*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* "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* "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* "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* "'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* "REFOCUS: THE FILMS OF ABEL FERRARA", BOOK CHAPTER

Over his four-decade long career, Abel Ferrara has built himself a reputation of being one of the most audacious and unconventional filmmakers in contemporary cinema. After his beginnings in the exploitation circuit of late 1970s he developed to become one of the central figures in the ‘indie’ wave of the 1980s and 90s and is by now a frequent guest at the leading international film festivals in Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Locarno.

Ferrara’s unique career covers the entire cinematic spectrum from grindhouse to arthouse but has seldomly been at the center of scholarly attention. The prospective collection of essays (planned to appear in the ReFocus series at Edinburgh University Press) aims to close this gap by offering a comprehensive critical survey of the director’s multi-faceted oeuvre covering his narrative features as well as his documentaries and his work for television.

In order to ensure a broad range of methodological, theoretical, historical or philosophical perspectives on Ferrara’s work, scholars of film studies and related fields such as cultural studies, screen and media studies, or philosophy are invited to submit a short abstract (approx. 300 words) for essays to be included in the collection. 

*CFP* "BORDERS AND DETECTIVE FICTION", THEME ISSUE, CLUES: A JOURNAL OF DETECTION

For this theme issue of Clues, proposals are sought from a wide variety of critical, national, and cultural perspectives addressing how and why borders are represented in detective fiction, film, television, or other media (e.g., computer games, graphic novels, radio drama, podcasts). As David Newman and Anssi Paasi argue, “The construction of boundaries at all scales and dimensions takes place through narrativity.” Thus, it makes sense to turn to the detective story, a genre whose plots conceptualize issues of morality, legality, security, and transgression to understand the ways in which borders are conceptualized and mediated. Crossing borders can signify openness, mobility, cultural exchange, and cooperation. But the border can also be a site of surveillance, discipline, risk, exclusion, and violence, a place where geographic, cultural, economic, and bodily integrity are rendered vulnerable. It can, in short, be the scene of (the) crime. How do imaginative narratives across the diverse range of historical and contemporary crime fiction constitute investigations of defined, dynamic, and/or developing border spaces?

Suggested topics:

• Detective fiction and migrancy/refugees 

*CFP* "FAIRY TALE AND FANTASY FICTION", SPECIAL ISSUE, FANTASY ART AND STUDIES JOURNAL

In 1947, Tolkien published “On Fairy Stories”, an essay on fairy tales which grew out of his 1939 Andrew Lang Lecture and has since become the basis for the theorisation of the modern Fantasy genre. This essay popularised the terms secondary world, subcreation and subcreator in specialist criticism. Yet Tolkien’s text, often presented as being more a reflection on the author’s own literary conception and his Fantasy work, is indeed supposed to be about fairy tales and to offer a definition and presentation of their main characteristics, such as the notion of eucatastrophe, a concept coined by Tolkien to refer to the happy ending of fairy tales and which can be put into perspective with the naïve ethics of these tales, as examined by André Jolles in his book Simple Forms (1930).

While it might therefore seem remarkable that Tolkien’s essay has become the basis for the theorisation of Fantasy, this is hardly surprising to Fantasy scholars, as Fantasy regularly borrows from the marvellous staff and structure of the fairy tale. It should not be forgotten that Tolkien himself considered The Lord of the Rings to be a fairy tale for adults and that his work is not free of elements and motifs from fairy tales. Moreover, the rewriting of fairy tales is recurrent within Fantasy to the point of having become an obligatory part of the genre for authors, willingly encouraged by publishers. One can mention in this respect the series of anthologies edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow, Snow White, Red Blood, the first volume of which is dedicated to Angela Carter, herself known for her rewrites of fairy tales. The Fairy Tale Series, also directed by Terri Windling, includes White as Snow by Tanith Lee (a rewriting of Snow White) and Briar Rose by Jane Yolen, based on Sleeping Beauty.

*CFP* "SPECULATIVE FICTION'S INTERSECTIONS WITH POSTHUMANISM AND NEW MATERIALISM", SPECIAL ISSUE, EXTRAPOLATION JOURNAL

Extrapolation invites papers for a special issue investigating how speculative fiction, broadly conceived, dramatizes the tensions between the material limitations of the body and efforts to think beyond the human subject in posthumanism and new materialism. Taking our cues from contemporary authors like Jeff VanderMeer, Nalo Hopkinson, Caitlín Kiernan, Kathe Koja, Ken Liu, and China Miéville, we will examine how experimentation with form serves to articulate human practices for enduring and even flourishing in our extra-human reality. We are particularly invested in the ways speculative texts critique the centrality of the human while remaining attentive to the lived experience of the material body as it responds to ecological, technological, and economic demands that exceed human capacities of understanding.

