Slayage 10 Conference

Il CFP per la 10 Conferenza sui Buffy Studies che si terrà in California a luglio è online e aperto a saggi e interventi relativi ai Buffy Studies in senso lato. 

Informazioni sul CFP e sull'accomodation qui!

CFP del Whedonverse

Con la fine del 2016 che si avvicina, facciamo il punto sui CFP per pubblicazioni e conferenze che riguardano il Whedonverse.

CFP Media Mutations 2017

Disponibile il CFP della prossima edizione di Media Mutations, appuntamento immancabile per tutti gli studiosi di Tv.

Cities in Crisis conference - King's College London

Il prossimo 19 novembre si svolgerà al King's College di Londra l'interessante Conferenza Cities in Crisis.

Se siete dalle parti di Londra, da non perdere!

Euroslayage Conference 2016

Sono aperte le iscrizioni per la Slayage Conference 2016 che quest'anno si terrà a Londra dal 7 al 10 luglio presso l'università di Kingston.

The 7th Biennial Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses

È on-line il CFP della prossima Slayage Conference chiamata Euroslayage poichè per la prima volta si svolgerà in Europa presso la Kingston University in UK, il 7/10 luglio 2016.

Come tradizione la conferenza si occuperà della figura di Joss Whedon in senso lato, toccando tutte le sue creazioni come regista, produttore e sceneggiatore e analizzando i suoi personaggi, temi filosofici, costruzione narrativa e così via.

Ci vediamo lì l'anno prossimo!

The Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses 2014

Si svolgerà dal 19 al 22 Giugno presso la California State University-Sacramento, la sesta conferenza biennale sul Whedonverse. Anche in questa edizione il programma si annuncia ricchissimo, con papers che partono da Buffy fino a Agents of Shield.

Se vi trovate nei paraggi l'evento merita sicuramente una visita!

CFP: Film and Media 2014. Visions of Identity.

Per chi volesse passare fine Giugno a Londra, è uscito il CFP della conferenza annuale Film and Media che merita un pensiero per gli studiosi di cinema e tv.

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Visions of Identity:

Global Film & Media

The Fourth Annual London Film and Media Conference

26-28 June 2014 

We are pleased to announce that FILM AND MEDIA 2014: The Fourth Annual London Film and Media Conference, organised by Academic Conferences London,will be held from 09.30h on Thursday 26 June 2014 to 16.30h on Saturday 28 June 2014 at the Institute of Education Conference Centre, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1, UK.

The Conference theme for 2014 is Visions of Identity: Global Film and Media. For the full Call for Papers, please see elsewhere on this site. This major international conference will again seek to explore, celebrate and critique the screen-based traditions of film, TV and digital media in all their manifold dimensions. This pioneering annual conference, now in its fourth edition, has proved to be of considerable interest and value to established scholars, early career Faculty, young researchers, and anyone with a commitment to learning about global film and media in a dynamic and friendly academic context. Please see the dozens of unsolicited appreciations quoted elsewhere on this site.

At our previous event in Summer 2013, we were honoured to schedule some 200 Speakers as well as other Delegates, making this again the largest annual UK 'home-grown' gathering in  the field.  Reflecting an extremely wide range of interests in Film and Media, they proved to be a fascinating mix of established and emerging scholars from nearly 40 countries - the UK, Albania, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Macau, Malaysia, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, The Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, Turkey and the USA.

Keynotes, Papers and Panels

The event will feature distinguished Keynote Addresses by Prof. Lawrence Grossberg (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Prof. Mandy Merck (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Prof. Daya Thussu (University of Westminster, London).  

The event will open with a screening of The Stuart Hall Project, John Akomfrah's magnificent new film portrait of the late Professor Stuart Hall, Cultural Studes pioneer and key exponent expert of ideas around intercultural identity. The conference will also feature a Memorial Roundtable commemorating the life and work of the great Brazilian documentarist Eduardo Coutinho, who tragically lost his life as we were preparing the conference.

We invite proposals for Papers of 20 minutes’ duration, as well as proposals for complete Panels of three Papers. Papers are not required in advance. Final Papers, submitted after the event, are eligible for consideration for publication in our annual E-Book Reader. Please submit your Proposal (strictly 180-200 words) plus a very brief CV (not more than 100 words) for Peer Review only via the online form available at on this website.

Deadline for Proposals: 31 March 2014

(but early application is strongly advised)

Please consult our Advisory Notes for Speakers and Panel Chairs, available for download elsewhere on this website. Please note that Speakers are required to complete early registration (at discount rates) absolutely no later than 30 April 2014.

