Category: Calls for Papers

CFP: New Media and the US South

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CFP: New Media and the US South

by Stephanie Rountree

CFP: New Media and the U.S. South [Edited Collection]

Proposals Due May 1, 2018
Editors: Gina Caison (Georgia State University), Lisa Hinrichsen (University of Arkansas), Stephanie Rountree (Auburn University)

We are seeking inventive work from scholars in a variety of fields for an edited collection that will examine the role of new media in relationship to the U.S. South. Technologies of virtuality and transformations in digital media and the geoweb are augmenting traditional concepts of space and place, offering new knowledge politics that carry a cluster of implications for commerce, governance, civic participation, and activism. Beyond its global reach through popular web-based and mobile applications, new media reshape the ways we view and interact within the local, from altering the way we navigate city streets to innovating modes of human intimacy; they challenge and change the ways in which we build and express attachments to place(s), form spatial imaginaries, and interact with landscapes. In examining how changes in information and media landscapes modify concepts of “region,” this collection will both articulate the virtual realities of the 21st-century U.S. South and also historicize the impact of “new” media on a region that has always been mediated.

Recognizing that many forms of “old” media were once “new,” this collection seeks to engage with epistemologies of “newness” that act upon ideas of both “media” and the “South.” To that end, this collection poses several questions for investigation. How have new media technologies challenged the material and linguistic nexuses of southern communities? Might digital technologies aid in, to use Brittany Cooper and Margaret Rhee’s phrase, “hacking the b/w binary” that has permeated narratives of the U.S. South? Or do technologies of geomonitoring and surveillance trap humans in forms of what Jerome E. Dobson and Peter F. Fisher have called “geoslavery”? How are our knowledge and memory of southern space and place being reshaped by new media in the present, and what are the historical antecedents to this phenomenon? What new types of collective memories, politics, and publics are being created through new configurative practices inherent to digital media?

We welcome papers from a variety of scholarly perspectives and methodological approaches. Suggested topics include:

• The impact of mobile technologies on privacy and surveillance in southern spaces
• Identity issues in social networks including but not limited to gender, sexuality, race, and disability
• Place-based new media practices
• New media and the fostering and/or threatening of cultural diversity, equity, and inclusion
• Digital neocolonialism
• Digital decolonization efforts and activism
• U.S. South/souths and the digital public sphere
• Virtual/viral/hypertextual souths
• Region and the digital divide
• The U.S. South and big data
• The mobilizing potential of new media
• Digital news and disinformation
• Networked cultural production in the digital age, including media convergence
• New media and the construction of cultural identity
• Specific studies of the U.S. South/souths on or across specific platforms (e.g. WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Wikipedia etc.)
• Affective experiences with the new media
• Phenomenological and epistemological implications of new media
• Podcasting the U.S. South/souths
• Digital temporalities
• Locational data mining and new forms of “geoslavery”
• Neogeographic mapping practices
• Spatial archives, digital preservation, cultural heritage practices
• Transmedia narratives
• The aesthetics and politics of new media
• New pedagogies for the new media landscape

Chapter proposals of 500 words, along with a 200-word bio should be sent to southandnewmedia@gmail.com by May 1, 2018. We expect to notify authors by the end of May, and to require chapters to be completed by the October 1, 2018.

CFP: Recovering May Alcott Nieriker’s Life and Work

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Recovering May Alcott Nieriker’s Life and Work | A One Day Conference. June 28, 2018, Université Paris Diderot

https://mayalcottnieriker.com/

Keynote Speaker | Dr Daniel Shealy (UNC, Charlotte)

Call for Papers | Deadline 31st January 2018

May Alcott Nieriker was a nineteenth-century American painter who lived as a single woman in Paris between the years of 1870-1879. At a time when women were not admitted to the beaux arts and were forced to pay double in tuition at the private ateliers, May daringly travelled alone to pursue a career at the age of thirty. She made a great impact on the Parisian art scene: being exhibited at the Paris Salon twice (1877, 1879), and publishing a book, Studying Art Abroad and How to Do It Cheaply (Roberts Brothers 1879), providing practical advice for other young American women who wished to pursue careers in painting in Europe. Beyond Paris, her career began with a book of sketches of the homes of famous authors from her hometown of Concord, Massachusetts (Concord Sketches, 1869), and she also lived for a short period in London—being exhibited at the Dudley Museum (1877), where she was also allegedly hailed by Ruskin as ‘the only artist worthy to copy Turner’.

