International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

British Society for Literature and Science
Symposium on Teaching

http://www.bsls.ac.uk 

University of Westminster, Regent Street, London – 8^th November, 2014

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PARTICIPATION

Literature and Science is currently gaining popularity amongst undergraduates, but opportunities for discussing how – and why – to teach it remain thin on the ground. This one-day symposium, led by the British Society for Literature and Science and supported by the University of Westminster’s Centre for the Study of Science and the Imagination, is designed to help further that discussion.

We are keen to hear from as many different perspectives as possible, and therefore invite contributions from anyone with experience as a teacher, postgraduate teaching assistant, student, or administrator of an undergraduate course on (or containing elements of) Literature and Science, broadly defined.

For this event, we have adopted a different format from the standard academic twenty-minute conference paper, and will ask speakers to present in a more informal tone and for different lengths of time depending on the session. These shorter, less formal presentations will minimise preparation time for speakers as well as increasing discussion time for all participants.

With this low-preparation, discursive format in mind, we warmly solicit expressions of interest (not more than 200 words, including a brief biography and details of experience with Literature and Science teaching) from potential speakers. These should be sent to Dr. Will Tattersdill (w.j.tattersdill@bham.ac.uk) not later than October 10^th 2014. Subjects we are anxious to discuss include, but are not limited to:

• Why Literature and Science is worth teaching to undergraduates (and why it might not be)
• Reflections on how, if at all, Literature and Science needs to be taught differently from other undergraduate programmes.
• Particular difficulties encountered in convening a Literature and Science course, be they conceptual, administrative, logistical, or pedagogical.
• Experiences collaborating with academic staff from other disciplines, including the sciences.
• Student reactions to Literature and Science material, positive and negative.

We are committed to inviting contributions from those teaching literature and science across all historical periods, working across international educational contexts as well as within the British higher education system. There will be invited speakers as well as this open call, and current undergraduates will hopefully be among the delegates.

Many of us teach literature and science on our own initiative, coping individually with both the joys and challenges raised by the endeavour. This is an important chance to consolidate those experiences and build strategies – and collegial networks – which will continue to drive the field forward at its grass roots: undergraduate teaching.

Professor Martin Willis

Chair in Science, Literature and Communication

Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies

University of Westminster

32-38 Wells Street

London W1T 3UW

Director, Centre for the Study of Science and Imagination (SCIMAG) – www.westminster.ac.uk/scimag

Editor, Journal of Literature and Science – www.literatureandscience.org

The University of Westminster is a charity and a company limited by guarantee. Registration number: 977818 England. Registered Office: 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW.

CALL FOR PAPERS

PULP STUDIES AREA

Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) National Conference

April 1–4, 2015

New Orleans, LA

Deadline for Abstracts is November 1, 2014

Pulp magazines were a series of mostly English-language, predominantly American, magazines printed on rough pulpwood paper. They were often illustrated with highly stylized, full-page cover art and numerous line art illustrations of the fictional content. They were sold for modest sums, and were targeted at (sometimes specialized) readerships of popular literature, such as western and adventure, detective, fantastic (including the evolving genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror), romance, and sports fiction. The first pulp Argosy, began life as the children’s magazine The Golden Argosy, dated Dec 2, 1882 and the last of the “original” pulps was Ranch Romances and Adventures, Nov. 1971.

The Pulp Studies area exists to support the academic study of pulp writers, editors, readers, and culture. It seeks to invigorate research by bringing together scholars from diverse areas including romance, western, science fiction, fantasy, horror, adventure, detective, and more. Finally, the Pulp Studies area seeks to promote the preservation of the pulps through communication with libraries, museums, and collectors. With this in mind, we are calling for papers and panels that discuss the pulps and their legacy.

Possible authors and topics:

• Magazines: Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, Fight Stories, All-Story, Argosy, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Spicy Detective, Ranch Romances and Adventures, Oriental Stories/Magic Carpet Magazine, Love Story, Flying Aces, Black Mask, and Unknown, to name a few.