Despite its modest aim to investigate thought and life that operates beyond the boundaries of enlightenment humanism, the field of the critical posthumanities often employs a rhetoric of extremes that invites us to abolish, expunge, contort, challenge, and undo the category of the human entirely. Yet, this expansive model of posthuman(ist) thought is often haunted by bodies, environments, and matter that resist being tamed by intellectual abstraction. Concomitantly, the turn to new materialism takes up problems of inter-relation and ecological co-constitution, offering ethical practices for coping with threats posed by the Anthropocene. Aiming to think more expansively than anthropocentrism allows, new materialist discourse disavows the human subject as the agent of our world to describe, instead, how agency—or animacy—is distributed beyond the human. 

*CFP* CALL FOR ARTICLES, NEXT ISSUES, NEW CINEMAS: JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY FILM

New Cinemas is seeking scholars and practitioners working in the fields below to act as peer reviewers. A vital part of academic publishing, peer review enriches the discipline and improves the work of authors and reviewers alike. We encourage reviewers from diverse backgrounds and at different stages of their career to join the peer review pool. We are particularly interested in hearing from researchers in Asian cinemas, film theory and philosophy, and genres such as horror and sci-fi.

New Cinemas is a peer-reviewed journal aiming to provide a platform for the study of new forms of cinematic practice and fresh approaches to cinemas hitherto neglected in western scholarship. It particularly welcomes scholarship that does not take existing paradigms and theoretical conceptualisations as given; rather, it anticipates submissions that are refreshing in approach and exhibit a willingness to tackle cinematic practices that are still in the process of development into something new.

We particularly welcome submissions from those close to completing their Ph.D., Early Career Researchers and practitioners, especially from outside ‘Western’ spaces, as well as work on film beyond the text (such as festivals, technology and marketing). We also seek to publish research and cutting-edge thought in shorter formats than the traditional academic article.

*CFP* "SHORT-FORM HORROR: HISTORY, PEDAGOGY, AND PRACTICE", ISSUE 5.2, MONSTRUM JOURNAL

From TV to TikTok, movie trailers to music videos, and GIFs to short films, the short form dominates most of our media consumption. The horror genre is ripe for experimentation in the short form, through screamer videos, short stories and flash fiction, television series, and even commercials. Today, most horror creators work primarily in the short form; with the continually prohibitive costs associated with a sustained feature-length filmmaking career, many filmmakers and creators—particularly those marginalized by race, gender, or socioeconomic status—prefer, or are compelled, to explore the creative and professional possibilities of short-form media. 

While the number of BIPOC, queer, and women-identifying creators who have established and successful careers in horror filmmaking remain few and far between, the short-form market is brimming with content from these often-marginalized voices and is, therefore, one of the most productive media niches for theorizing issues of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and the intersectionality of these identifiers in the horror genre. In attending to the richness of the short form, how can scholars, makers and curators not simply diversify the content and canon of horror as a field, but also challenge our assumptions of how we read, analyze, consumer and react to horror media?

*CFP* "ESSAYS ON POLICE AND POLICING IN 21ST CENTURY FILM AND TELEVISION", BOOK COLLECTION

The Black Lives Matter movement, the trial and conviction of Derek Chauvin, calls to defund the police, the prominence in the media of killer police such as Joseph James DeAngelo are recent manifestations of intense and even unprecedented levels of media attention on policing at interlocking points of race, inequality, social justice and political agendas.  Equally, exciting cross-disciplinary engagement between fields of justice studies, criminology, cultural studies and popular culture are increasingly opening up.

Police have been the inspiration for and focus of countless film and television stories, a long-standing dramatic strain that is a fictional backdrop to the intense recent public scrutiny, and at times rejection of policing. Perceptions of the police are shaped by these long standing narrative forms of film and television that can also convey other shapers of perception, from bodycam footage to mobile phone recordings. At this point of exceptional pressure on police conduct and the uncertain paths that policing will take in the 21st century, this collection is intended to be a topical opportunity to examine the themes of how police and policing are perceived and portrayed and these points are intended as the focal point for each contribution. We are assembling a special collection of essays that consider addressing the intersection of police and policing with film and television in the 21st century. 

*CFP* "BODIES OF WATER IN AFRICAN AMERICAN FICTION & FILM", BOOK CHAPTER

We invite abstracts for a new book of original essays which explore the meaning and/or function of still or moving bodies of water -- lakes, rivers, the sea, gulfs, streams, ponds, canals -- in narratives by African Americans.  In particular, we seek other innovative and provocative critiques of images of water in 20th and 21st Century African American fiction and film, poetry and drama.  At once, a few pieces of literature and film come to mind:  August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean; Zora Neal Hurston’s Janie Crawford in the Everglades; Michelle Cliff’s short story collection, Bodies of Water; so much of Toni Morrison’s fiction; readings of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust; Spike Lee on Hurricane Katrina; and, Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou, for example.  Our volume wants analyses which acknowledge the legitimacy of but move beyond the familiar or conventional interpretations of the Atlantic Ocean Middle Passage and/or Transatlantic Slave Trade.  