However, May continues to remain in the shadow of her more famous sister, Louisa May Alcott, and, as Judy Bullington has observed, her life and achievements are consistently ‘enmeshed’ with the fictional character of Amy March of Little Women (‘Inscriptions of Identity,’ 2007). Recovering May Alcott Nieriker’s Life and Work is a one-day conference, opportunely held in Paris, that aims to gather new interest for, and invite new perspectives on, any aspect of the life and work of this forgotten transatlantic artist, a painter and a writer and a figure of the troubled Parisian scene of the 1870s. Of particular interest are the new contexts of reception of her oeuvre, both her painting and her writing, new archival work, the question of co-authorship (notably with her sister Louisa) and creditation, the mapping of (transatlantic and European) artistic networks in the 1870s.

The symposium will feature the work of postgraduate students of the AHRC CHASE consortium. It is open to academics, independent researchers and international postgraduates from a variety of disciplines: Americanists, nineteenth-century historians, biographers, literary scholars, art historians and artists with an interest in the Alcott family from across the world.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

  • May Alcott Nieriker’s visual art, especially her portrayal of enslaved and freed people in such works as La Négresse (1879) and the lost portrait, “The Prince of Timbuctoo” (1877)
  • The political dimension of her art in the context of French and international politics.
  •  May Alcott Nieriker’s epistolary output and life-writing, housed at the Houghton Library, Harvard, her articles for the Boston Evening Transcript and Youth Companion, and her unfinished novel, An Artist’s Holiday (1873), co-authored with Louisa May Alcott.
  • The importance of Studying Art Abroad: And How To Do It Cheaply (1879) (notably in shaping our understanding of the lifestyle and challenges facing nineteenth-century woman artists, especially those who were expatriates)
  • Mapping May Alcott Nieriker’s Paris.
  • May Alcott Nieriker and her contemporaries (artistic networks, expatriate networks, influence of, and on her peers)
  • May Alcott Nieriker’s life: relationship with her husband Ernst Nieriker, her attempts to combine an artistic career with domestic life.
  • May Alcott Nieriker’s influence on Louisa May Alcott’s portrayal of female artists in such works as A Marble Woman (1865), the Little Women trilogy (1868-1886), Psyche’s Art (1868), An Old Fashioned Girl (1869), and Diana and Persis (1879).
  • May Alcott Nieriker’s relationships with the wider Alcott family: her father Bronson Alcott and mother, Abigail May, and her three sisters, Anna Bronson, Louisa May and Elizabeth Sewall.
  • May Alcott Nieriker’s reception from biographers and critics, and her portrayal in popular culture and fiction, including works such as Jeanine Atkins’ 2015 novel, Little Woman in Blue, and Elise Hooper’s 2017 novel, The Other Alcott.

Scientific committee: Azelina Flint (University of East Anglia), Cleo Humphreys (University of East Anglia), Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Diderot-LARCA), Christopher Timms (University of Essex), Heather McKnight (University of Sussex), Elise Hooper, author of The Other Alcott (2017)

This conference is sponsored by the University of East Anglia, the Université Paris Diderot, the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England (CHASE), the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the University of Essex and EKCCHO

CFP: The Moravian Journal of Literature and Film

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The Moravian Journal  of Literature and Film

invites submissions for a forthcoming special issue on WILLA CATHER.

This issue will present unpublished letters from Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937), the first Czechoslovak president, to Willa Cather.

The Moravian Journal of Literature and Film, published by Palacký University Olomouc, is an international scholarly journal whose objective is to be a platform for an intersection of literary and film history, criticism, and theory. The journal examines literatures and films in any language, thus merging both regional and universal themes. The journal is published in English, is peer-reviewed, and has two issues a year. The journal is indexed in The MLA Directory of Periodicals and inEBSCO. Editor-in-Chief: Marcel Arbeit, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic

Deadline: February 15, 2018

http://www.moravianjournal.upol.cz/

CFP: Society for the Study of American Women Writers 2018 Triennial Conference

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Deadline for submissions: February 16, 2018
Full name/name of organization: Christopher Allen Varlack, Society for the Study of American Women Writers
Contact email: ssaww.vpdevelopment@gmail.com

CFP for the SSAWW 2018 Triennial Conference in Denver, Colorado
Conference Theme: “Resistance and Recovery across the Americas”
November 7-11, 2018 | The Westin Denver Downtown

