International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Pirates: Lifting the Jolly Roger in History and Popular Culture
Edited by Antonio Sanna

Since the times of their brutal aggressions to vessels journeying over the seven seas, pirates have firmly captured the imagination of writers, directors and producers all over the world and have elicited an incredible impact over contemporary culture. Pirates have been studied and represented by Daniel Defoe, Walter Scott, Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson, but they have also appeared in the works of William Shakespeare, Ann Radcliffe and Lord Byron. Although their fictional representation is very different from the reality of the (either duller or more atrocious) actions that they actually committed, these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers have modelled and defined the figure of the maritime outlaws that is still firmly impressed in our minds: expert mariners, bold hunters for treasures who were often obsessed with revenge, vulgar and ruthless predators roaming the coasts and the deep seas of the five continents. Cinema has equally invested in such a figure, from Albert Parker’s The Black Pirate (1926), Michael Curtiz’s The Black Hawk (1940) and Disney’s Treasure Island (1950) to the successful saga Pirates of the Caribbean (2003-2017) – whose most recent instalment will be in cinemas in 2017 – and Shinji Aramaki’s Space Pirate Captain Harlock (2013). Nevertheless, the figure of the pirate has not been confined to these media and has freely roamed through theatre, the visual arts, manga, anime, video games and park rides, thus demonstrating its centrality in contemporary popular culture.

This anthology will explore the figure of the pirate from multidisciplinary perspectives. This volume seeks previously-unpublished essays that explore the heterogeneous representations of both historical figures and fictional characters. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the subject. There are indeed several themes worth exploring when analyzing the historical and fictional representation of pirates, utilizing any number of theoretical frameworks of your choosing. Contributions may include (but are not limited to) the following topics:

Historical pirates (in the seven seas)
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary pirates
Twentieth-century and contemporary representations of pirates in literature
Manga and anime
Pirates in the visual arts and on the stage
The Pirates of the Caribbean saga
Video games
Pirates and philosophy
Pirates and sea creatures (including monsters and mermaids)
Humour, Black Humour and the Macabre
Gender and queer readings
Ecocriticism
Alienation and misperception, conformity/nonconformity
Disfigurement, deformity and (dis)ability
Death and the afterlife
Adaptations, Remakes and Appropriations
Music in films on pirates
Fan practice and fan communities

The anthology will be organized into thematic sections around these topics and others that emerge from submissions. We are open to works that focus on other topics as well and authors interested in pursuing other related lines of inquiry. Feel free to contact the editor with any questions you may have about the project and please share this announcement with colleagues whose work aligns with the focus of this volume.

Submit a 300-500 word abstract of your proposed chapter contribution, a brief CV and complete contact information to Dr. Antonio Sanna (isonisanna@hotmail.com) by 1 March 2016. Full chapters of 4000-6000 words would be due by June/July 2017. Note: all full chapters submitted will be included subject to review.

Tolkien Conference at University of Vermont

deadline for submissions:
February 1, 2017

full name / name of organization:
14th Annual Tolkien at UVM Conference

contact email:
cvaccaro@uvm.edu

14th Annual Tolkien at UVM Conference

Saturday April 8th, 8;30am-5:30pm, Campus

Theme: Romances in Middle-earth

Organizers of the Tolkien at UVM Conference are now accepting abstracts for the 2017 conference until the February 1st deadline.

We welcome papers on every topic but will give priority to those addressing the theme. Tolkien wrote that he had the romances of William Morris in mind when writing The Lord of the Rings. We also know he was ispired by the Arthurian romances of England, Wales, and France. Tolkien’s own interlacing narrative style is very much derived from this medieval genre (while also anticipating the Post-modern). Additionally, Tolkien wrote of numerous romances of great intensity and poignncy within his narrative framework. Papers might consider these within the context of miscegenation, gender fluidity, or the homo-erotic, or they might explore other areas of interest.

Please submit abstracts by the February 1st deadline to Christopher Vaccaro at cvaccaro@uvm.edu

Please find attached the Call-for-Papers for the Current Research in Speculative Fiction (CRSF)’s 2017 postgraduate conference! CRSF is a conference for postgrads by postgrads in the fields of speculative, fantastic, and weird fiction (and all related areas).

