Call for Papers: Transitions 4 - New Directions in Comics Studies

A call for papers for Transitions 4 - New Directions in Comics Studies has just been published.

Transitions will be a one-day symposium at the University of London in November, promoting new research and multi-disciplinary academic study  of comics, comix, manga, bande dessinée and other forms of sequential art.


Now in its fourth year, the Keynote will be given by Dr. Ann Miller (University of Leicester, joint editor of European Comic Art), with response from Dr. Roger Sabin (Central St. Martins, University of the Arts London).

Transitions is currently the only regular academic comics event based in London.  The symposium provides a platform where different perspectives and methodologies can be brought together and shared.  As an event devoted to promoting new research into comics in all their forms the symposium provides a forum for research from postgraduate students and early career lecturers.

Comics studies occupy a unique multi-disciplinary middle-space, one that encourages cross-disciplinary pollination and a convergence of distinct knowledges: literary and cultural studies, visual arts and media, modern languages, sociology, geography and more.
By thinking about comics across different disciplines, we hope to stimulate and provoke debate and to address a wide spectrum of questions, to map new trends and provide a space for dialogue and further collaboration to emerge.

The organisers welcome abstracts for twenty minute papers of 250 - 300 words.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

International iterations: manga, bande dessinée , fumetti etc. – children’s comics – superheroes – non-fiction comics – the (im)materiality of comics – formalist approaches – cultural histories –adaptation/ remediation – autographics – early comics – comic strips – small press –alternative comics/ underground commix – comics narratologies – political comics – comics and cultural theory – contexts of production and circulation - audiences – comics and the archive – subjectivity in comics – graphic medicine – fan subcultures – comics as historiography – key creators

• Proposals for papers should be sent as Word documents, with a short biography appended. Abstracts should be submitted by the 30th July 2013 to Hallvard, Tony and Nina at transitions.symposium@gmail.com.

• Transitions will take place on Saturday 2nd November 2013 at the School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London, London WC1E 7HX

Call for Papers: Contemporary Uses of Fairy Tales

Melissa Leons - hunting fairies in
contemporary culture

Doctor Melissa Lenos, an Assistant Professor of English at Donnelly College in Kansas City, Kansas, is inviting submissions for an edited collection of essays on contemporary uses of fairy tales in popular culture.

Contemporary Uses of Fairy Tales, which offers the chance for commentary on comics such as Alan Moore's Lost Girls and Bill Willingham's Fables, will focus on recent reinterpretations and reboots of classical fairy tales, ways the contemporary texts address the original tales and narratological implications of the repetitions and adjustments of these stories.

In essays that explore the functions and consequences of fairy tale reboots, remakes and updates, authors will consider the ways fairy tale generic conventions have been revised over time, representations of race, gender, class and sexual identity, the roles of archetypes, mythic tropes and patterns and the emergence of self-referential and meta-tales within these texts.

Essays may also address fan culture influence on contemporary tales, opportunities for interactivity and the roles of stars in fairy tale reboots.

Text focus could include television series, feature-length films, comic books and graphic novels, games and animation.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Fables (Bill Willingham/Vertigo, 2002-present)

Lost Girls (Alan Moore/Top Shelf, 2006)

The Red Shoes (Kim Yong-gyun, 2005)

Hansel and Gretel (Yim Pil-Sung, 2007)

Sydney White (Joe Nussbaum, 2007)

Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat, 2009)

The Sleeping Beauty (Catherine Breillat, 2010)

Red Riding Hood (Catherine Hardwicke, 2011)

Hanna (Joe Wright, 2011)

Beastly (Daniel Barnz, 2011)

Once Upon a Time (ABC, 2011-present)

Grimm (NBC, 2011-present)

Snow White and the Huntsman (Rupert Sanders, 2012)

Mirror, Mirror (Tarsem Singh, 2012)

Hansel and Gretel (Anthony Ferrante, 2013)

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (Tommy Wirkola, 2013)

Jack the Giant Slayer (Bryan Singer, 2013)

Submit a two-page proposals by the deadline of June 19, 2013 to Dr. Melissa Lenos at melissalenosATgmail.com; questions may be addressed to the same. Please also include a short bio. If your proposal is selected, the final essay (5000-8000 words) will be due on December 1, 2013.