From Anne Hutchinson to Phillis Wheatley to the Crunk Feminist Collective, American women writers have historically engaged in resistance in their creative/activist works, pushing against restrictive gender norms, a patriarchal culture that devalued women in political and economic spaces, the tradition of silence and silencing, and any number of other obstacles that limited women’s voices and their freedom to explore the full breadth of their unique identities. At the same time, from scholars like Frances Foster to the initiatives championed by the likes of Legacy and the Colored Conventions Project, scholars also work toward recovery, eager to rediscover the works of American women writers who were active in their resistance, insightful in their social and political critiques, and responsive to the dominant discourse on race, protest, social justice, as well as identity, etc. emerging during their lives. For the 2018 SSAWW Triennial Conference in Denver, CO, we invite proposals on the topic of “Resistance and Recovery across the Americas,” from early American literature to the literature of the present day. Proposals are encouraged in, but not limited to, the following topics:

Literary Studies

  • Writing the fight: social justice, resistance, and protest in poetry and prose
  • Confronting race, whiteness, invisibility, and labor
  • Social and political resistance in American women’s writing
  • Resistance to restrictive gender roles in women’s writing
  • The role of writing in emotional recovery from systemic oppression
  • Memoir as a genre of recovery and resistance
  • Periodicals, newspapers, and magazines: women and textual engagement
  • Recovering American women’s writing from the archives

Teaching and Pedagogy

  • Women scholars’ resistance and work to change academic institutions
  • Resisting the canonical syllabus by diversifying the field of women writers taught in the classroom
  • Teaching beyond traditions by transcending traditional theoretical lenses, engaging new approaches to student research/scholarly production, etc.
  • Encouraging thinking beyond traditional academic silos by engaging the intersection of art, music, literature, etc. for a more interdisciplinary approach

Public Humanities

  • Performance
  • Scholarship as social engagement
  • Teaching outside of the academic classroom
  • Creating partnerships for public humanities by bridging the university and the public sphere

Digital Humanities

  • Utilizing digital avenues to showcase research projects and student work
  • Pedagogical practices of digital tools, assignments, projects in the classroom
  • Labor and recovery in the digital age: new models of resistance, politics, and economies
  • Approaches to shepherding projects from initial idea stage to fully-formed digital works
  • The state of digital humanities
  • Access to grant funding and sustainability of long-term projects
  • Perceived disparities between projects focusing on male versus female authors
  • How digital publication platforms can both hurt and/or help recovery work
  • Discussion on the differences between digital and print texts, journals, etc.
  • Professional challenges within universities or the discipline (e.g. how to “count” digital work toward promotion and tenure, etc.)

The deadline for proposals of approximately 250 to 300 words is Friday, February 16, 2018, using the corresponding Google Form listed below. Session lengths are 1 hour and 15 minutes, and preference will be given to pre-formed panels as well as roundtables (pending review by our esteemed SSAWW reviewers), though high-quality individual submissions will be accepted and grouped into coherent panels when possible. Remember that panels typically consist of three, preferably four, presenters allotted approximately fifteen minutes each to present their work with time remaining for discussion. Roundtables typically consist of five to eight participants allotted approximately six to eight minutes to present their work with time remaining for discussion. In order to help facilitate the review process and the development of this exciting SSAWW program, we ask participants identify five key words for their proposals when submitting.

Submit individual paper proposals to: goo.gl/y3wLgL
Submit pre-formed panel proposals to: goo.gl/J8f1QQ
Submit pre-formed roundtable proposals to: goo.gl/P61gGK
Submit workshop and exhibition proposals to: goo.gl/Q4v4Aj
Submit special sessions (for SSAWW affiliate organizations) to: goo.gl/HPf2oe
For complete sessions, please ensure that notifications are sent to potential participants by early February at the latest to allow those whose proposals are not accepted for the panel or roundtable to submit individual paper proposals by the submission deadline of February 16, 2018. Chairs will be asked to provide an abstract for the panel as a whole (approximately 250 to 300 words) as well as the contact information and a brief biographical statement (no longer than 60 words) for each participant, each individual abstract, and any A/V requirements (please note that while we do recognize the need for support for some presentations, there are always high costs associated with securing this equipment that we would like to limit).

For help regarding any technical issues with the new electronic submission form, please contact the Program Director for the 2018 SSAWW Triennial Conference, Dr. Christopher Allen Varlack, at ssaww.vpdevelopment@gmail.com; he is also the contact person for scheduling, A/V requests, etc. For questions regarding the conference, please contact the Vice President of Organizational Matters, Dr. Sabrina Starnaman at ssaww.vporganizationalmatters@gmail.com.