Returning for it’s 7th year, the conference will take place at the University of Liverpool, on the 9th of June 2017, and this year we have the pleasure of welcoming Dr Bernice Murphy from Trinity College Dublin and Dr Robert Maslen from the University of Glasgow.

The deadline for abstracts is the 31st of March 2017.

CRSF 2017 Call for Papers

CFP: Star Wars and Folkloristics
by John Price

The Folk Awakens: Star Wars and Folkloristics in Popular Culture
A special issue of New Directions in Folklore

https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/ndif

The resurgence of the Star Wars film franchise provides folklorists a unique insight into the performance, reception, transmission, and creation of folklore in real-time. As a trademarked franchise, Star Wars encompasses movies, television shows, toys, games, clothing, and countless other forms of consumable popular culture artifacts. Allegedly built as a new version of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, the franchise lives in the culture as more than just popular productions, but as a hybrid narrative form that imposes a top-down narrative structure onto a fan community that reciprocates and participates through performative world building. The producers of Star Wars and its fans have in effect created an entire folk system around the movies, including fan-productions like books, costumes, and holidays. This special issue of New Directions in Folklore will frame Star Wars and its role in culture in the context of folkloristic and ethnographic methodologies. Contributions are welcome from any folkloristic perspective on topics such as the following:

The intersection of popular culture and folklore
The transmission of narratives over generations
Embodied fandom and cosplay
Vernacular religions and its evolution
Crafting fandom in a hybridized digital culture
Nostalgia and memory through cinema
The complexities of narrative
The future of the narrative museum
The question of authorship and formal folklore
The power of cinema on popular culture
Ethnographic analyses of fan communities
The role of digital culture in formalizing vernacular culture

Proposals accepted no later than January 31, 2017. Please submit your name, CV, abstract (200-300 words), and a brief note on your research methods (~100 words) to newdirectionsinfolklore@gmail.com.

All submissions should be original works that are not previously published or currently under consideration for publication.

CFP for Console-ing Passions Panel: Black Mirror, Bleak Future: Representations of Technology, Feminism, and the Future

deadline for submissions:
January 10, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Console-ing Passions

contact email:
brookeb@usc.edu

CFP for Console-ing Passions Panel: Black Mirror, Bleak Future: Representations of Technology, Feminism, and the Future

Brooke Bennett (University of Southern California) and Emma Bedor Hiland (University of Minnesota) are looking to construct a panel for the Console-ing Passions Conference taking place at East Carolina University (Greenville, NC) during July 27-29, 2017. The conference submission deadline is Monday, January 16, 2017.

We are creating a panel proposal on the Channel 4 (2011-2014)/Netflix (2014-present) program Black Mirror, and are soliciting other potential participants whose work on the show relates to one (or more than one) of the following:

Technology and identity;

Feminist media studies;

Governmentality;

Social media;

Digital and/or affective labor.

Proposals on aspects of Black Mirror that are not listed above are also welcome. If interested in joining the panel, please submit an abstract of 250 words to Brooke Bennett at brookeb@usc.edu by Tuesday, January 10, 2017.

Mythmoot IV: Invoking Wonder

deadline for submissions:
February 28, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Mythgard Institute by Signum University

contact email:
events@mythgard.org

Mythmoot combines academic conference, literary creative meet-up, and fan convention all into one. It develops studies in fields not considered primary in literary scholarship such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, gothic, folklore, children’s literature, etc., in a way that academics and enthusiasts will appreciate.

Mythgard Institute from Signum University is turning Mythmoot IV into a secondary-world experience for academics, friends, and fans. Confirmed guest speakers are Dr. Verlyn Flieger and Dr. Mike Drout, with more special guests to be announced. Mythmoot IV will be held from June 1st to 4th, 2017, at the National Conference Center in Leesburg, VA. This year’s theme is…

Invoking Wonder

Mythmoot IV is accepting Paper, Panel, Workshop, and Creative Presentation (storytelling, music, visual arts, etc.) Proposals related to:

Imaginative Literature — Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Speculative Fiction from Mary Shelley and H.P Lovecraft to Ursula Le Guin and Neil Gaiman.

