International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Call for Papers
The 2013 Joint Eaton/SFRA Conference
Science Fiction Media
April 10-14, 2013
Riverside Marriott Hotel
Riverside, California

This conference—cosponsored by the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy (UC Riverside) and the Science Fiction Research Association—will examine science fiction in multiple media. The past several decades have witnessed an explosion in SF texts across the media landscape, from film and TV to comics and digital games. We are interested in papers that explore SF as a multimedia phenomenon, whether focusing on popular mass media, such as Hollywood blockbusters, or on niche and subcultural forms of expression, such as MUDs and vidding. We invite paper and panel proposals that focus on all forms of SF, including prose fiction, and that address (but are not limited to) the following topics:

• Mainstream Hollywood vs. Global SF Cinema
• SF Comics and Manga
• SF Anime and Animation
• SF on the Internet and the World Wide Web
• Multimedia “dispersed” SF narratives
• Fandom, Cosplay, Mashups, and Remixing
• Broadcast and Cable SF Television
• SF Videogames
• World’s Fairs, Theme Parks, and other “Material” SF Media
• Short-form SF film
• Afrofuturism
• SF and/in Music
• SF Idiom and Imagery in Advertising
• Webisodes and TV Games
• SF Art and Illustration

The conference will also feature the fourth Science Fiction Studies Symposium on the topic of “SF Media(tions),” with speakers Mark Bould, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., and Vivian Sobchack. Keynote speakers and special guests will be announced as they are confirmed; see the conference website at http://eatonconference.ucr.edu/ for periodic updates.

Conference sessions will be held at the newly remodeled and centrally located Riverside Marriott Hotel, with rooms at a reduced conference rate ($109). For more about the hotel, see their website at: http://www.marriott.com/hotels/ hotel-information/travel/ralmc-riverside-marriott.

A block of rooms will also be available at a discount ($139) at the historic Mission Inn Hotel and Spa two blocks from the Marriott: http://missioninn.com.

Rooms in both hotels are limited and will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Abstracts of 500 words (for papers of 20-minutes in length) should be submitted by September 14, 2012. We also welcome panel proposals gathering three papers on a cohesive topic. Send electronic submissions to conference co-chair Melissa Conway at Melissa.Conway@ucr.edu with the subject heading: EATON/SFRA CONFERENCE PROPOSAL. Please include a brief bio with your abstract and indicate whether your presentation would require A/V. Participants will be informed by December 1 if their proposals have been accepted.

The Science Fiction Division of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association invites paper proposals for the 110^th annual PAMLA conference, held this year at Seattle University, in Seattle, Washington from October 19^th – 21^st, 2012.

All abstracts proposing original science fiction scholarship will receive full consideration.

To propose a paper, please follow this link and use the Online Proposal Submission Form, which will help guide your paper title, abstract, and proposal (of no more than 500 words) to the Science Fiction Division by the April 22^nd deadline: http://www.pamla.org/2012/proposals

A few official stipulations:

• Members may only deliver one paper at the conference. You may submit more than one proposal, but as soon as you accept an invitation, you must inform the organizers of the other sessions that you are no longer eligible to present in their sessions.
• Papers may not be read in absentia.
• Participation in the conference requires payment of PAMLA 2012 membership dues by June 1^st, 2012 and the separate conference registration fee by September 15^th, 2012.

About the conference venue:

Seattle University, founded in 1891, is a Jesuit Catholic university located on 50 acres in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. More than 7,900 students are enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs within eight schools and colleges. U.S. News and World Report’s “Best Colleges 2011” ranks Seattle University among the top ten universities in the West that offer a full range of masters and undergraduate programs.

Learn more at Seattle University’s website.

NETWORKING KNOWLEDGE
CALL FOR PAPERS: AMERICAN TELEFANTASY

Television schedules are currently rife with Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror programmes. Whereas the re-launched Doctor Who continues to lead the charge of contemporary British telefantasy (Merlin, Being Human, Misfits et al), US shows attract large audiences, extensive media coverage and – since Peter Dinklage’s Emmy win for Game of Thrones – mainstream awards.