Note that selected participants must be members of SSAWW no later than September 28, 2018 in order to secure their place on the conference program. We look forward to receiving proposals for the many thoughtful and informative sessions that our SSAWW members always produce and to seeing you in Denver for yet another powerful SSAWW Triennial Conference. The registration and hotel information will be posted to the SSAWW website, listserv, as well as social media accounts under separate cover.

For additional information about the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, please visit our website at ssawwnew.wordpress.com.

CFP: Domestic Space: The Home in American Science Fiction

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ALA 2018, San Francisco May 24-27, 2018

Deadline for submissions: January 21, 2018
Full name/name of organization: John Miller
Contact email: jmiller@nu.edu

The so-called “Golden Age” of American science fiction coincided with the mythologizing of the American home in the two decades following WW II as an idealized site for the realization of a certain conception of “American values.” While science fiction might seem an unlikely genre in which to explore and question ideas of domesticity, much science fiction in and since the 1950s has done just that. This panel invites papers that in any way explore the theme of domesticity or the idea of “home”—including the idea of the “home planet”—in specific works of American science fiction. Papers comparing multiple works or authors or that situate these works within larger discourses and debates on the nature of the home in American culture in the 20th and 21st centuries are particularly welcome. Please submit proposals of no more than 250 words to John Miller, jmiller@nu.edu, by 1/21/18.

CFP: Speculative Fiction as Literature of Emergence

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Deadline for submissions: January 2, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Gabriella Friedman/American Studies Association 2018
Contact email: gf258@cornell.edu

Speculative fiction is often loosely defined as an umbrella category that includes genres such as science fiction, fantasy, supernatural horror, and magical realism—that is, as fiction that deploys non-mimetic or “fantastic” elements. This panel, however, will take up conceptions of speculative fiction that go beyond this generic distinction. That is, instead of defining speculative fiction primarily by the presence of non-mimetic elements, the panel will explore speculative fiction as any fiction that generates emergences—ontological, epistemological, and/or political—which are seemingly unimaginable in our existing society.

Can speculation be understood as a mode of thinking, being, operating, or relating to others? If so, how and to what ends does literature articulate this mode? What does the fantastic/magic/the non-mimetic do in speculative fiction when it is present? Can literature which features no overtly non-mimetic elements be considered speculative fiction? What is the relation between speculative fiction and experimental fiction? What are the political stakes of speculative fiction?

Papers on literary texts from any period are welcome–papers that engage with race or gender are especially of interest.

Panel proposal for the American Studies Association meeting in Atlanta, GA (November 8-11, 2018).

Please send 300 word abstract and brief bio to Gabriella at gf258@cornell.edu by January 2nd.

CFP: “Embodiment and Charlotte Perkins Gilman” ALA 2018

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Deadline for submissions: December 31, 2017
Full name/name of organization: Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society
Contact email: hhuber@email.sc.edu

American Literature Association (ALA) 28th Annual Conference–May 24-28, 2018–San Francisco, California

“Embodiment and Charlotte Perkins Gilman”

Despite a career-spanning insistence on the spiritual value of collective humanity, the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman often take a turn toward the exploration of individual embodiment. In her autobiography, Gilman attests to a “life-long interest in physical culture” and recounts many of her life’s events through somatic experience. In another instance, she recalls a doctor’s praise for having depicted so thoroughly the physical experience of nervous breakdown in “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” This session invites papers that explore Gilman’s fascination with the physical body and her simultaneous investment in and resistance to individualized embodiment. This panel’s selected papers should contribute to a better understanding of themes of embodiment and corporeality in Gilman’s writings. They may also illuminate Gilman’s and/or other writers’ enmeshment in scientific, medical and popular treatments of the body in late nineteenth and early twentieth century culture. Additionally, this panel encourages pedagogical approaches to embodiment and similar themes in the works of Gilman and other contemporary authors. Submit 250 to 500-word abstracts and a CV, by December 31, 2017, to Hannah Huber, University of South Carolina, at hhuber@email.sc.edu.