Tolkien and Inklings Studies — Research on the works and lives of the Inklings as they interact with each other, their modern context, and classic and imaginative literature.

Germanic Philology — Explore relationships between language and literature in the past, present, and future.

Anything Else — Academic research or creative presentations that traverse literature in its wondrous variety.

~ Paper proposals should be approximately 100 words. Presentations will be under 20 minutes long.

~ Panel proposals must be submitted in one inclusive email, with approximately 100 words describing each paper. Panels will be presented in 1-hour sessions.

~ Workshop proposals should be approximately 200 words. Workshops will be allotted 1 hour in total.

~ Creative Presentation proposals should provide a short description (fewer than 200 words) of the presentation. Creative Presentations should be no longer than 30 minutes.

Proposals are accepted through 28 February 2017. Send proposals to events@mythgard.org with a subject line of “Paper Proposal,” “Panel Proposal,” “Workshop Proposal,” or “Creative Presentation Proposal.” Include a brief bio and A/V requirements. Please note that submission of any proposal is considered agreement by the presenter to attend Mythmoot IV and deliver the presentation if it is accepted. Presentations of any form will not be delivered in absentia.

Visit http://mythgard.org/events/mythmoot-iv/ and http://signumuniversity.org/event/mythmoot-iv-invoking-wonder/ for more details and registration.

The Velvet Light Trap Issue #81: Power, Freedom, and Control in Gaming

deadline for submissions:
January 15, 2017

full name / name of organization:
The Velvet Light Trap

contact email:
velvetlighttrap.austin@gmail.com

The Velvet Light Trap Issue #81: Power, Freedom, and Control in Gaming

Game studies is no longer an ‘emerging’ field and video games can no longer be considered a ‘new’ or niche medium. The commercial video game industry is now over 40 years old and games are an increasingly intrinsic part of the symbolic terrain of culture. The continued economic growth of the global video game industry is well documented and staggering, and this is reflected in the growing body of academic work that engages with the multifaceted ways that games are designed, created, received, and played. In recent years, scholars have productively moved away from the hotly contested theoretical divisions between ludology and narratology that defined early game studies. Yet, at the same time, games scholarship continues to privilege digital gaming, in the process often sidelining or excluding from academic discussions the vibrant range of game design paradigms and player practices in non-digital gaming, such as board games, card games, and role-playing games. This issue of The Velvet Light Trap considers the place of gaming within media studies and the potential value of utilizing a cultural studies framework for understanding issues of power, freedom, and control in game studies.

As the game industry has matured alongside information and communications technologies, methods of production and industry lore have become normalized as the scope and diversity of games being produced becomes ever more richly nuanced. Triple-A franchises, such as Grand Theft Auto, Fallout, and Madden NFL, are gaming blockbusters, with production teams of hundreds, production budgets of millions, and revenue in the billions. The success of the mainstream industry combined with digital distribution has also opened up niches for thriving independent and underground game scenes, where titles as varied as Undertale, Depression Quest, The Stanley Parable, and Papers, Please, have interrogated the act of play itself while expanding conceptions of what forms and functions games can take.

The increasing complexity of the globally networked gaming industry demands scholarly engagement from a variety of perspectives. The scholarly turn to games and gaming is producing a groundswell of work that parses the disparate yet often interrelated patterns of more micro-level historicity and phenomena, such as game aesthetics and narrative engagement; player identity and communities; emergent cultures and practices the circumscribed agency of designers; and issues of local production, histories, and archives. Scholarship on analog formats like role-playing games and board games have foregrounded the importance of looking beyond the digital, highlighting the economic and cultural contexts of a broader range of gaming and play practices.

This issue of The Velvet Light Trap seeks to build upon this body of research and further consider how games reproduce popular ideas about identity, including issues of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, ability, etc., through characters, gaming worlds, play, design, and performance. Which voices, perspectives, and sensibilities are privileged in gaming culture, and how can the gaming industry become more inclusive and self-reflective about the practices it engages in and choices it makes? How are communities traditionally marginalized in the gaming economy asserting greater agency? How are issues of power, freedom, and play negotiated, challenged, or reinscribed in the various games and gaming practices marking today’s increasingly expansive media and cultural landscape?

