that your submission is for the Special Issue on learning in virtual worlds.

Jeremy Hunsinger
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture Virginia Tech Information Ethics Fellow Center for Information Policy Research

CFP: Journal of Virtual Worlds Research
The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research (http://jvwresearch.org) is soliciting "think pieces" in response to the following questions:

"In thinking about the spaces of virtual worlds, and the practices we witness within them, how can we define what counts as culture?
Can we see any common cultural trends emerging in different virtual worlds, or are practices as disparate as the worlds and groups we find within them?"

The formatting guidelines are:

* 1000-1300 words total
* The "think pieces" are brief essays or papers intended to spur discussion amongst the scholarly community.
* The pieces should aim to ask provocative questions for future research and debate, rather than provide definitive answers.
* We encourage the use of visual aids such as images, video clips, or links to content in virtual worlds.
* Abstract (no more than 300 words) and keywords (a minimum of 3)
* APA Style (unless it is inappropriate for the type of essay being
submitted)
* The website currently only accepts .doc and .rtf formats.
* Single-spaced

The deadline for submissions is: January 9, 2008, 5pm CST

Please send your submissions directly to: Mia Consalvo consalvo[@]ohio.edu and Mark Bell typewritermark[@]gmail.com
Mia Consalvo, Ph.D.
School of Media Arts & Studies
(formerly the School of Telecommunications) Ohio University
9 South College Street
Athens, Ohio 45701
USA

CFP: INTERNATIONAL GOTHIC ASSOCIATION 9th BIENNIAL CONFERENCE LANCASTER UNIVERSITY 21st - 24th JULY
MONSTROUS MEDIA / SPECTRAL SUBJECTS

INTERNATIONAL GOTHIC ASSOCIATION 9th BIENNIAL CONFERENCE LANCASTER UNIVERSITY 21st - 24th JULY 2009

SESSION CALL FOR PAPERS

MONSTROUS HYBRIDS: GOTHIC / SCIENCE FICTION

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NEH Summer 2009 Institute for School Teachers: Tolkien
Announcing a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute for School Teachers:

J. R. R. TOLKIEN'S THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE REAL AND THE IMAGINED MIDDLE AGES

Dear Colleagues Letter and Application Information in downloadable pdf files

July 13-August 13, 2009 (5 weeks)
Robin Anne Reid and Judy Ann Ford, Texas A&M University-Commerce
Information: Robin Anne Reid
Department of Literature and Languages
Texas A&M University-Commerce
Commerce, TX 75429
903-886-5268
Robin_Reid@tamu-commerce.edu

Visiting Experts

Douglas Anderson
David Bratman
Janet Brennan Croft’
Edith Crowe
Verlyn Flieger
Jason Fisher
Edward James
Kristine Larsen
Charles W. Nelson
Faye Ringel
Deborah Sabo
Amy Sturgis
C. W. Sullivan III
Elizabeth Whittingham
Ralph C. Wood

Livejournal Community: http://community.livejournal.com/lotr_middleages/

Steampunkers of LJ! Ahoy!
CALL FOR PAPERS
SPECIAL ISSUE
Steampunk, Science, and (Neo)Victorian Technologies

Neo-Victorian Studies invites papers and/or abstracts for a 2009 special issue on neo-Victorianism’s engagement with science and new/old technologies, especially as articulated through the genre of Steampunk. As a lifestyle, aesthetic and literary movement, Steampunk can be both the act of modding your laptop to look like and function as a Victorian artefact and an act of (re-)imagining a London in which Charles Babbage’s analytical engine was realised. Steampunk includes applications of nineteenth-century aesthetics to contemporary objects; speculative extensions of technologies that actually existed; and the anachronistic importation of contemporary science into fictionalised pasts and projected futures. In all cases, Steampunk blurs boundaries: between centuries, between technologies, and between “those” Victorians and “us” neo-Victorians. This special issue will explore why particular scientific and technological developments are revisited at particular historical moments and trace Steampunk’s importance to neo-Victorianism, as well as its wider cultural implications.

Deadline for submissions of completed papers: 1 June 2009

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
• Steampunk and the importation/transformation of Victorian aesthetics
• changing narrative “technologies” in Victorian/neo-Victorian fiction
• markets and economics of the Steampunk universe
• science and environmental politics
• Steampunk and the myths of the Industrial Revolution
• redefining the human: intersections with cyberpunk
• Steampunk and old/new/lost world empire(s)
• the terrors of Steampunk in a post-9/11 world
• historicising the Steampunk phenomenon
• gender constructions in Steampunk art, literature, and practice
• mad geniuses: scientists, inventors, doctors, engineers
• Steampunk pasts and futures (e.g. The Difference Engine vs. The Diamond Age)
• modding and maker practices: objects and (neo-)Victorian materialism
• real and imagined difference engines
• scientific (im)practicalities of Steampunk contraptions
• visual Steampunk vs. narrative Steampunk (e.g. graphic novels or movies vs. novels)
• cosplay and conventions

Articles and/or creative pieces between 6000-8000 words should be submitted by email to the guest editors, Rachel A. Bowser (rachel.bowser[@]gmail.com) and Brian Croxall (b.croxall[@]gmail.com). For submission guidelines, please consult the journal website at

http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/.

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