*CFP* "GEORGE A. ROMERO: A CANNIBALIZED BODY OF WORK?", INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

International Conference

George A. Romero: A Cannibalized Body of Work?

November 24-25, 2022, Montpellier, France

 

Dug up in 2019, The Amusement Park (1973), and released in theaters in June 2021, commissioned by the Lutherian Church, stands as a reminder that George Andrew Romero (1940-2017) was not just the director of Night of the Living Dead (1968) and creator of the modern zombie. By focusing on an old man abandoned in a theme park where he will be subjected to all sorts of humiliation and abuse, the Pittsburgh director once again fires away at US-American society and remains faithful to an aesthetics whereby the figures of Gothic horror are portrayed in a raw realist mode.

Prompted by this posthumous release, and considering the continued relevance of Romero’s stories of contamination, zombified lives, and deserted stores and streets in the light of a global pandemic, this two-day international conference aims to decenter the habitual views cast on a body of work that has been cannibalized by the living dead. From 1968 to 2009, ten out of the sixteen feature films directed by Romero have ignored the creature to focus on witches in Jack’s Wife/Season of the Witch (1972), vampires in Martin (1977), killer monkeys in Monkey Shines (1988) and faceless yuppies in Bruiser (2000).

*CFP* LLAMADA A PARTICIPACIÓN, XXI CONGRESO DE LA ASOCIACIÓN INTERNACIONAL DE HISPANISTAS

XXI Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas (AIH)

Neuchâtel, del 11 al 16 de julio de 2022

Université de Neuchâtel

 

La Université de Neuchâtel y la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas invitan a participar en este congreso que se celebra del 11 al 16 de julio de 2022 en Neuchâtel (Suiza).

Se aceptarán comunicaciones referidas a los ejes temáticos que tradicionalmente han sido tratados en los Congresos de la AIH: literaturas hispánicas (géneros, períodos, temas, autores, lectura y recepción, literatura oral, escritura femenina y estudios de género, etc.); lingüística hispánica (diacrónica y sincrónica); enseñanza del español; cultura hispánica (arte, historia, cine, etc.). En el marco de esta amplia convocatoria, se prevén ejes temáticos específicos que serán anunciados próximamente.

El evento se desarrollará en seis jornadas, que integrarán:

*CFP* "POST-CONFLICT CULTURES IN ASIA", MAJOR VOLUME, THE STUDIES IN POST-CONFLICT CULTURES SERIES

Critical, Cultural and Communications Press (London) announces the publication in early 2023 of a major volume focusing on post-conflict cultures in Asia.

The Studies in Post-Conflict Cultures series, which was inaugurated in 2006, has to this date published ten anthologies and three monographs exploring the cultural consequences of conflict across the globe. This is an ongoing series, originating in an Anglo-Italian Leverhulme-funded project, examining the specifically cultural aftermath of periods of national or international conflict, understood as war, civil war, dictatorship, terrorism, revolution, colonialism or persecution. 

No chronological or disciplinary boundaries are applied. Studies may be historical or contemporary, and may fall within any subject field. The ten volumes so far published have brought together international experts from disciplines as diverse as Political Science, History, Law, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Semiotics, Geography, Film Studies, Anthropology and Literature Studies. CCC Press intends to publish a major volume of papers on post-conflict cultures in Asia in the first half of 2023. 

