CFP: Essay Collection on Heroines: Images of Women in Literature & Pop Culture

Call for Book Chapter Proposals

Heroines: Images of Women Through Literature and Popular Culture

Bob Batchelor, Maja Bajac-Carter, and Norma Jones are calling for proposals for essays to be included in an anthology focused on heroines.

Portrayals of female heroes are often limited to roles of the sacrificial heroine (sacrificed for a cause or benefit of others) and Heidi Redeemers (overcome great obstacles by being pure and loving).

More recently, articulations of Woman Warriors (as girl power) have become more prevalent in popular culture (Xena, Amazons).

However, heroines may be more complex. In this anthology, the editors hope to further complicate and problematize portrayals of women (as heroines) in popular culture.

Essays should, in some manner, contribute to understandings of how heroines are portrayed, as well as how they might empower and/or constrain. For example, instead of conforming to male heroic norms, how does a heroine re-articulate what it means to be a woman?

The topics below provide general direction for possible chapters, but individual authors may adapt them to fit interests. The editors also welcome proposals for related topics:
-- Heroines across cultures
-- New Fictional Heroines
-- New Women Warriors
-- Comic Book Superheroines
-- Witches and Priestesses

Please email heroine@kent.edu for further information.
Please include:
-- a tentative chapter title
-- brief synopsis/proposal of your approach
-- and your C.V.


The deadline for proposals is
January 15, 2012.

CFP: Memes in Visual Culture (Jan.15, 2013)

Call for Submissions: Internet Memes and Visual Culture
A themed Special Issue of Journal of Visual Culture
Issue Guest Editors: Laine Nooney (Stony Brook University) and
Laura Portwood-Stacer (New York University)

The Editors are currently seeking proposed contributions for a Special Issue of the Journal of Visual Culture on Internet Memes and Visual Culture, to be published December 2014. The term meme, a portmanteau of mimesis and gene, was minted in 1976 by British ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins proposed the meme as a “unit of cultural transmission,” a self-perpetuating cultural phenomenon analogous to the gene as a replicator of biological data. Almost 40 years later, the term “meme” has become the coin of the realm within Internet subcultures, particularly on microblogging and social network platforms. In these contexts the designation “meme” identifies digital objects that riff on a given visual, textual or auditory form. For a digital object to become a meme, it must be appropriated, re-coded, and slotted back into the Internet infrastructures it came from—memes require continued user adaptation. Thus, memes are co-constitutive with the user practices of creative (re)production that are default modes of communicative interaction on major social media platforms such as Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube. Memes are frequent objects of analysis among scholars of contemporary digital culture, socio-linguistics, fan culture, and social networking, wherein they are assessed as forms of generative vernacular communication and art-making that defy traditional models of top-down capitalist consumer control of mass media forms. Yet the speed, volume and insularity of meme-making often frustrates aesthetic, formal and techno-infrastructural scholarship on memes and meme distribution.

This special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture will organize a conversation among cultural scholars, artists, activists, journalists and Internet content producers regarding the social, historical, and aesthetic significance of Internet memes. Our move to “take memes seriously” as communicative and aesthetic objects is especially timely, as memes' linguistic tropes, visual styles and means of transmission gain increasing visibility beyond their origins in online subcultural spaces such as 4chan or 9gag. One of the ways this special issue will take on these questions is by itself expanding on traditional modes of academic writing. Potential contributors are thus encouraged to incorporate visual and conceptual experiments intended to elucidate the meme form, performatively and materially replicating the phenomenon under study.

Suggested Topics
The Editors are open to engagements with “Visual Culture” broadly writ. Contributions may consider the following topics or expand on other ideas, keeping a particular emphasis on relating memes to the visual:

how memes figure in a broader history of performative, humor-based, conceptualist, retro, or contemporary digital art practices
the formal aesthetics of different meme types and the technological infrastructures that undergird them (300x300 macros, supercuts, GIFs, screengrabs, photobombs, snowclones, etc.)
meme production in non-Western locations (particularly as they may be tied to political risk or Internet censorship)
meme transmission across national and cultural borders
how (if?) memes have enabled creative producers (particularly queer people and people of color) to contest presumptions of homogenous Western whiteness on the Internet
how memes have served as vehicles for political protest and resistance

Proposed contributions may take the form of scholarly articles (5000-7000 words), but the Editors are particularly interested in shorter essays, graphic essays, and other creative formats. We especially encourage submissions in formats that can be showcased on the Journal of Visual Culture's blog and a Tumblr devoted to this special issue.