Melissa teaches film studies, composition, popular culture and whatever else her tiny department requires. Her research interests include narratology in Hollywood, mythic structures and archetypes. Visit her blog at: http://cargocollective.com/flyover/index

Call for Papers: Conflict in Children’s and Young Adult Fiction

A call for papers for a forthcoming conference on Conflict in Children’s and Young Adult Fiction at the University of Bedfordshire has just been announced - and comics and graphic novels will be on the agenda.

The Hockliffe Conference: Conflict in Children’s and Young Adult Fiction is a one-day conference on 6th September 2012 at the University of Bedfordshire, Polhill Campus, Bedford.

Writers of children’s and young adult fiction have never shied away from writing about conflict faced by children whether it’s the conflict of a world war in The Silver Sword, published in 1956, or inter-tribal conflict in East Africa in Little Soldier (1999) – both explored at last year’s exhibition, ‘Once Upon a Wartime’, at the Imperial War Museum – generational conflict such as that experienced by Mossy Trotter (1967) or intra-racial conflict faced by the eponymous Rani and Sukh in Bali Rai’s book (2004). All children face conflict at some time in their lives and this conference explores the way in which this is represented in children’s and young adult fiction.

The keynote speaker at the conference will be Bali Rai. Born in Leicester, Bali Rai writes about the harsh realities faced by children and young adults and his books have been short-listed for a number of awards including the Booktrust Teenage Prize. His third novel, Rani and Sukh, is now a GCSE set text.

Academic contributions to the conference could include the following issues:

• Inter-generational conflict
• Conflict within families
• Global conflict
• Racial conflict
• Conflict between friends
• Children coping with death and loss
• Gender conflict

Approaches might include

• The history of conflict in children’s and young adult fiction
• The representation of conflict in:
• picture books
• comics
• graphic novels
• fiction and non-fiction
• film and media adaptations
• computer games
• blogs and new media
• The benefits of using conflict narratives in the classroom

This list is not exhaustive and abstracts dealing with any form of conflict will be considered.
Abstracts of 250 words for 20 minute conference papers should be sent to the organisers as a Word attachment to (hockliffe@beds.ac.uk) together with a brief biography by 19th April 2013. Presenters will be notified by10th May 2013.

The conference is titled the Hockliffe Conference in honour of a local bookseller, Frederick Hockliffe, whose son donated his collection of early children’s books to what was then Bedford Training College in 1927. This comprises over a thousand rare books dating from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century, mainly between 1740 and 1840. Its importance is indicated by the fact that it formed the basis of a major research project, funded by the AHRB, between 1999 and 2002. The website for the collection is currently housed at De Montfort University, in the Centre for Textual Studies, and was most recently reconfigured and updated in 2012 (http://hockliffe.dmu.ac.uk).

In 2010, the Collection was augmented when Hockliffe’s granddaughter made a further donation of books from her own collection.

The University also holds a collection of over 200 copies of versions of ‘Cinderella’ which was donated to the Library in August 2012. Most are from the twentieth century, but about half a dozen are rare nineteenth-century editions. This wonderful collection of copies of the most popular of all fairy stories (first published in English in 1729, but of much more ancient origin) further enhances the position of the Library as a leading resource for the study of children’s literature.

• Contact details: The Hockliffe Conference, c/o Dr Clare Walsh and Dr Nicola Darwood, Division of Performing Arts & English, University of Bedfordshire, Polhill Avenue, Bedford MK41 9EA Email: hockliffe@beds.ac.uk

Call for Papers: Comic Empires: The Imperialism of Cartoons, Caricature, and Satirical Art

The Rhodes Colossus: a caricature in Punch, published in December 1892, by Linley Sambourne of Cecil John Rhodes, after he announced plans for a telegraph line and railroad from Cape Town to Cairo.

A group of academics has put out a call for papers for a new study titled Comic Empires: The Imperialism of Cartoons, Caricature, and Satirical Art, which may be collected into a book by Manchester University Press next year.

In recent years, the cultural turn in the history of empire and imperialism has shed much new light on how imperialism and subject populations functioned. Yet despite ample attention being given to the role played by commercial advertising, print capitalism, travel and tourism, and other cultural forms, there has been little analysis of the key function of cartoons, satirical art, and caricature in sustaining, and challenging, imperial systems. Aside from useful surveys by Roy Douglas (Great Nations Still Enchained, published in 1994) and Mark Bryant (Wars of Empire in Cartoons, 2008), there exists no thorough, scholarly, interrogation of the relationship between cartoons and empire.