*CFP* "HUMANISM AND THE FICTIONAL REPRESENTARIONS OF MONARCHS IN LITERATURE, ARTS AND MEDIA", BOOK CHAPTER

When Gilgamesh rejected the advances of Ishtar and refused to do what his father did, he renounced the status of the chosen lover and champion of the Goddess and (unwittingly) decided to be human. The death of Enkido made him realize that he is no longer favored by the Gods. His failed attempt to reach immortality can be read as an attempt to regain the former status he renounced. The epic of Gilgamesh, like other epics, anounces the severing of the connection between the divine and the human in the political realm. After Gilgamesh, the biographies of Mesopotamian rulers started to seem more human despite the formulaic presence of the divine. In ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, Monarchs were either gods or descendents of gods. In the Medieval age, he devine right of kings replaced the old myths about the divine lineage of monarchs. Machiavelli's realpolitiks and the advent of Renaissance humanism put the concept of divine right in question. The human rather than the divine started to define the monarchs in the West. In the East, however, while Europe was restricting its monarchs, the Meiji restoration puts the emperor at the center of the political system in Japan. The Victorian and Edwardian ages are the last literary periods to be named after monarchs. They both witnessed the rise of Gothic literature. The figure of Dracula strikes the reader as a monarchic figure. But this monarch is a posthuman figure cursed with immortality and a hunger for human blood. In recent years, the gothic and horror genres have gained remarkable popularity in cinema and popular culture. The figures of the Mummy and the vampire are usually depicted as monarchic figures that seek revenge for past wrongs. Revenge is closely related to the theme of royalty. In classical and Renaissance, modern and contemporary revenge narratives where loyalty to a deceased patriarch gives legitimacy to the actions of their heirs. Indeed, revenge narratives in Shakespeare and beyond are generally based on father-son emotional dynamics. These emotional dynamics are described as monarchic by Martha C Nussbaum in her book Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. In Victorian and contemporary horror fiction, the father-son dynamics are more complex as the royal father is the past self of the revenant. 

*CFP* "FANTASY ACROSS MEDIA", GIFCON 2022

The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic is pleased to announce a call for papers for Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations (GIFCon) 2022 with the theme of 'Fantasy Across Media'.

Much of fantasy studies has focused on the genre’s presence in literature, with histories and theoretical frameworks often either implicitly or explicitly centring the written word. In some cases, academic, critic, and fan responses to the genre outside of literature even go so far as to erase or question the possibility of the genre’s existence in other media, perhaps most famously embodied in J.R.R. Tolkien’s insistence in ‘On Fairy-stories' that some media, such as drama, are fundamentally incompatible with fantasy. These types of responses fail to account for the medium-specific benefits and challenges that different media pose for depictions of the impossible, serving to establish hierarchies between media, exclude non-literary media from analyses of the genre, and potentially limit a full understanding of the genre’s history.

Fantasy and the fantastic have had long, rich histories outside of literature, playing a central role in the development of theatre, film, and comic books, and celebrating a more recent boom on the small screen. Furthermore, from the innumerable reimaginings of the Arthurian tradition, to The Wizard of Oz, to manga and anime, to contemporary multimedia franchises and cinematic universes, fantasy texts have been integral to the history of transmedia storytelling, allowing their rich storyworlds to expand across multiple media. 

*CFP* LLAMADA A ARTÍCULOS, VOL. 1 Nº 2 (2022), REVISTA SERIARTE

SERIARTE es una revista, con revisión por pares, creada con la intención de proporcionar un espacio a la investigación, el debate teórico, metodológico y crítico sobre las series televisivas y el arte de los nuevos medios audiovisuales.

La profunda transformación experimentada por el entorno, la difusión y el consumo de la imagen en movimiento, además de la rápida expansión bajo el impacto de la tecnología digital, ha llevado a los académicos en el campo de los estudios del audiovisual a elaborar nuevos paradigmas teóricos y enfoques metodológicos para dar cuenta de las complejidades de un panorama cambiante de convergencia e hibridación, unos paradigmas que, además, se traducen en el avance y la transferencia de unos conocimientos que encuentran su reflejo en la sociedad actual. Teniendo en cuenta este escenario en evolución, SERIARTE facilita un espacio internacional para el estudio de las series televisivas y los nuevos medios de comunicación como el cine, los videojuegos, los videoclips o las plataformas digitales, entre otros. Todo ello atendiendo al compromiso crítico, la discusión científica de naturaleza teórica y el análisis de las obras. Para ello dispone de las siguientes secciones: Artículos (Monográfico y Miscelánea), Tribuna, Reseñas y Crítica.