Current Contributors
Peter Lunenfeld (UCLA)
Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard)
An Xiao Mina (design strategist, researcher and artist/anxiaostudio.com/)
Patrick Davison (New York University)
Limor Shifman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Charles Eppley (Stony Brook University)
Nick Douglas (slacktory.com)
Danielle Henderson/Feminist Ryan Gosling (University of Wisconsin--Madison/
feministryangosling.tumblr.com)
Gabriella Coleman (McGill)
Academic Coach Taylor (academiccoachtaylor.tumblr.com)

Submission Guidelines
For a proposed academic paper, please email a single-spaced, extended abstract of 1000-1200 words that details a projected argument and possible example cases to be examined. Please also include a brief list of scholarly sources that will inform your paper (not included in the word count). For a proposed contribution in another formats (short essay, graphic essay, conceptual piece, etc.), please email a single-spaced description or artist statement that details the format and projected content of the submission. The deadline for submission of proposals/abstracts is 15 January 2013. The Editors expect to make final decisions about accepted contributions by mid-March 2013. Accepted contributors will be asked to submit their full contributions by January 2014. The Editors are aware of and open to shifts in content that may occur as the full submission develops, should the proposed contribution be accepted for inclusion in the issue.

Inquiries and submission proposals should be directed to both Laine Nooney (laine.nooney@gmail.com) and Laura Portwood-Stacer (lportwoodstacer@gmail.com). Emails should include the subject heading: Internet Memes special issue, JVC.

Desire—Grad Conference@CUNY (Nov. 2011)

CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Avenue, New York, New York)
November 10-11, 2011

Desire: From Eros to Eroticism

The students of the Department of Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center present an interdisciplinary graduate student conference on November 10-11, 2011.

The concept of desire has been the subject of much examination throughout centuries of literature. From the ancient Greek idea of eros to psychological analysis of the subject through contemporary negotiations of love and desire, the interpretation of desire has evolved, but it has always held a central role in literature and discourse. Desire serves as the motivation for action, and yet the most satisfying desire is often the one that remains unfulfilled. This conference will explore desire as it impels us forward in our pursuit of an end that may ultimately be unattainable.

We invite papers from all disciplines focusing on works from any period that explore desire as it is portrayed in literature, philosophy, theory, art, film, or society. Some of the questions this conference seeks to answer include, but are not limited to:

• How does desire serve as a motivating force?
• Must desire be fulfilled or does it serve another purpose?
• In what ways are the repercussions of desire demonstrated?
• How has the definition of desire evolved between different cultures or time periods?
• In what way does desire figure into political landscapes, contemporary or otherwise?
• What is the relationship between desire and cultural production and entertainment in the age of the Internet and other technologies?
• How does an author’s desire factor into the creation of a text?
• How does a character’s lack of desire affect the text?
• How does comprehension of desire help us to explore the human psyche?
• How is desiring the “undesirable” presented and addressed?
• How does desire relate to discussions of gender, sexuality, race, and other intersections of sexual politics?
• How does desire relate to other concepts such as love, seduction, intoxication, and pleasure?

Please submit a 300 word abstract for a 15-20 minute paper by September 15, 2011 to desireconference2011@gmail.com. Proposals should include the title of the paper, presenter’s name, institutional and departmental affiliation, and any technology requests. We also welcome panel proposals of three to four papers.

This conference is co-sponsored by the Writers’ Institute at the City University of New York Graduate Center, an un-MFA program devoted to bringing together the country’s most talented writers and today’s most celebrated editors, and by the Doctoral Students’ Council, the sole policymaking body representing students in doctoral and master’s programs at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

CFP: new journal - "Authorship"

*Authorship*

*Call for Contributions*

The peer-reviewed, open access e-journal *Authorship*, planned to go online
in the summer of 2011 and to appear twice a year, is seeking submissions for
its inaugural issue. The journal aims to offer a venue in which to describe
diverse historical and discursive settings of authorship, and to grapple
with the complex issues of authorial authority, independence or
interdependence, and self-fashioning. The Romantic or New Critical concept
of the solitary genius or auteur (if indeed such an entity ever existed at
all) has for decades now been the subject of intense critical scrutiny and
revision; as a result, what the general public might once have thought of as
authorial agency is now submerged in an elaborate tissue of critical
feedback, textual instability, editorial intervention, and accidents of
publishing, branding, and spin. And yet the Author persists, as a
nomenclature, as a catalogue entry, as a biographical entity, as a popular
icon, and as an assumed agent of creativity and innovation. In analyzing
cultural formations of 'authoriality' as they developed historically, over a
long period of time and in a variety of geographical locations, in relation
to cultural networks and social change, to transformations of the media, as
well as to changing perceptions of gender and personhood, *Authorship* hopes
to foster a more refined and precise theoretical and historical
understanding of the complex ideological, technological and social processes
that transform a writer into an author. We therefore welcome articles in
English on the cultural performance of authorship in any contemporary or
historical literary milieu.


Topics include, but are not limited to:

- Authorship across and within diverse languages, literatures, and
geographical locations: colonial, transatlantic, transnational, translated,
polyglot.