The Supernatural in Literature and Film Conference

Il prossimo 29-31 Marzo 2014, a Shetland, UK, si svolgerà la conferenza

The Supernatural in Literature and Film

Objects of fascination and horror

Ever since the dawn of literature, the supernatural has played a role in the stories humanity tells about itself. But how can we compare Medieval historical writing – with its naturalistic narratives of fairies, demons, and monsters – with present-day written and film fiction concerning vampires, aliens, and ghosts? What are today’s readers to make of Medieval texts of a consciously fictional nature? Even in 12th Century Britain, the serious author Gerald of Wales could criticise his earlier contemporary Geoffrey of Monmouth for writing lies, yet Gerald himself delights in tales of demons and enchantment. Film and literature’s fascination with the supernatural is no less complex today: Whether ‘weird fiction’, Hollywood’s fairy tale reboots, ancient evils of Lovecraftian horror, literary mysticism, the vampires and werewolves of the Twilight books and movies, or the vengeful ghosts and giant monsters that wreak habitual destruction in Japanese cinema, popular culture has never been more magical.

The conference will be based on the windswept island of Unst, Shetland. 29-30 March will feature presentations by academics and practitioners on the subject of the supernatural in literature and film. It will also be possible to hear talks from the conference Folk Belief and Traditions of the Supernatural.

Il programma provvisorio si preannuncia molto interessante!

Media Mutations 6

Segnalo l'appuntamento annuale con Media Mutations, conferenza organizzata dall'Università di Bologna (27/28 maggio 2014) dedicata ai modi di produzione e alle forme narrative della serialità televisiva contemporanea. 

Ecco il CFP:

Media Mutations 6. Modes of Production and Narrative Forms in the Contemporary TV Series.


Bologna, Dipartimento delle Arti, May 27th-28th, 2014


Invited keynote speaker: Catherine Johnson (University of Nottingham)

Media Mutations, the international conference on audiovisual media studies, comes to its sixth annual edition. This year’s theme is the relationship between modes of production and narrative forms in contemporary scripted television series in the United States and in Europe. The industrial structures of television, from labor organization to economic models of monetization, all shape the types of content that is created: the stories that the medium tells and the ways in which it tells them. This year’s conference seeks to explore changes brought in the past decade by new models of business, new technologies and new forms of integration within the media, and the resulting changes to television narratives.
We invite submissions that cover the following topics, favoring proposals that are able to intersect across different areas:

•   Narrative models and industrial structures: the influence of extratextual factors (organizational structures, institutional policies, production patterns, economic models and types of distribution) on the form and language of TV series.

•   New forms of monetization: the relationships between television series, ancillary products and branded extensions in a context of digitization and cross-media storytelling. What effect is the trend towards gamification having on TV series? What elements in series are highlighted by broadcasters according to diverse cross-platform monetization strategies? How is this influenced by contexts of distribution?

•   Genres: the impact of changing economic considerations in re-shaping subgenre traditions (dramas, sitcoms) and in inventing new genres and hybrid forms. To what extent does the TV series format, and its various genres and subgenres, influence and regulate audience expectations?

•   From TV watching to user experiences: the effects of the transition of media broadcasters from content providers to designers of user-oriented experiences based on scripted series. In what ways is added value provided to television texts? What kinds of new cross-media skills are required from TV professionals in the context of expansion of, and integration with, digital media content?

•   Global content flows and local contexts: the discourse of television as a national medium in the shaping of production cultures. In what ways is this discourse influenced by economic, technological and cultural changes? What is the role of production and distribution routines (i.e. dubbing, acquisition, promotion) in the modification (forms and identities) of original series into different local contexts?

•   Theoretical definitions: the identification of effective models in the contemporary milieu, thirty years after the Second Golden Age. The evolution of aesthetic and product-related definitions such as quality TV, high-concept series and narrative complexity.

The official languages of the conference are English and Italian. There will be no conference fee. Proposals of no more than 250 words (for 20-minute talks), should be sent to Luca Barra (luca.barra@unicatt.it), Leora Hadas (lhadas.uni@gmail.com) and Paolo Noto (paolo.noto2@unibo.it) by January the 27th 2014. Please attach a brief biography (maximum 150 words) and an optional selected bibliography (up to three titles) relevant to the conference theme.

Contemporary Horrors: Destabilizing a Cinematic Genre

Altra segnalazione per questa conferenze sull'Horror che si svolgerà presso l'Università di Chicago il 25 e 26 aprile 2014.