CFP: “Follow the Yellow Brick Road? Challenging Approaches to Progress in North America”

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Call for papers for the 11th Annual Graduate Conference of the GSNAS Berlin:

“Follow the Yellow Brick Road? Challenging Approaches to Progress in North America”
Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, June 7-8, 2018
Notions of progress have remained pivotal to North American identities and academia. Discussions range from how “progress” may be evaluated empirically to whether the concept is a useful theoretical tool at all. In practice, visions for social and economic change are generally coupled with the idea of progress. Particularly in North America, competing perceptions of progress remain a driving force behind public and political discourses. Across the political spectrum, current debates often hinge on appropriations or differing interpretations of progress. These debates have intensified against the backdrop of technological innovation, sociopolitical upheavals, and programmatic schisms in progressivist movements.
The 11th Graduate Conference hosted by the Graduate School of North American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin will explore interdisciplinary ideas of progress and consider their relevance across numerous fields of research. How is progress framed in various academic dialogues? What functions do concepts of progress and progressivism fulfill in North American societies? To what extent have American values promoted or obstructed progress? Which counternarratives exist? What are the contested theories and methods by which progress can be measured, if it can be measured at all?
As an interdisciplinary institute, the Graduate School welcomes abstracts for individual 20-minute papers from political science, history, economics, literature, cultural studies, and sociology, as well as related fields of research. Graduate students (M.A. & Ph.D.) and early career scholars are especially encouraged to apply.
Proposals may explore, but are not limited to, the concept of progress in the following contexts:
• Progress and American Exceptionalism
• Progress in the colonial imagination and practices of “writing back”
• Religions as catalysts of change
• Whose progress? Social justice and activism
• Definitions of progress in progressivist movements since the 19th century
• Progress in a “post-fact” society
• Digital transformation and the future of work
• Representations of progress, regress, and stagnation in popular culture
• Teleological understandings of progress
• Utopian and dystopian art, film, and literature
• The future of remuneration and minimum basic income
• Visions of innovation, technology, and development
• Gendered and racialized notions of progress
• The rise of economic nationalism in the age of globalization
Abstracts should be limited to 300 words and include the author’s name, e-mail address, institutional affiliation, discipline(s), and a short biography. The deadline for submissions is February 1st, 2018. The conference committee will confirm the receipt of abstracts via e-mail and will notify the selected researchers by the end of March 2018.
Please submit all abstracts and questions to gsnas.conference2018@gsnas.fu-berlin.de. The conference will be held in English. For further information go to www.gsnas-conference2018.de

CFP: “Transatlantic Conversations: New and Emerging Approaches to Early American Studies”

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CALL FOR PAPERS:
“Transatlantic Conversations: New and Emerging Approaches to Early American Studies”

A Workshop Jointly Sponsored and Organized by the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies and the Society of Early Americanists

October 4-6, 2018
Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany

The discipline of early American studies seems full of gaps: from Eric Slauter’s perceived trade gap between historians and literary scholars (Early American Literature, 2008) to the theory gap between early American literature and later disciplines identified by Ed White and Michael Drexler (American Literary History, 2010). Given the boon of transatlantic scholarship in the past few decades, however, the relationship between European and North American scholars working on early Americanist topics appears to grow closer than ever before. A small but stalwart group of European—especially French, German, Austrian, Swiss, and British—early Americanists regularly attends North American conferences, such as the SEA biennials and the annual ASA convention. In turn, however, too few North American scholars are reading scholarship published and attending scholarly gatherings in Europe.

This joint Obama Institute-SEA workshop will bring together early Americanist scholars from North America and Europe in a 2 ½-day intensive conversation and collaboration about transatlantic perspectives on new developments in the field of early American studies.  The workshop seeks to engage several critical fields around which specific collaborations during the conference will center:
•    Digital humanities and archival studies
•    Intersections between book history, print and material culture
•    Transpacific and archipelagic studies
•    Indigenous studies
•    African American studies
•    Periodical studies
•    Ethnic, multilingual, and comparative literary studies
•    Environmental and medical humanities; history of science
•    Religious networks
•    Post-critique
•    Aesthetics and new formalism
Seminal critical interventions—such as Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski’s Critique and Post-Critique (Duke, 2017) or Ed Cahill and Ed Larkin’s focus on aesthetics in their jointly edited issue of Early American Literature (2016)—frequently catalyze new work in early American studies on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet scholars in Europe and North America often apply theoretical questions in different ways and proceed from different assumptions about the aims, methods, and rhetorical articulations of scholarly and critical innovation. Even more basically, varying practices of reading and teaching, or uses of text, context, and critique often make conversations at standard conferences non-starters or inconclusive. This workshop provides early American literature scholars the opportunity to
•    Discuss their work with scholars across the Atlantic.
•    Debate applications of key critical texts in their field to early American studies.
•    Plan collaborative publications, grants, workshops.