• Editors and Owners: Street and Smith (Argosy), Farnsworth Wright (Weird Tales), Hugo Gernsback (Amazing Stories), Mencken and Nathan (Black Mask), John Campbell (Astounding).

• Influential Writers: H.P. Lovecraft, A. E. Merritt, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Robert Bloch, Donald Wandrei, Clark Ashton Smith, and Henry Kuttner. Proposals about contemporary writers in the pulp tradition, such as Joe Lansdale and Michael Chabon are also encouraged. New Weird writers and others, such as China Mieville, whose work is influenced by the pulps, are also of interest.

• Influences on Pulp Writers: H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sax Rohmer, and Jack London were all influences, along with literary and philosophical figures such as Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edgar Allen Poe, and Herbert Spencer.

• Popular Characters: Conan of Cimmeria; Doc Savage; Solomon Kane; Buck Rogers; Northwest Smith; The Domino Lady; Jiril of Joiry; Zorro; Kull of Atlantis; El Borak; The Shadow; The Spider; Bran Mak Morn; Nick Carter; The Avenger; and Captain Future, among others. Also character types: the femme fatale, the he-man, the trickster, racism and villainy, etc.

• Artists: Popular artists including Margaret Brundage (Weird Tales), Frank R. Paul (Amazing Stories), Virgil Finlay (Weird Tales), and Edd Cartier (The Shadow, Astounding).

• Periods: The dime novels; Argosy and the ancestral pulps; Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and the heyday of the pulps; the decline of the pulps in the 50s and 60s; pulps in the age of the Internet.

• Theme and Styles: Masculinity, femininity, and sexuality in the pulps; the savage as hero, the woman as hero, the trickster as hero, colonialism in the pulps, racism and “yellow peril,” Modernism in the pulps, etc.

• Film and Television: Possible topics could include film interpretations such as Conan the Barbarian, pulp-inspired television such as Amazing Stories, and new work based in the “pulp aesthetic” such as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. 

• Comics: Comic book incarnations of pulp magazines and series; “new weird” reinventions of the pulps such as the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and The Watchmen; comic adaptations of old pulp series such as The Shadow, The Spider, Doc Savage and others.

• Cyberculture: Cyberpulps such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies and pulp-influenced games such as the Age of Conan MMORPG or the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.

These are but suggestions for potential panels and presentations. Proposals on other topics are welcome. For general information on the Pulp Studies area, please visit our website: http://pulpstudies.weebly.com/

How to Submit Proposals: Proposals must be submitted through the official PCA conference website: http://ncp.pcaaca.org/

Please send all inquiries to:

Justin Everett, PhD

Interim Director of Writing Programs

University of the Sciences in Philadelphia

600 S. 43rd St.

Philadelphia, PA 19104

j.everet@usp.edu

Jeffrey H. Shanks, RPA

Southeast Archeological Center

2035 E. Paul Dirac Drive

Johnson Building, Suite 120

Tallahassee, FL 32310

jeffrey_shanks@nps.gov

Paradoxa: Call for Papers: “The Futures Industry”

More than thirty years ago, Fredric Jameson suggested in “Progress versus Utopia” (1982) that, far from providing us with blueprints of the future, the function of science fiction was to dramatize our inability to imagine a future distinct from the capitalist present. Much of his work since, including his “genealogy of the future” in Valences of the Dialectic has focused on the importance of speculative fiction for working through the difficulties of utopian thinking in a context thoroughly saturated by capitalist thinking.

Capitalism has colonized our present and our ability to think about the future. But more importantly, it has also consumed this future in the form of futures markets that script certain trajectories as we deplete limited oil reserves and watch the extinction of hundreds of species due to pollution and climate change.

In the twenty-first century, the future has never seemed so polarized, and we oscillate between dystopian visions of scarcity and collapse (what Chris Harmon calls Zombie Capitalism, 2010) and visions of corporate advertising for products such as cellular phones and luxury cars. These “essential” items suggest that their consumers can live in the future now through these technological marvels. Everyone from Monsanto (Monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/feed-the-future-initiative.aspx) to Verizon (verizon.com/powerfulanswers/) to biotech entrepreneur Craig Venter—in his book Life at the Speed of Light (2013)—claims to be building a better world. Such discourse appropriates and erodes the language of those who seek to articulate alternative futures.