Convocatoria del Vol. 1 No. 2 (2022)

*CFP* "FROM CINEMA CULTURE TO CINEMA MEMORY", THREE-DAY CONFERENCE

‘From Cinema Culture to Cinema Memory’

6 - 9 April, 2022

Lancaster University, UK

 

‘From Cinema Culture to Cinema Memory’ is a three-day conference that invites speakers to discuss a range of themes relating to cinema culture and cinema memory. The conference will mark the climax of a 3-year AHRC-funded project, ‘Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive: 1930s Britain and Beyond’ (CMDA). The project gathers together a range of material relating to cinema memory in a comprehensive digital archive, a vast amount of which has been made available to view freely online for the first time. Information on this project can be found here. The relationship between cinema culture and cinema memory is explored in ‘From Cinema Culture to Cinema Memory: a Conceptual and Methodological trajectory’ (Kuhn, upcoming)

Key themes to explored at the conference are:

*CFP* "SUPERHEROES: A COMPANION", BOOK CHAPTER

As media texts show us superheroes from around the world(s), demonstrating extraordinary abilities and living a life shaped by a moral code, how we define their iconic features and cultural impact has been the focus of much scholarly debate.

Superheroes have proliferated and multiplied in the 21st Century, coming to prominence in film, television, and video game industries the same way that their popular narratives had begun to flourish in the comic book industry some eighty years before. Yet, while all of these stories and characters are tethered to these early years of the genre, through iterative retellings, reboots, and cultural readjustments, superheroes have consistently found renewed life in modern and contemporary re-imaginings.

Seen through examples, such as the synergy of “Batmania”, the convergence culture of the MCU, the conglomerate hierarchies that facilitate the Arkham games, or the multi-verse publications that enable spaces for a female Thor or an Afro-Latino Spider-man, superheroes continue to evolve through the conditions of their production and the cultural discourses that they engender. 

*CFP* "EXPLORING MOTHERLY INSTINTICS: REPRESENTATION OF MOTHERS IN INDIAN CINEMA", SPECIAL ISSUE, CAFÉ DISSENSUS JOURNAL

The figure of the mother has always been glorified and depicted in black and white without shades of grey. However, time and again filmmakers and academic thinkers have strived to push this conventional depiction to accommodate various layers associated with the concept of motherhood, as they have sought to challenge the simplistic representation of mothers in popular media. It is important to explore the maternal world further in this highly digitized, globalized and gender-neutral environment.

This proposed issue of Café Dissensus aims to curate a collection of essays on the representation of mothers in films that go beyond the stereotypical portrayal of motherhood as epitomized in the figures of Nirupa Roy and Rakhee Gulzar in conventional Bollywood style, showing unconditional love toward her offspring. 

The proposed issue welcomes submissions on the following themes (though not limited to them):

• Queerness and motherhood 
• Good vs. bad mothers 

*CFP* "DRACONES IN MUNDO: DRAGONS IN LITERATURE, FILM, AND POP CULTURE", A SERIES OF EDITED VOLUMES

As the popularity of mythical creatures in films and literature grows, there is one creature that remains prominent: the dragon. Dragons have become most visible recently in the cinematic versions of The Hobbit and in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones Series). However, there are other films, such as Dragonslayer (1981), Reign of Fire (2002), Dragonheart (1996), and the How to Train Your Dragon series (2010-2019), and numerous adult and children’s literature series that feature dragons.