Established programmes such as True Blood, Fringe and Sanctuary offer a continued presence on primetime schedules; while cable shows such as The Walking Dead and Falling Skies have had demonstrable ratings success. However, is the demise of previously dominant franchises such as Star Trek, Stargate and Battlestar Galactica representative of an uncertain future?  Or will the genre continue to thrive thanks to high-profile newcomers with celebrity showrunners like JJ Abrams’ Alcatraz, Steven Spielberg’s Terra Nova and Kevin Williamson’s The Secret Circle?

The prevalence of contemporary anxieties centered upon (and within) television Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror appear to indicate an opportune time to consider how US telefantasy might be understood, examined and contextualised.

Papers of between 6,000 and 8,000 words are invited from postgraduate students and early career researchers across the humanities and social sciences for this special edition of Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA-PGN.  Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Historical case studies
• Franchises and/or Authorship
• The role of technology in science fiction television
• Representing (in)human subjectivities and/or identities
• The aesthetics of Fantasy television
• Constructions of utopia/dystopia
• Genre and/or narrative theory
• Marketing television Horror
• Performance and/or Stardom
• Issues of reception
• Telefantasy and realism

Proposals of approx. 250 words should be directed to the issue’s guest editors Rhys Thomas at rothomas@gmail.com or Sophie Halliday at smhalliday@gmail.com by 6th April 2012.  If accepted, completed articles need to be submitted by 1st June 2012.  For any further information, please contact Rhys, Sophie or NK general editor Tom Phillips at knowledge.networking257@gmail.com.

This two-day multidisciplinary conference which takes place in Trinity College Dublin 20-21 July 2012, will explore the role of green man and wild man motifs in twentieth and twenty-first century children’s culture. From Puck to Captain Planet, the green man motif may help to kindle ecological awareness and excite the environmental imagination. The green man offers education and guidance and a release from the pressures and responsibilities of the civic space. Yet the spaces the green man inhabits – forests and wildernesses – are also sites of wild abandon, savagery and panic where human characters become wild men and slip away from their civilised identities altogether. From Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain, to Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, to Linda Newbery Lob, to Almond’s The Savage, to Siobhan Dowd and Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls, the motif of the wild child and the wild man pervades twentieth and twenty-first century children’s culture. This conference will celebrate all aspects of the green man and the wild man in children’s culture. Keynote speakers include Roni Natov and Jim Kay.

Papers on literature, art, comics/graphic novels, video games, film and music are welcome. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Superheroes and Supervillains
• Green Women
• Hermits
• Puck/Pan/Pantheism
• Wildness and Savagery
• Ecopedagogy
• Independence
• Wild Holidays
• Exile
• Forest Dwellers
• Feral Children
• Flower Fairies and Forest Spirits
• Green Rhetoric
• Ecocritical responses to the Green man

Abstracts of 200 words for 20 minute papers should be sent to greenchildrenslit@gmail.com before 5pm on Friday March 30th 2012.

The Science Fiction Foundation (SFF) will be holding the sixth annual Masterclass in sf criticism in 2012.
Dates: June 22nd, 23rd, 24th 2012.
Location: Middlesex University, London (the Hendon Campus, nearest underground, Hendon).
Delegate costs will be £190 per person, excluding accommodation.
Accommodation: students are asked to find their own accommodation, but help is available from the administrator (farah.sf@gmail.com).

Applicants should write to Farah Mendlesohn at farah.sf@gmail.com. Applicants are asked to provide a CV and a writing sample; these will be assessed by an Applications Committee consisting of Farah Mendlesohn, Graham Sleight and Andy Sawyer. Completed applications must be received by 28th February 2012.

Monstrophy: The Academic Study of Monsters

”Monstrophy” is a term referring to the academic study of monsters as representational and conceptual categories, which has gained recent currency in several related fields of study (literary and cultural history, sociological theories of identity and difference, et al.), as well as in a number of recent books and articles about monsters as subjects of theoretical interpretation. Etymologically derived from Latin ”mōnstrum” (meaning prodigy, ominous sign, monstrous creature or person, abomination) and Greek ”sophia” (σοφία, wisdom), hybrid compounding of monstrophy is not uncommon in disciplinary names, e.g. [[sociology]], another Greek and Latin compound.) Monstrophy literally means “wisdom about monsters,” and in academic usage refers to the broader study of monsters in society and history.