This issue of Paradoxa invites papers that address the struggle to imagine—and shape—the future in interdisciplinary frameworks. Mark Fisher argues in Capitalist Realism (2012) that the language of advertising is a key mechanism by which we are encouraged to invest in the future as the future of capitalism. It is imperative that we interrogate these limiting visions of the future and reinvigorate the utopian project of imagining and nurturing alternative visions of the social.

As examples of this reimagining, authors are referred to Arjun Appardurai’s call for “an anthropology of the future” in The Future as Cultural Fact; Elizabeth Povinelli’s analysis of the frozen space-time of neoliberalism and her observation that it destroys alternative futures by “denying them social substance” (Economics of Abandonment 134); Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s work on the economies of biocapital and its Derridean rhetoric of “truth”; Melinda Cooper’s work in Life as Surplus on what she calls “capitalism delirium [which] seeks to refashion the world rather than interpret it” (20).

How might we reclaim the future, not only the material future as a space of greater equity and social justice, but also the future as our imaginative ability to think about estranged and new worlds rather than to capitulate to a future as envisioned by global capital? Can science fiction foster a critical understanding of the intersections of political economy and contemporary technoscience, or does its own status as an entertainment commodity inevitably compromise its capacity as a tool for social critique? What is the role of speculative thinking in political struggle and social justice today?

We invite proposals of 500 words for papers of 5000-9000 words. Proposals are due October 1, 2014 and contributors will be notified within 3 weeks if their abstract is accepted. Full papers will be due July 1, 2015; each paper will be subject to external peer review before acceptance is final.

Please send proposals to Sherryl Vint at sherryl.vint@gmail.com.

CFP: Special Issue of Slayage on Firefly/Serenity / Contact: Michael Goodrum & Philip Smith

Dear Whedon Studies Association Members,

Issue 13.1 of Slayage (Spring 2015) will be a special issue devoted entirely to Firefly/Serenity. It will be guest-edited by Michael Goodrum and Philip Smith, editors of the forthcoming volume Firefly: Academic Approaches to Joss Whedon’s Series to be published by Rowman and Littlefield.

It has been over ten years since Joss Whedon’s Firefly (2002-03) was first screened. Although the narrative covers only one season and a film, the series has enjoyed a long afterlife through comic books, roleplaying games, and the fan community. It has also enjoyed a steady flow of academic responses even if, at times, it has remained somewhat under-represented compared with Whedon’s other work.

The editors seek original contributions concerning Firefly/Serenity. Papers should show a strong awareness of existing academic scholarship on the series and film (including the existing Slayage special issue from 2008). Preference will be given to proposals which take an original approach and/or engage with more recent additions to the Firefly ‘verse, particularly the Serenity comics.

Individuals who are interested in contributing should send a 200-300-word abstract/proposal by August 15, 2014. Submissions will be due September 30, 2014. Please send your proposal to Psmith.firefly@gmail.com.

Final papers will be 5,000 – 7,000 words in length and in Modern Language Association (MLA) style.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Best,

Mitch & Phil

NEMLA 2015

full name / name of organization: 

Chamutal Noimann – BMCC City University of New York

contact email: 

cnoimann@bmcc.cuny.edu

We seek proposals for an approved panel for the 2015 NEMLA conference in Toronto.

Through consistent creation of powerful female heroines the likes of which we have never seen in Victorian literature, Steampunk has emerged as a strong feminist voice that addresses contemporary and current discourses on femininity simultaneously and rethinks our ideas of Victorian gender roles. This panel seeks to examine how Steampunk Young Adult and graphic novels subvert Victorian patriarchy and Empire by creating an alternate past that reimagines them both. Please submit 300-word abstract and bio.

