International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Science Fiction Studies announces the fourth annual R.D. Mullen Fellowship supporting research in the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Utopian Literature at the University of California, Riverside. Awards of up to $1500 are available to fund research in the archive during the 2012-13 academic year. Students in good standing in graduate degree-granting programs are eligible to apply. We welcome applications from international students.

The Mullen Fellowship, named in honor of SFS’s founding editor, promotes archival work in the Eaton’s extensive holdings, which include over 100,000 hardcover and paperback books, over 250,000 fanzines, full runs of all major pulp and digest magazines, and the manuscripts of prominent sf writers such as Gregory Benford, David Brin, and Anne McCaffrey. Other noteworthy parts of the Collection are: 500 shooting scripts of science fiction films; 3500 volumes of proto-sf “boy’s books” of the Tom Swift variety; works of sf in numerous foreign languages, including Chinese, Czech, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish; a large collection of taped fan conventions and taped interviews with American, British, and French writers; reference materials on topics such as applied science, magic, witchcraft, UFOs, and Star Trek; an extensive collection of anime and manga; and the largest holdings of critical materials on science fiction and fantasy in the United States. Further information about the Eaton Collection can be found online at: <http://eaton.ucr.edu/>.

Applications should include a cover letter explaining the candidate’s academic experience and preparation, a CV, a 2-3 page proposal outlining a specific and well-developed agenda for research in the Eaton archive, a prospective budget detailing expenses, and two letters of recommendation from individuals familiar with the candidate’s academic work.

The deadline for submission is April 6, 2012. Applications will be reviewed by a committee of sf scholars, and successful applicants will be notified in early May. Electronic submission (as RTF or PDF files) of applications to is preferred. Applications should be sent to: Professor Rob Latham at <rob.latham@ucr.edu>.

MAGGIE GEE CONFERENCE
University of St Andrews and University of Lincoln
(Venue: University of St Andrews, 30-31 August, 2012)
Contact email: gee@gylphi.co.uk

This two-day international conference aims to bring together scholars for the first academic conference dedicated to Maggie Gee’s writing. Gee is one of Britain’s most prolific and critically-acclaimed novelists: the author of 12 novels, as well as collections of short stories, edited anthologies of contemporary writing and, most recently, an autobiography My Animal Life (Telegram Books, 2010).

Since she was selected for Granta’s first list of Best of Young British Novelists in 1983 (in company with Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Rose Tremain), Gee has worked in publishing, academic research (gaining a PhD in the twentieth-century novel from Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1980) and was the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently working as one of the Society’s Vice Presidents, as well as acting as Visiting Professor of Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. In addition to her publishing and academic responsibilities, Gee is also highly critically acclaimed: her eighth novel, The White Family (2002), was shortlisted in 2002 for the Orange ! Prize for Fiction as well as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2004.

Ceaselessly inventive and astonishing, Gee’s writing is distinguished by ambitious scope and aesthetic innovation, tackling political themes and writing across a broad range of subjects and genres. Intertwining intimate domestic dramas with grand-scale, seismic shifts in cosmic balance, several of Gee’s novels imagine global disaster, apocalyptic futures and environmental catastrophes. Meanwhile, Gee is also concerned with exploring issues of racism, prejudice, cultural difference and class inequalities. Her body of work confronts political attitudes in contemporary Britain through satire, comedy, family saga, thriller and romance.

The organisers welcome papers on any topic related to Maggie Gee’s writing. Topics might include, but are not limited to, Maggie Gee’s writing and:

• genre, science fiction, thriller, autobiographical fiction, romance, family saga, political satire
• war, terrorism, violence and political activism
• (post-)apocalypse and ecocatastrophe
• inter-generational conflict, familial relationships
• utopian and dystopian thinking
• the urban and the rural
• racism, migration and multicultural Britain
• the role, and representation, of women
• the environment and new ecocritical directions
• class, social mobility, poverty and social inequality
• modernism and its inheritances
• death, suicide and posthumous narrative voices
• the representation of time and imagining the future
• nuclear weaponry
• society, nature and the cosmos
• cosmopolitanism, Africa, Japan
• contemporary women’s writing and publishing
• translation, the British publishing industry

The conference welcomes papers from any discipline, a variety of theoretical perspectives, and those which engage with media beyond that of the written text. Submissions are welcome from both research students and academics. Please send a title and 300 word abstract for a 20 minute paper along with your name, affiliation and 100 word professional biography to gee@glyphi.co.uk by 29th February 2012.