Some possible questions for African American analysis, including environmental or ecocritical contemplation:

• What roles do bodies of water play in African American literary and filmic creative imagination?  In particular, how does the trope of water/waterways get interwoven into works by African American authors and filmmakers?  

*CFP* CALL FOR PROPOSALS FOR TOPICAL ISSUES, OPEN CULTURAL STUDIES

Open Cultural Studies invites groups of researchers, conference organizers and individual scholars to submit their proposals of edited volumes to be considered for publication as topical issues of the journal. 

 

About the journal: 

Open Cultural Studies is a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal that explores the fields of Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts. It interprets culture in an inclusive sense, in different theoretical, geographical and historical contexts. The journal would like to promote new research perspectives in cultural studies, but it also seeks to map out social and political scholarship that places questions of inequalities and imbalances of power at the heart of academic debate. 

 

Published special/Topical issues: 

*CFP* "MAKING A MURDERER: TRUE CRIME IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE", SPECIAL ISSUE, EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS CRIME FICTION STUDIES JOURNAL

“Everybody’s fascinated with the notion that there is a cause and effect,” claims notorious serial killer Ted Bundy, quoted in the Netflix original, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019) – that we can “put our finger on it,” and reassuringly rationalise the genesis of the uniquely modern phenomenon of the American serial killer. But when there is “absolutely nothing” in the background of a serial murderer that would lead one to believe they were “capable of committing murder,” how do we begin to acclimatise ourselves to this violent defect of contemporary history? More challengingly, how do we bring depth to our collective portrait of what constitutes a murderer, so that we may then self-exempt our compulsion to look more closely at these perversely familiar figures? 

Over the last 50 years, a plethora of books, magazines, film and television adaptations on the subject of true crime has captured – and held – the public imagination in a vice-like grip, ultimately achieving cult status in postwar-American society while furthermore granting the white male serial killer the kind of cultural capital usually awarded only to celebrities. With the enormous popularity of such series as Making a Murderer (2015) and Mindhunter (2017), however, it seems like now, more than ever, the uneasy question of why we continue to glorify killers by inserting them into mainstream media – and what exactly the appeal of this enduring genre and its mythologization of ultraviolent masculinities tells us about ‘who we are’ and the nature of American society itself – has acquired a new level of urgency, which, in turn, requires new depths of understanding. Likewise, with the growing Netflixisation of true crime, and the narrativization of true crime more broadly, now is the time to establish a study that evaluates the politics of the ever-increasing fine line between actual crime documentaries versus fictional shows that reference true crime.

*CFP* "MANY DOORS TO FANTASTICA: THE NEVERENDING STORY & THE EDUCATION OF THE IMAGINATION", EDITED VOLUME

When thinking of family films from the 1980s, the plethora of weird yet engaging movies seems endless. Chief among them was Wolfgang Petersen’s 1984 film adaption of The Neverending Story. The film drew from Michael Ende’s 1979 Die unendliche Geschichte: Von A bis Z, known better by the English title which was shared with the film. Ende’s book ultimately spawned three films, two animated series, a hit song which has been covered by musicians in a variety of genres, and a host of short stories written as tributes to the imaginative work. Ende’s work managed to secure a spot in the collective memory of Americans. References to the film and the book populate television shows. This collection of essays seeks to engage in interdisciplinary readings and viewings which will help shed light on the lasting power of Ende’s fictional world.

The multifaceted framework of Ende’s story helps to shape the interdisciplinary approach of this collection. The lines between reality and fiction, between characters, and between purposes are all blurred in such a way that there is much to mine from the stores rich layers. This volume hopes to do the same by investigating the text from a variety of viewpoints, as well as offering pedagogical approaches for the classroom. It also seeks to highlight the various media representations of Ende’s story, including the films and cartoon adaptations. In the end, the book will enrich the reading and viewing experiences for those for whom Bastian and Atreyu are a part of their imaginative fabric, as well as serving as a gateway for those just coming to Fantastica for the first time. Contributors are invited to submit paper proposals that approach the imagination from a variety of lenses.

*CFP* "SPIES AND SECRET AGENTS ON EASTERN EUROPEAN SCREENS", SPECIAL ISSUE, STUDIES IN EASTERN EUROPEAN CINEMA JOURNAL

While various generic manifestations of popular cinema in Eastern Europe have attracted increasing scholarly attention, as testified, for instance, by special issues of SEEC devoted to sci-fi and musicals, a  research gap can still be observed regarding the espionage genre in the region, despite the fact that some of the Eastern European titles of this variety have become box office hits. The lukewarm academic interest in Eastern European spy thrillers thus far can perhaps be partly explained by the low cultural prestige of the genre and its assumed adherence to the hegemonies and realpolitik of the Cold War – implicit preconceptions that the proposed special issue is designed to address.

 

Aside from screen stories with a central focus on clandestine affairs, we also encourage studies on works that present secret agents in a range of generic frameworks, such as historical dramas, biopics or comedies.

• Some of the possible topics and approaches include:
• The espionage genre and cinematic secret agents before World War II
• Spy films and Cold War