Other possible areas of inquiry in digital and analog gaming include but are not limited to:

● Theories of play
● Gaming pedagogy
● Archive/Collection
● Game design (development & production); designer agency
● Labor, locality, and the global commercial market
● Global gaming (Non-U.S. products or cultures)
● Marketing and distribution
● Games as ancillary merchandise
● Games as parts of transmedia franchises
● Metagaming and paratextual engagement
● Adaptation (game to film/TV; film/TV to game)
● Gamer culture and identity
● Gender and #Gamergate
● Celebrity
● Digital access and class privilege
● Ludic cartographies
● Mobile apps
● Virtual Reality
● Mods & Freeware

Submission Guidelines
Submissions should be between 8,000 and 10,000 words, formatted in Chicago Style. Please submit an electronic copy of the paper, along with a separate one-page abstract, both saved as a Microsoft Word file. Remove any identifying information so that the submission is suitable for anonymous review. Quotations not in English should be accompanied by translations. Send electronic manuscripts and/or any questions to vltcfp@gmail.com by January 15th, 2017.

About the Journal
TVLT is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal of film, television, and new media. The journal draws on a variety of theoretical and historiographic approaches from the humanities and social sciences and welcomes any effort that will help foster the ongoing processes of evaluation and negotiation in media history and criticism. While TVLT maintains its traditional commitment to the study of American film, it also expands its scope to television and other media, to adjacent institutions, and to other nations’ media. The journal encourages both approaches and objects of study that have been neglected or excluded in past scholarship.

Graduate students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Texas at Austin coordinate issues in alternation, and each issue is devoted to a particular theme. VLT’s Editorial Advisory Board includes such notable scholars as Charles Acland, Richard Allen, Ben Aslinger, Caetlin Benson-Allott, Mark Betz, Corey Creekmur, Michael Curtin, Kay Dickinson, Bambi Haggins, Scott Higgins, Mary Celeste Kearney, Jon Kraszewski, Lucas Hilderbrand Roberta Pearson, Nicholas Sammond, Jacob Smith, Jonathan Sterne, Cristina Venegas. VLT’s graduate student editors are assisted by their local faculty advisors: Mary Beltrán, Ben Brewster, Jonathan Gray, Michele Hilmes, Lea Jacobs, Derek Johnson, Vance Kepley, Shanti Kumar, Charles Ramírez Berg, Thomas Schatz, and Janet Staiger.

Speculative Fictions and Socio-Ecologies of the Americas

deadline for submissions:
January 13, 2017

full name / name of organization:
American Literature Association

contact email:
nmerola@risd.edu

The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) seeks proposals for the panel “Speculative Fictions and Socio-Ecologies of the Americas” to be held at the Annual Conference of the American Literature Association in Boston, Massachusetts on 25-28 May 2017.

This panel seeks submissions that examine the ways in which North American, Caribbean, Central American, and South American authors have used the conventions and techniques of speculative fiction (including science fiction and magical realism) to represent and respond to socio-ecological circumstances, events, and issues.

By 13 January 2017, please send 300-500 word abstracts and one-page CVs to Nicole Merola at nmerola@risd.edu. Please include your contact information, academic affiliation, and any A/V requests.

This ALA panel is sponsored by ASLE. While you do not need to be a member of ASLE to submit a proposed abstract for an ALA panel, presenters must be or become ASLE members before the ALA conference in order to participate in an ASLE-sponsored panel.

Compared to film, TV and the novel, science fiction theatre is not a widely discussed topic. But, whilst there is only one book from the 1990s that lists the history of sf plays, there is a long legacy of staging the fantastical, including the importance of Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1920) in coining the term ‘robot’. With contemporary mainstream plays such as Constellations, The Nether, Mr Burns and X, sf theatre may be experiencing something of a revival. There are an increasing number of sf theatre companies worldwide as well as a new anthology in sf plays.