Area: British, Women’s and Gender Studies

Deadline for abstracts Sept. 30, 2014

Session ID: 15117
Session Format: Panel
Link to session submission:https://nemla.org/convention/2015/cfp.html#cfp15117

Focusing on the Post(-): An Interdisciplinary Perspective

October 24-25, 2014

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

The focus of this conference is on what it means to be post-, post, or Post, or whether anyone, any place, or indeed anything can ever be truly “post” after an initial phase. Join us as we explore the state of academic inquiry and discourse in studies that focus on “after” effects, identities, and locations. We are interested in examining how the post makes itself known in a variety of disciplines and ideas, and we have conceived the conference in an attempt to allow for papers that wish to focus on the post itself, on the post under erasure, or on the trace of the past as it locates itself within the post in all areas of study. All scholarly work will be considered, but papers that focus on post-colonialism, post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-race, and post-humanism are especially welcomed. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Animal Studies
• Computer Technology
• Critical Race Studies
• Cybernetics
• (Dis)ability Studies
• Engineering
• Environmental Justice
• Feminist Studies
• Gender Studies
• Media and Popular Culture
• Post 9/11/Security/Surveillance Culture
• Post Apocalypse
• Post Print/Digital Media
• Queer Studies
• Science Fiction/Fantasy
• Sexual Politics

Guest of Honor: Dr. Sherryl Vint

Sherryl Vint has published widely on science fiction, including most recently Science Fiction: A Guide to the Perplexed. She is a Professor of Science Fiction Media Studies and Co-Director of the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Program at the University of California, Riverside, and an editor for the journals Science Fiction Film and Television and Science Fiction Studies. Her current research is on biopolitics and science fiction.

Scholarly work by both faculty and students from all disciplines is welcomed. The goal of this conference is to cross disciplinary boundaries, unifying perspectives on identity, culture, languages, linguistics, and across world literatures.

To apply: Please e-mail a 500 word abstract (for presentations of 20 minutes in length) before August 1, 2014 to faucssaconference@gmail.com. Proposals should include the participant’s name, institutional affiliation, e-mail, and phone number. Proposals for panels are also welcome.

Decisions on abstracts will be sent no later than August 15, 2014.

The Ph.D. in Comparative Studies is an interdisciplinary program in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. For more information, please visit www.fau.edu/comparativestudies.

With dozens of nonfiction books on Joss Whedon’s works from Buffy toAvengers, one critical area has been ignored: Whedon’s comics. In fact, he’s written several series for Marvel and DC, along with independents and the many issues of Angel, Buffy, and Serenity comics for IDW and Dark Horse. While a few isolated essays have tackled Buffy season eight or Whedon’s X-Men run, there is no anthology devoted to only Whedon comics. Now that’s about to change.

Essays on any aspect of Whedon’s comics (as described below) are welcome. The completed essays should be 4000-5000 words. Essays must adhere to MLA format and be friendly and approachable, yet academic in scope and content. New papers or presented conference papers rather than reprints are appreciated. This collection is not yet under contract, but I have several interested publishers who are awaiting a list of essays to be included. McFarland, who publishes most of the Buffy criticism collections, will likely be on board.

Proposal Guidelines: Please send a 350-500 word summary of your proposed essay pasted into your email, along with a short professional bio or cover letter.

Direct inquiries and proposals can be sent to Valerie Estelle Frankel, pop culture author and professor, at valerie at calithwain.com with a subject of WHEDON SUBMISSION.

Abstracts are due Aug 31, Complete papers Nov 30, 2014.

Essays on both canon and “less official” Whedon comics are welcome, as are comparisons between Whedon comics and other comics or other Whedon works. Discussion of comic conventions from canon to art to gender issues are also appreciated.  Other areas, like comparing Whedon’s Avengers movie, Agents of SHIELD, Doctor Horrible, or other shows to comics are also possible. On the shows, Buffy is compared to Spider-Man, Superman and Power Girl, Angel is compared to Batman so much Boreanaz was offered the role, Dark Willow parallels Dark Phoenix, Cordy and Fred are called Wonder Woman, and Xander and Giles are compared to Jimmy Olsen and Alfred…there’s paper material there, too. This anthology welcomes established Whedon scholars as well as enthusiastic new writers.