This is a significant omission, say the new project's editors, Dr Richard Scully and Dr Andrekos Varnava. It is almost impossible to imagine the ‘New Imperialism’ in Africa without picturing Linley Sambourne’s ‘Rhodes Colossus’ standing astride the continent from Cape to Cairo. Similarly, Thomas Theodor Heine’s famous representation of the different Belgian, French, British, and German methods of colonialism continues to colour our understandings of imperial exploitation, as do numerous similar works by American, Japanese, and cartoonists of other nationalities.

Cartoonists and satirical art also played an important role in the resistance to imperial regimes, argue the editors, and the recovery of their voice has been an important aspect of the postcolonial enterprise.

This new study aims to bring together what is still a disparate field of inquiry, and offer a consolidated approach to understanding the relationship between cartoons and imperialism.

This edited volume aims to explore the importance of cartoons, caricatures and satirical art in the imperial context through a series of case-studies spanning the age of High Imperialism (c.1815-1945) from European and non-European contexts. It will cover important threads of support, resistance and criticism, to imperialism in both metropole and periphery, explore the question of orientalism, and look at colonial development, as well as any other theme relating to empire.

Already committed to the project are the editors of the collection, Dr Richard Scully (University of New England) and Dr Andrekos Varnava (Flinders University, South Australia). The editors are looking to receive proposals on the cartoons, caricature and satirical art emanating from journals published in Europe (including Ottoman Empire), the US and non-Western traditions, such as Japan.

If you're interested in contributing, please send an abstract (150-200 words) and short professional biography to Dr Richard Scully, University of New England, at: rscullyATune.edu.au, and Dr Andrekos Varnava, Flinders University, South Australia, at andrekos.varnavaATflinders.edu.au by 28th June 2013.

All those who send in a proposal will be notified of the result by 22 July 2013, and the full book proposal will be sent to Manchester University Press, to be considered as part of the Studies in Imperialism Series at the end of July 2013.

The series editors of Studies in Imperialism at Manchester University Press, Professors John MacKenzie and Andrew Thompson, have expressed an interest in considering such a volume.

• Full details here on H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Online

Investigating the dark comedy of comics - a call for papers

A call has gone out for papers investigating the dark humour of comics, which will be presented at a one day event, the Bath Spa University Postgraduate Symposium in May at Corsham Court, Wiltshire, whose guests will include both academics and writers.

The Laughter and Transgression: An Investigation of Dark Comedy event will take on Friday 13th May 2011 at Corsham Court, Corsham, Wiltshire and is supported by the School of Humanities and Cultural Industries, Research Centre for Contemporary Writing and The Graduate School at Bath Spa University.

Comic writing and performance often allows for transgression, amorality, surprise, and the creation of alternative worlds. The act of creating dark comedy invokes a desire to shock, enabling disengagement, and thus freedom, from temporal and moral concerns. What are the evolving elements of dark comedy, and what are some of the issues that arise from its expression?

The day will feature presentations by keynote speakers including a well known writer to be announced and Professor Nicholas Royle, Professor of English, University of Sussex - whose books include Telepathy and Literature, After Derrida, The Uncanny and the novel Quilt.

The programme will be finalised by 15 April 2011.

The organisers are inviting abstracts for provocative papers, presentations, and installations for an upcoming one-day symposium on dark comedy, saying the symposium will be informal and cross-disciplinary.

Submissions will be considered from all disciplines within arts and humanities - including creative writing, screenwriting, drama, visual art, and film - as well as the social sciences. Installations can be of any nature; presentations should be 20 minutes in length.

Thematic areas might include modes of expression of dark comedy; the limits of dark comedy and the boundaries between discomfort and laughter; the ethics of laughter, Taboos and censorships; an transgressive narrative voice.

• Please send abstracts of maximum 200 words, and a brief CV, to: Rob.Smith10@live.bathspa.ac.uk. Please use this same e-mail address if you would like to attend but not present a paper.

• Abstracts must be submitted no later than Friday 11 March 2011.

(Thanks to Norman Boyd for this item)