Foundation seeks articles for a special issue on science fiction and theatre, to be published in winter 2017. Why is sf not analysed as often in theatre than other media? What is lost and what is gained when a text is adapted for the stage? Are there any genre tropes that cannot be staged effectively in theatre? What tropes work particularly well for the stage? All topics and methodologies are welcome including (but not limited to) stage depictions of the future, constructions and representations of sf tropes, performing the non- and post-human, space-time on stage, and adaptations of sf films and novels.

Please send submissions of up to 6000 words by 5th February 2017 to journaleditor@sf-foundation.org, attaching the file in either .rtf or .doc format. For questions about formatting, please see the style guide at www.sf-foundation.org; for all other enquiries, please contact Susan Gray at susan.gray87@gmail.com

Technoculture’s Ongoing Call for Projects and Papers (Continuous Publication)

deadline for submissions:
December 31, 2999

full name / name of organization:
Technoculture: An Online Journal of Technology in Society

contact email:
inquiries@tcjournal.org

Technoculture is accepting both creative works that use new media, preferably on the subject of technology, and critical essays from a broad range of academic disciplines that focus on cultural studies of technology.

Essays we publish examine the topic technology and society, or, perhaps, technologies and societies. This call is ongoing and open topic, and we encourage a broad definition of technology. Topics could include depictions of technologies that treat a wide range of subjects related to the social sciences and humanities.

As a journal, we are interested in a conception of technology and the humanist impulse that pushes beyond contemporary American culture and its fascination with computers; we seek papers that deal with any technology or technologies in any number of historical periods from any relevant theoretical perspective.

Topics might include:

The use of technology by youth, especially beyond or other than their use of social media
The use of technology by older individuals, especially beyond or other than their use of social media
The use of technology by marginalized individuals, especially beyond or other than their use of social media
The access problem today
Technology and its implications for both oppression and liberation
Community uses of technology, especially to make or hinder change of various kinds
Medical issues and technologies
Intellectual property concerns, especially patents and trademarks, and in different historical moments
Literary and cinematic descriptions of technology in any historical period such as Bellamy’s Looking Backward or Blade Runner
Use of technology from non-Western perspectives
Class and its implications in the use (or lack of use) of technology
Game studies (especially in the form of or delivered via playable online games)
Music, theater, and other plastic arts and the use of technology by artists
Sound and silence, and especially noise, the latter especially in positive senses and applications
Alternative forms of print texts and especially of “books” and games
Work and labor issues
Leisure
We also publish creative works, but these must use media (all forms with the exception of print type artifacts) in new or exciting ways. No print type creative texts accepted. This might include:

Audio works
Video works
Digital images, especially those that use digital manipulation or retro images and aren’t just images straight from the camera
Digital poems
Other digitally enhanced or produced creative works, so long as they are stored on our server and otherwise self-contained on our website
Creative works can be on any subject (while critical articles and essays must be on the subject of technology)

For critical articles, we would like to move beyond print texts delivered via virtual means though we do not (yet) insist on native hypertexts or extended use of media. We especially encourage critical articles that are themselves games and/or interactive texts of various sorts.

We will publish scholarly/critical papers in a citation style appropriate to the home disciplines of the authors (MLA preferred).

We publish art work and especially media designed for display/dissemination on a computer monitor including still images, video or audio. We also publish documentation of art installations and exhibitions.

Creative and critical works published in Technoculture are published continuously; we will close off each year’s volume on 31 December of each year and rollover all submissions in process at that time to the next year automatically.

All critical and creative works are peer reviewed.

We encourage inquiries at inquiries at tcjournal dot org for reviews of all sorts of materials (books, movies, theater, games, objects and so on, all on the subject of technology), though for reviews, we do want you to inquire first! Reviews must be timely: their subject must have a copyright, patent or licensing date of no more than two or three years old from the date of inquiry.

In all events, we are not interested in “how to” pedagogical papers that deal with the use of technology in the classroom. PLEASE do not inquire about pedagogical essays.

Authors of all materials are welcome to submit abstracts and inquiries for critical works, creative works and reviews to inquiries at tcjournal dot org. Formal submissions of all works will be by Submittable; please visit and sign up for a Submittable account (if you do not yet have one) at https://technoculture.submittable.com and submit your work there.