The Workshop will be limited to 30 participants grouped together in small, critically and thematically focused teams. Each team works together over 2 days and shares results in poster presentations at the end of the workshop.  Preceding the Workshop, each pre-arranged team agrees upon, circulates, and reads a) one article-length work in progress written by each participant, and b) a limited number of critical/theoretical works informing each sub-field to anchor the conversation and collaboration.

SUBMISSIONS
Please email the following materials to the Workshop Chair, Prof. Oliver Scheiding (scheiding@uni-mainz.de) as PDF attachments by February 15, 2018:
•    A 2-page CV.
•    A circa 400-500 word proposal, including the applicant’s critical and theoretical focus, current work(s)-in-progress, past and future work in primary text archives, and a statement detailing specific objectives and ideas for scholarly collaboration. The proposal should address how and why the applicant’s work would profit from collaboration with colleagues across the Atlantic. Although the main Workshop language will be English, all applicants should detail their level of competency in languages other than English (such skill will not be required but may help in grouping applicants in specific teams).

Workshop acceptances will be sent out by March 15, 2018.

CFP: Madness, Mental Illness and Mind Doctors in 20th and 21st Century Pop Culture

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CALL FOR PAPERS

Madness, Mental Illness and Mind Doctors in 20th and 21st Century Pop Culture

3rd & 4th May 2018

University of Edinburgh

www.madnessinpopculture.com

CALL FOR PAPERS

“Sometimes it’s only madness that makes us what we are.” Grant Morrison, Batman: Arkham Asylum (1989)

In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault writes that “madness fascinates man”. Indeed, examples of this dark allure are present throughout the ages. From tales of those who paid a penny on Sundays to view the insane held at London’s Bethlem Hospital in the early nineteenth century, to ever popular portrayals of mental illness and madness in the literature, television, and film of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, representations of psychiatric illness remain loaded, highly visible, and deeply entrenched in Western pop culture.

Mental illness – and more colloquially, madness – often functions metaphorically as representative of a subversive liminality that delegitimizes protest against the status quo. Characters like John Givings in Richard Yates’s novel Revolutionary Road, for example, are ultimately neutralized as political agents through psychiatric diagnosis. Other more recent filmic and televisual representations of mental illness utilize such psychiatric tropes in alternative but highly recognizable ways. Television shows such as Sherlock and House emphasize the connection between madness and genius, while Fight Club and the television series Mr Robot focus on the social equation between mental illness and criminality. The American true crime podcast Sword and Scale has been accused of demonising victims of mental illness. In Andrew Solomon’s Noonday Demon, Allie Brosh’s webcomic Hyperbole and a Half, and Kabi Nagata’s manga My Lesbian Experiences with Loneliness, the line between pathology and pathography, medicine and memoir, has blurred.

This conference will examine these representations, and explore the ways in which madness, mental illness, and those who are both affected by, and striving to treat, psychological maladies are depicted in twentieth and twenty-first century popular culture. We ask: how have fluctuating historical conditions and attitudes influenced the ways in which madness and mental illness are portrayed in the media? What kind of relationship exists between medical understandings of psychological disorders and popular depictions of such illnesses? Do contemporary portrayals of “madness” in popular fictions work to demystify and destigmatize mental illness, or do these representations reinforce negative stereotypes, further obfuscating our understanding of psychological disorders?

We welcome proposals for 20-minute presentations from a range of disciplines that engage with popular conceptions of madness and mental illness in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Proposals that include visual arts or other media, as well as the traditional paper, are welcomed. Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Depictions of mental illness in film, television, literature, podcasts,  graphic novels, and video games.
  • Madness as political/protest (social conformity as ‘true’ madness)
  • Women/gender and madness
  • Madness and creativity
  • Pop culture vs. medical establishment
  • Psychiatry in popular culture
  • Madness and horror/the Gothic
  • Madness, confinement, and physical space
  • Asylums, community care, and deinstitutionalization
  • Madness as metaphor
  • History of psychiatry and antipsychiatry
  • Freud and the history of popularization of psychoanalysis
  • Post-war psychiatry
  • The politics/impact/importance of life narratives
  • The “myth” of mental illness
  • Medical humanities and medical science
  • Mental health and contemporary politics
  • Madness and confessional narrative

Please submit abstracts of 300 words, along with a short biographical note (150 words), to madnessinpopculture@gmail.com by 2nd February 2018. Further information at www.madnessinpopculture.com.

Follow us on Twitter @madpopculture or Facebook, under “Madness in Pop Culture PG Conference”.