This call for papers will result in several themed volumes under each of these main headings:

 

Full volume(s):

• Wings, Wonders, and Warriors: Dragons in Children’s Literature and Graphic Novels

*CFP* "EXPLORING MOTHERLY INSTINCTS: REPRESENTATION OF MOTHERS IN INDIAN CINEMA", PROPOSED ISSUE, CAFÉ DISSENSUS JOURNAL

The figure of the mother has always been glorified and depicted in black and white without shades of grey. However, time and again filmmakers and academic thinkers have strived to push this conventional depiction to accommodate various layers associated with the concept of motherhood, as they have sought to challenge the simplistic representation of mothers in popular media. It is important to explore the maternal world further in this highly digitized, globalized and gender-neutral environment. 

This proposed issue of Café Dissensus aims to curate a collection of essays on the representation of mothers in films that go beyond the stereotypical portrayal of motherhood as epitomized in the figures of Nirupa Roy and Rakhee Gulzar in conventional Bollywood style, showing unconditional love toward her offspring. 

The proposed issue welcomes submissions on the following themes (though not limited to them):

• Queerness and motherhood 
• Good vs. bad mothers 

*CFP* "EPIC AND ICONIC: ESSAYS ON THE WORK, INFLUENCE, AND LEGACY OF ALEX ROSS", BOOK CHAPTER

Nelson Alexander Ross, better known as Alex, has exerted nearly thirty years of profound influence upon sequential art storytelling. Ross emerged into the comics world in the early 1990s with his work on Terminator: Burning Earth, Marvels, and Kingdom Come, immediately establishing his photorealistic style of painting, influenced by Norman Rockwell, Salvador Dali, and Andrew Loomis, among others.

In the years since, Ross has drawn and painted nearly every recognizable character in the Marvel and DC universes, expanded the storytelling capacity of the graphic novel form, and taken home numerous Eisner and Harvey awards. His prolific output can be found across media platforms, from traditional comics to art galleries, from film and television to magazines, toys, and video games.

Given Ross’s substantial and acclaimed level of production, it is no exaggeration to consider him among the most important commercial artists of his generation – and yet, his work has garnered little academic interest. In this collection, we hope to curate the first definitive set of scholarly perspectives on Ross’s creative approach, his interventions into sequential art narrative and aesthetics, and his lasting influences upon popular culture and the creative community.

*CFP* "IDENTITY AND OTHERNESS IN FILM", INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON FILM STUDIES

Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, cinema, television, and related media have become increasingly central both to individual lives and to the lives of peoples, groups, and nations. Cinema has become a major form of cultural expression and films both reflect and influence the attitudes and behaviour of people, representing their tensions and anxieties, hopes and desires and incarnating social and cultural determinants of the era in which they were made.

Cinema as a whole has historically offered a rich setting for understanding cultural interaction, however it functions within certain political and ideological limits. It offers fascinating source material for an examination of what, in the modern world, we understand as "otherness", the cinematic "Other" being constructed in terms of race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender or sexual orientation.

This conference aims to consider film studies from a variety of critical, theoretical, and analytical approaches and to focus on how "self-other" relations are represented.

Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:

*CFP* "USEFUL FILM IN (NEURO) PSYCHIATRY EUROPE, 1900-1950", WORKSHOP

Workshop “Useful Film in (Neuro) Psychiatry Europe, 1900–1950”

University of Lausanne 3-4 March 2022

This workshop is organized in the framework of the SNSF project Cinéma et (neuro)psychiatrie en Suisse: autour de la collection Waldau, 1920-1990

 

Since its inception, the cinematograph had many applications in the medical field, and particularly in the fields of psychiatry, neurology and neuropsychiatry. With surgeons, neurologists and psychiatrists are at the forefront of using film as a tool for analyzing, storing, archiving, and transmitting knowledge. For a long time, the (neuro) psychiatric films made by doctors as part of their teaching and research have been overshadowed by educational and health films. But since 2000, and especially 2010, scholars from different disciplines are increasingly interested in these practices. Several interdisciplinary teams have conducted research, with the aim of rehabilitating film as a privileged source for both the history of medicine and the history of cinema.