Monsters have been widely catalogued in their historical and ethnographic contexts, and have been commonly included in cultural products such as epic, folktale, fiction, and film, but have only begun to be studied seriously as semiological markers indicating the seams of internal cultural tension. Interpreters commonly note the “monstrous” as occupying space at the borders of a society’s conceptual categories, such as those relating to sexual and behavioral transgression, or to inherent prejudice and internal conflict (for instance, in race, gender, politics, and religion). Monsters are rarely fully distinct from the “human,” but are often comprised of hybrid features of the human and non-human. This issue of Preternature invites contributions that explore how the category of “monster” is used to define and articulate what a certain group of people articulates to itself to be properly human.

Contributions are welcome from any discipline, time period, or geographic provenance, so long as the discussion highlights the cultural, literary, religious, or historical significance of the topic.

Contributions should be roughly 8,000 – 12,000 words (with the possibility of longer submissions in exceptional cases), including all documentation and critical apparatus. If accepted for publication, manuscripts will be required to adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition (style 1, employing endnotes).

Preternature also welcomes original editions or translations of texts related to the topic that have not otherwise been made available in recent editions or in English. Submissions are made online at: <www.preternature.org>.

Final Papers are due April 15, 2012.

Queries about submissions, queries concerning books to be reviewed, or requests to review individual titles may be made to the Editor: Kirsten C. Uszkalo: kirsten@uszkalo.com

Inquiries about book reviews should be sent to the Book Review Editor: Richard Raiswell: rraiswell@upei.ca.

For more on the journal, please consult <www.preternature.org>.

Science Fiction Across Media: Alternative Histories, Alien Futures
Umeå University, Sweden
April 23-24, 2012

Science fiction is becoming a mainstream and increasingly popular genre in fiction and film, as demonstrated by recent novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, Michel Houellebecq, Junot Diaz and William Gibson as well as the global success of James Cameron’s Avatar. Yet science fiction is more than simple entertainment. This workshop considers science fiction as multi-medial explorations of alternative histories and alternative futures and invites scholars across the humanities to present their ongoing work on science fiction either in the form of full-length 20-minute papers, or as shorter papers on work in progress or mini-presentations on crucial concepts or ideas (8 minutes).

We are particularly interested in papers that explore science fiction in and across its varied media — novels, short stories, films, animation, comic books, computer games — and/or that focus on some aspect of the complex representation of natural and technological ecologies in the genre:

– alternative social and environmental histories
– new approaches to the representation of crisis and disaster
– alien ecologies and their relation to terrestrial crises
– alternative visions of humans’/nonhumans’ relationship to place
– wild, rural and urban environments of the future or on other planets
– contrast or convergence of organic, mechanical and virtual environments
– mapping and the (technological) representation of territories and geographies
– futurist forms of energy, transportation, food provision and resource extraction
– synthetic forms of nature, including synthetically generated or modified bodies
– environmental utopias and dystopias
– new directions in the representation of gender, race and species in science fiction
– ecological scarcity and abundance
– physical and systemic violence in relationships within and between species
– thematic, stylistic and media changes in science fiction as a genre
– changing audiences of science fiction

The workshop will take place in HUMlab, Umeå University’s digital humanities laboratory, and will emphasize informal, yet critical discussion of papers and presentations.

The workshop is arranged by Finn Arne Jørgensen (Umeå University) and Ursula K. Heise (Stanford University) on behalf of Umeå Studies in Science, Technology, and Environment (USSTE), the Nordic Environmental History Network (NEHN), and the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES).

Please submit a 200-word abstract and a 1-page CV to scifi@nehn-nordic.org by Saturday, March 10. Indicate whether you wish to present a full-length 20-minute paper, a shorter paper on work in progress, or a mini-presentation on crucial concepts or ideas (8 minutes).

We will cover accommodation and meals for all participants, and will seek to provide travel fellowships for participants from the Nordic countries.

For more information, please contact:
Finn Arne Jørgensen
Associate Senior Lecturer, History of Technology and Environment
Department of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies
Umeå University
901 87 Umeå
finn.jorgensen@idehist.umu.se

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.