Which comics are Whedon’s? Canon comics include the following Whedon products (as Whedon wrote or supervised them).

BUFFYVERSE

Fray

Tales of the Slayers

Tales of the Vampires

Buffy: The Origin (reprinted in Buffy Omnibus 1)

Angel: Long Night’s Journey (#1-4) (reprinted in Angel: Omnibus 1)

“Always Darkest” (reprinted in Myspace Dark Horse Presents #4 or available online)

Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season Eight (Whedon wrote #1-5, 10, 11, 16-19)

Angel: After the Fall, Angel: The End, and spin-offs

Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season Nine (Whedon wrote #1-2)

Angel & Faith

Buffy Season Ten and Angel & Faith Vol. 2  2014-

See http://valeriefrankel.wordpress.com/2014/06/29/a-guide-to-the-buffy-and-angel-comics/ for a more elaborate Buffyverse comics guide and reading order.

X-MEN

Astonishing X-Men vol. 3: (#1-24) & Giant Size Astonishing X-Men #1 (reprinted as the collections Astonishing X-Men: Gifted, Dangerous, Torn, Unstoppable)

“Teamwork” (in Giant Size X-Men #3, available online)

SERENITY

Serenity: Those Left Behind

Serenity: Better Days

Serenity: The Shepherd’s Tale

“Serenity: Firefly Class 03-K64 – It’s Never Easy” (available online) by Zack Whedon

Serenity: Leaves on the Wind by Zack Whedon

DOCTOR HORRIBLE

Dr. Horrible and Other Horrible Stories by Zack Whedon

OTHER

“Some Steves” (in Stan Lee Meets The Amazing Spider-Man #1)

Runaways vol. 2 (#25-30) (reprinted as Dead End Kids)

Superman/Batman #26 (p. 20-21)

Sugarshock 1-3 (reprinted in Myspace Dark Horse Presents #1)

Please contact Valerie Estelle Frankel at valerie @ calithwain.com with any questions.

Call for papers – ‘Rethinking Early Photography’: 16th-17th June 2015, University of Lincoln

Keynotes: Kate Flint, Lindsay Smith, Kelley Wilder

Attitudes to photography have undergone a radical shift in recent times. Partly in response to these contemporary changes, historians, curators and photographic practitioners have begun to re-examine older forms of photography: exploring the wide variety of historical technologies and techniques, finding surprising ways in which images were manipulated and determining how an ideology of photographic realism was maintained. Yet there remains a need for scholars to explore questions of early photographic ‘authorship’, singularity and objectivity in much greater detail.

Scholarly studies of nineteenth-century photography have been heavily influenced by later theoretical constructions. As an alternative, Daniel Novak has posited a ‘Victorian theory of photography’. Yet this theory remains unelaborated. Similarly, Elizabeth Edwards and others have called for a move away from the traditional Art History model of analysing photography. This interdisciplinary conference will explore the question of what such an analysis, and such a theory, might look like.

Possible questions and areas of interest for the conference include:

•           How do technological narratives influence our understanding of photography?

•           Photography as a business; photographers as workers.

•           The hegemony of nineteenth-century photographic realism, and resistances to it.

•           Can/should we do away with the Art History model of photography?

•           Alternatives to the photographer-as-author model of photographic exhibition and analysis.

•           To what extent can we think of photography as being separate to other print and visual media?

•           The role of photography in the creation of nineteenth-century celebrity.

•           Early photography as represented in literature, art and film.

•           Photographs as networks; photographs as objects.

•           When does ‘early’ photography end?

•           Does digital photography allow us to ‘read back’ the performativity of images from earlier periods? How might the revival of Victorian photographic techniques by current practitioners influence historians?

Organisers: Owen Clayton, Jim Cheshire, and Hannah Field.

To submit proposals for 20 minute papers, please send an abstract of 200-250 words to rethinkingphotography@gmail.com<mailto:rethinkingphotography@gmail.com>. The deadline is 12th Jan 2015, 5pm (GMT).