*CFP* LLAMADA A PARTICIPACIÓN, III CONGRESO INTERNACIONAL DE COMUNICACIÓN Y REDES EN LA SOCIEDAD DE LA INFORMACIÓN

III Congreso Internacional de Comunicación y Redes en la Sociedad de la Información

Universidad de Salamanca

3 y 4 de marzo de 2022 (presencial)

 

El impacto de las redes sociales ha continuado creciendo de forma espectacular en la última década, tanto en número de usuarios y tiempo invertido en ellas, como en los ingresos obtenidos. El fenómeno de las redes sociales está cobrando aún más importancia gracias a la posibilidad de acceso a través de la banda ancha móvil, mediante aplicaciones para dispositivos móviles. Ambos fenómenos se retroalimentan y configuran un binomio de éxito dentro de la Sociedad de la Información.

Los usuarios de las redes sociales tienen ahora la capacidad de conectarse, opinar, seguir a sus amigos, informar, etc., en tiempo real. El acceso a las redes sociales en movilidad aporta un valor añadido al propio servicio, ya que el usuario está siempre conectado y puede interactuar en todo momento, independientemente del lugar en el que se encuentre.

*CFP* "EXHIBITING THE HOLOCAUST IN THE IMMEDIATE POSTWAR PERIOD: HISTORIES, PRACTICES AND POLITICS", SPECIAL ISSUE, THE JOURNAL OF HOLOCAUST RESEARCH

Exhibitions were a crucial medium of Holocaust memory in the immediate postwar period. Between 1944-1950, hundreds of exhibitions were mounted across war torn Europe and the United States that sought to tell the story of World War II, Nazi Crimes, and the Holocaust. Already on the day after liberation, the process of “museumification” was initiated. Political prisoners and Allied soldiers organized impromptu site-specific exhibits in the concentration and extermination camps. Small, low-tech, DIY exhibitions were mounted in the Displaced Persons camps and Historical Commissions by Jewish survivors. Impressive blockbusters sponsored by governmental ministries and international organizations, such as the United Nations War Crimes Commission, opened in museums across Europe. Varying in their budgets, resources, tone, media, and function, these exhibitions were intended to convince and convict but also to inform, educate, and commemorate. Whether meticulously planned and generously funded or makeshift and improvised, they offered their visitors a different “way of seeing” and interpreting the violence, atrocity, and human rights abuses of the recent past.

Exhibitions not only illustrate history, they also shape it. Despite their central role in shaping our understanding and representation of Nazi crimes and victim experiences, these early postwar exhibitions have received little scholarly attention to date. Yet their impact rivals the media of monuments, photography, and film, cutting across national and political lines and belying the “Myth of Silence” regarding the postwar period that David Cesarani so persuasively debunked. Reconstructing these exhibition histories can tell us a great deal about how different nations, communities, and individuals chose to remember, and what they privileged and understood about the war. It can help us construct a historiography of Holocaust representation, tracing the canonization of certain practices and images, as well as certain modes of presentation. This special issue hopes to offer a more nuanced understanding of exhibitions as a neglected but important medium of early Holocaust memory.

*CFP* "'THE EXORCIST: STUDIES ON POSSESSION, INFLUENCE, AND SOCIETY", SPECIAL EDITION, REVENTANT JOURNAL

The Exorcist, both as a book and film, has had a lasting influence beyond the world of horror. It is essentially a foundational, multivalent work: on the one hand, it helps understand and approach the theological concept and spiritual dimension of demonic possession as found in the Catholic faith, and on the other hand, it investigates domestic/public, spaces, dynamics, and spheres. Indeed, The Exorcist examines social discourse and narratives from a transformative and turbulent period of American history, sheds light on the difficulties that aging populations face in societies that do not offer adequate social safety nets, and exposes the miserable circumstances that people with mental health conditions and medically uninsured individuals and families often endure. Moreover, The Exorcist also speaks directly to the colonization and neo-colonization of archaeological sites and religions.