- Varieties of authors: dramatists, novelists, poets, journalists, sages,
critics, humorists; authors as entertainers, public intellectuals,
moralists.

- Authenticity, authority, agency, attribution.

- Authorship and the canon.

- Gender and authorship: interrogating putative "feminine" and "masculine"
models of writing, self-fashioning, and getting published.

- Fame, infame, disfame, lack of fame; the self-creation, branding and
reception of authors.

- Anonymity, pseudonymity, and authorial personae.

- Authors and collaboration; single and multiple authors. Authors and
cultural networks.

- The quotidian activities of writers as they relate to the public image of
authors.

- Translation, editing, redacting, and reviewing considered as kinds of
authorial performances.

- Authorship and the marketplace; authors and patrons; authorship and
intellectual property.

- The textual re-creation of authors by editors, publishers, and printers.

- Authorship and/in the material book; authorship & new technologies (film,
digital media, the internet).



Submissions may be sent to the editors (mailto: authorship@ugent.be). The
recommended length for articles is about 5,000 words, and the deadline to be
considered for inclusion in the first issue is 1 May, 2011. See the website
of *Authorship *at http://www.authorship.ugent.be/ for more information and to sign up for email notification of future issues.



This journal is an initiative of the Research project on Authorship as
Performance (RAP). For further information, visit http://www.rap.ugent.be/



--
Dr. Sören C. Hammerschmidt

Postdoctoral Research Fellow/Postdoctoraal onderzoeker
Research on Authorship as Performance (www.rap.ugent.be)
English Department/Vakgroep Engels
Ghent University/Universiteit Gent
Room 130.033
Blandijnberg 2
9000 Gent
Belgium/België

soren.hammerschmidt@ugent.be

http://www.rap.ugent.be/index.php?id=15&type=content
http://www.english.ugent.be/sorenhammerschmidt

CFP: Newberry Grad Conference (10/15/10)

The Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies is pleased to announce:

Call for Papers for the 2011 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference

Deadline for submissions: October 15, 2010

Conference dates: January 27-29, 2011

www.newberry.org/renaissance/conf-inst/gradstudents.html

www.newberry.org/renaissance/conf-inst/2011CFP.pdf: PDF flyer printable in color or black-and-white. Please distribute and post.

We invite abstracts for 15-minute papers from master's or Ph.D. students on any medieval, Renaissance, or early modern topic in Europe or the Mediterranean or Atlantic worlds. We encourage submissions from disciplines as varied as the literature of any language, history, classics, art history, music, comparative literature, theater arts, philosophy, religious studies, transatlantic studies, disability studies, and manuscript studies.

We also hope to include at least one panel of papers dealing with the digital humanities.

Priority is given to students from member institutions of the Center for Renaissance Studies consortium.

Please feel free to forward this message to others who may be interested.

~

Faculty and graduate students from Center for Renaissance Studies consortium schools are eligible to apply for travel funding to attend Center for Renaissance Studies programs or to do research at the Newberry Library. Contact your school's faculty representative for details: www.newberry.org/renaissance/consortium/exec.html. The Center's main web page is: www.newberry.org/renaissance.

CFP: Re-Gendering Images and Identities (essay collection)

Call for Proposals
Re-Gendering Images and Identities: Photography, Art and the Transgendered Body

Editors: Prof. Stephen Whittle OBE, Dr Sara Davidmann
Deadline for abstracts: November 1 2010
Deadline for completed essays: April 2011
Email: photobook@live.co.uk


Stephen Whittle and Sara Davidmann are in the process of completing a book proposal for an exciting edited anthology on the significance of photography and other forms of image making (within the sense of the picture) to issues of self-visualisation, representation and the visibility of trans people.

The book will bring together essays by some of today’s foremost trans academics, activists and authors. We are looking for a broad spectrum of subjects and foci and accordingly this call is being made in order to offer other, possibly lesser-known, academics with a serious interest in the area the opportunity to contribute to the anthology.

The book will make a contribution to different disciplines: photography theory, the fine arts and humanities more broadly, transgender studies, media studies, cultural studies, social sciences, and potentially psychology and medicine.

We are currently at the stage of gathering together abstracts from authors and planning our proposal. We anticipate final chapters to be of approximately 6,000 words. We aim to publish in 2011.

If you are interested in submitting a proposal please forward an abstract of 250-300 words by November 1 2010 to photobook@live.co.uk Please include the title for your essay, key points or arguments to be developed, and an overall outline for the chapter. Please also attach a brief (one - two page) c.v.

Additionally, if your chapter will include images please provide an estimate of the number of images and indicate whether you already have copyright clearance. Please let us know if you would prefer your images to be printed in colour.

We welcome essays from all academic disciplines.
~~~~~~~~~