Conference website: http://www.gylphi.co.uk/criticalessays/index.php
Conference blog: http://maggiegeeconference.blogspot.com/2011_12_01_archive.html
Conference Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/#!/events/154402491290124/

The conference is organised by Dr Sarah Dillon, Lecturer in Contemporary Fiction, School of English, University of St Andrews and Dr Caroline Edwards, Lecturer in English, Department of English, University of Lincoln. For more information on the research and professional activities of Dr Dillon and Dr Edwards, see their homepages:

• http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/english/people/academicstaff/dillon/
• http://lincoln.ac.uk/humanities/staff/3004.asp

For more information regarding the St Andrews School of English and its activities, as well as the Department of English at the University of Surrey, see the homepages:

• http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/english/
• http://lincoln.ac.uk/humanities/english/default.htm

The conference is sponsored by Gylphi Arts and Humanities Publisher. Selected papers from the conference proceedings will be published asMaggie Gee: Critical Essays, with a foreword by Gee, as part of Gylphi’s Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series (Series Editor: Dr Sarah Dillon). For more information regarding the Series see: http://www.gylphi.co.uk/criticalessays/index.php

The MLA Discussion Group on Comics & Graphic Narratives are pleased to announce the following CFP for a panel we hope to present at the upcoming MLA conference, to be held Jan. 2013:

Black Studies and Comics

Call for Papers for a proposed panel at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, 3-6 Jan. 2013, in Boston. Sponsored by the MLA Discussion Group on Comics & Graphic Narratives.

How Black Studies might inform comic scholarship and vice versa, to promote greater understanding of race and representation. 500-word abstract in .doc or .pdf by 9 March 2012; Charles Hatfield (charles.hatfield@gmail.com).

This CFP has been posted at the website for the Comics & Graphic Narratives Group, along with the Group’s other two CFPs for 2013: http://graphicnarratives.org/category/calls-for-papers/ [.] Please visit the site and see what we have planned for the coming year! We update the site regularly, and, besides our own Group news, we post information about other comics studies-related activity at MLA as well.

A fuller version of this CFP is enclosed at the bottom of this message. Thank you for your attention!

Charles Hatfield
2012-2013 Chair, MLA Discussion Group on Comics & Graphic Narratives

BLACK STUDIES AND COMICS

Call for Papers for a proposed panel at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, 3-6 Jan. 2013, in Boston. Sponsored by the MLA Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives.

Since representation is at the heart of graphic narrative in all its forms—including comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, webcomics, and panel cartoons—analyzing comics should be of central importance to scholars of race. To take but a single example, one of the pioneers of the newspaper strip, George Herriman, was a Black Southerner whose work offers subtle and complex commentary on race and color. Herriman—like Homer Plessy a mulatto from New Orleans—produced Krazy Kat, perhaps the most critically acclaimed and artistically influential strip in American history, from 1913 up to his death in 1944. Yet the realities of Herriman’s origins remained obscure in his own lifetime, and even today scholars of the Harlem Renaissance rarely if ever align Herriman with the New Negro movement. Nor do most scholars grant more than cursory attention to the possible links between Herriman’s own racial hybridity and the formal innovations that have enabled Krazy Kat to influence figures as diverse as Picasso, Walt Disney, and Jay Cantor.

This proposed panel seeks to tease out these and other potential areas where the methods of Black Studies may inform comic scholarship, and vice versa. We hope greater collaboration between these disciplines will yield a greater understanding of race and representation in one of America’s most vital cultural archives.

We invite proposals on all topics relevant to this theme, including but not necessarily limited to:

• The legibility (and ironies) of race in George Herriman’s Krazy Kat
• African-American cartooning pioneers, e.g. Herriman, Oliver Harrington, Jackie Ormes, Morrie Turner
• Ho Che Anderson’s King and other graphic representations of the Civil Rights Movement
• Black biography in comics, e.g. King, Santiago’s 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente, Von Eeden’s The Original Johnson
• Contemporary African-American strip cartoonists, e.g. Robb Armstrong, Ray Billingsley, Barbara Brandon, Keith Knight, Aaron McGruder
• McGruder’s Boondocks and Birth of a Nation
• Samuel Delany’s comics work, including Empire, Bread & Wine, and Wonder Woman
• Comics and Afro-futurism
• Black superheroes and racial ideology
• Morales and Baker’s Captain America, in Truth: Red, White, and Black
• Cyborgs and race in American comics
• Encounters between comics and hip-hop, e.g. Ghostface Killah et al.’s Cell Block Z; Slug, Murs, and Mahfood’s Felt; MF Grimm and Wimberly’s Sentences
• Mat Johnson’s comics work, including Incognegro, Dark Rain, and the forthcoming Right State
• Jeremy Love’s Bayou and the nadir
• Depictions of Blackness in manga, e.g. Koike and Kano’s Color of Rage, Hiramoto’s Me and the Devil Blues
• Blackness, racial caricature, and Otherness in French-language bandes dessinées and other traditions
• Black entrepreneurship in comics, e.g. Fitzgerald’s Fast Willie Jackson; Milestone Media; the Afrocentric self-publishers of the 1990s
• Race in graphic depictions of the New Orleans disaster, e.g., Dark Rain, Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge
• Scholarly and curatorial recoveries of Black cartooning
• The archive of comics and the archive of slavery
• Masks and other metaphors of double consciousness in superhero comics
• EC Comics’ commentaries on racial discrimination
• Caricature and stereotype in Eisner, Crumb, Spiegelman, and others

Send 500 word abstracts in .doc or .pdf form to Charles Hatfield: charles.hatfield@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is 9 March 2012. Submitters will receive notification of results from the Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives by no later than April 1.

PLEASE NOTE: This CFP is for a proposed, not a guaranteed, session at MLA 2013, meaning it is contingent on approval by the MLA Program Committee (which will make its decisions after April 1). All prospective presenters must be current MLA members by no later than 7 April 2012.