The Exorcist has much to offer as the foci for extensive and sustained research in the humanistic disciplines. This Special Edition of Revenant aims to start a new conversation on The Exorcist according to three dimensions: 1) to go back to the roots of the concept of possession, 2) to assess the cultural impact of the book and film, and 3) to present new scholarly developments about the book and film. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

*CFP* "SOCIOSEMIOTIC CRITIQUE. A LOTMANIAN PERSPECTIVE", ISSUE 5 (2022), SOCIAL SEMIOTIC JOURNAL

In 2022 – the centenary of the birth of Juri Lotman – we invite you to focus on the potentiality of his semiotic theory (including ideas of as personality, translation, creolization, autocommunication, self-description, semiosphere) to critique power structures and ideological processes in semiosic phenomena.

We invite contributors to prepare an analytical essay focusing on a specific case study of a semiotic artefact or type of artefact, demonstrating how Lotmanian theory can fuel a critique of the limitations on, and variations in, the ways in which the semiotic resources/practices in question may perpetuate biases, imbalance or legitimize and maintain kinds of power interests.

At this stage, we solicit not papers but a proposal of between 1000 and 1500 words length, with bibliographic references included. On this basis, we will select 8 proposals, to be developed in an essay of 7/8000 words (bibliography included).

Proposals should be sent to: (annamaria.lorusso@unibo.it) and (franciscu.sedda@gmail.com).

Deadline CfP: 30 October 2021

*CFP* "EXPLORING MOTHERLY INSTINCTS: REPRESENTATION OF MOTHERS IN INDIAN CINEMA", ISSUE 63, CAFÉ DISSENSUS MAGAZINE

The figure of the mother has always been glorified and depicted in black and white without shades of grey. However, time and again filmmakers and academic thinkers have strived to push this conventional depiction to accommodate various layers associated with the concept of motherhood, as they have sought to challenge the simplistic representation of mothers in popular media. It is important to explore the maternal world further in this highly digitized, globalized and gender-neutral environment. This proposed issue of Café Dissensus aims to curate a collection of essays on the representation of mothers in films that go beyond the stereotypical portrayal of motherhood as epitomized in the figures of Nirupa Roy and Rakhee Gulzar in conventional Bollywood style, showing unconditional love toward her offspring. The proposed issue welcomes submissions on the following themes (though not limited to them):

• Queerness and motherhood 
• Good vs. bad mothers 
• Evolution of the representation of mothers in cinema 
• Modern women and motherhood 
• Reimagining the domestic space 
• Masculinity and motherhood 

*CFP* "THEOLOGY AND VAMPIRES", THEOLOGY AND POP CULTURE SERIES COLLECTED VOLUME

From the ‘vampire craze’ of the eighteenth century, and up to contemporary takes on the genre, vampire narratives have been inextricably bound up with theological questions. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula and its many adaptations, the vampire is repelled by the crucifix and the consecrated Host. Two puncture wounds on the victim’s neck in Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ make the doctor send for a clergyman. In Anne Rice’s Memnoch the Devil, Lestat believes that he has witnessed the Crucifixion and tasted Christ’s blood. ‘God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves’, he tells Louis in Interview with the Vampire, styling himself as a God, and mimicking divine omnipotence. But he has no answers to give Louis, no revelation, and no known salvation or solace, because he is just like him in their shared vampiric nature. What do these examples tell us about where the vampire sits in relation to the divine? And what kind of theological vision do vampire stories uncover?

Given the richness of theological substratum in vampire fiction, we invite submissions for a collected volume entitled Theology and Vampires, for the Theology and Pop Culture Series published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic. The aim of this volume is to explore the theology of vampires, with a particular focus on the pop culture aspect of vampire narratives. We are seeking essays exploring the theological implications of the vampire across a wide range of media, from popular Victorian tales through to films, video games, and animated series.