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The turn of the millennium has witnessed a uniquely dazzling renaissance in cinematic production within the horror genre. How do we account for the prolific production and prodigious diffusion of horror film since the turn of this last century?  From thematic topoi to cinematographic style, horror cinema of the past 10-15 years has witnessed numerous trends emerge, cross-pollinate internationally, and re-enter the genre in cycles of repetition and transformation accelerated by digital production and distribution technologies. And yet, the sheer proliferation and remarkable diversity of vital horror filmmaking makes defining the genre perhaps more challenging than ever before.

In the 21st century, as horror cinema has become more clearly than ever a global genre, those films that find their way to U.S. movie theaters represent only a small fraction of the total quantity made. Just as the vast majority of horror filmmaking now occurs independently of major studio support, practices of distribution and viewing have expanded and evolved with the internet making this impressive range of films available to fans around the world. One is left to question how structures of global information and capital (and strategies for evasion of such structures), affect the form and function of filmic negotiations of horror. In other words: What delineates horror as a genre in the 21st century? How have shock, fear, and the fantastic been defined in recent horror productions? If horror has become somehow an almost “universal” idiom of global experience, what unifies our senses of trauma? How are memory and melancholy supplanted by obscenity and anxiety?

To engage these and other questions, we welcome speakers who take diverse paths toward contemplation of the contemporary horror film and the questions it raises as a transnational cinematic genre.  A panel of independent horror filmmakers will convene to inaugurate the conference.  Adam Lowenstein, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film, will provide the keynote.

Topics that may be considered include but are not limited to:

-        Gore and images of violence; body horror; torture porn/spectacle horror

-        Auteurs and auteurist approaches to genre; alternative collaborationist approaches

-        The significance of horror within contexts of national cinemas and the significance of national contexts for understanding international horror

-        Transnationalism and border-crossings (international co-productions, émigré filmmakers, transnational influences)

-        Remakes and genre formulae; translating and transducing horror across cultures and time

-        New forms/patterns of distribution and spectatorship; Methods of advertising and publicity

-        Queerness and gender issues in horror; the legacy of Carol Clover, Linda Williams, Robin Wood in horror criticism

-        The relationship of art-house cinema to genre (i.e. Haneke, Del Toro, Von Trier, Denis)

-        Monsters and monstrosity

-        The “found footage” film  (Paranormal Activity, [REC], Cloverfield, etc.); “home movies” and the unheimlich

-        Media in horror and “haunted media”; outdated medial artefacts between nostalgia and fear; the afterlife of formats

-        Models for independent production

-        The eroticization of the monstrous and the abject

-        Technologies of horror and horrific technics: instruments of para-transmission

-        Horrified psyches: anxiety, melancholy, depression, and affective models

-        Horror as Event

-        Speculative realism at the movies: the object’s ontology in the horror film.

Abstracts of a maximum of 200-250 words are due no later than February 1, 2014 by email to contemporaryhorrors.uchicago@gmail.com.

Mechanisms of Monstrosity Conference

Segnalo questa interessante conferenza che si svolgerà al Mansfield College di Oxford il prossimo 27 luglio 2014.

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This years Monsters and the Monstrous conference will focus on the mechanisms of monstrosity itself and the forms of othering and difference that cause a society, a culture and a historical moment to label someone or something as monstrous. As such, whilst iconic monsters such as Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula can themselves be seen to embody a particular cultures sexual, racial, and even biological anxieties, we wish to focus on those forms of abjection that can be seen to have initiated or fueled such a “monstrous” response. Contemporary examples might include paedophiles, parents in the widest sense (mothers and usually step-fathers in particular) who kill their children, sex offenders and even immigrants. More recently, reactions to bankers, the perceived greed of corporations, and even natural phenomenon (global warming, tseunami’s, tornado’s) have elicited similar responses. Consequently it is both the groups, even phenomena, that are othered or seen to “polute” and destabilse the normalised “us” of society, and the reasons and mechanisms of why and how that we wish to explore.

These monstrous technologies, as labelled by some theorists, or what we might also call the mechanics of monstrosity are utilised by ideologies of patriarchy, nationalism, imperialism and capitalism, to name but a few, to victimise those that defy or exceed categorisation or that threaten to corrupt or dissolve the hetero-normative subject and the societal “I”. Whilst this points to the monsterisation of groups, or individuals that fail to belong to the “group,” due to their, gender, sexuality, disability or ethnicity, it also suggests the inherent monstrosity of the group, culture, ideology that creates and enforces such systems of demarcation and exclusion. As such the nature of the machinery of monstrosity created, maintained and disseminated by and throughout a particular culture will also be examined. It is also worth noting of course that whilst such mechanisms differentiate between those that are included and excluded, that even with the category of the “us” there are often further sub-divisions of purity and privilege, or what we might call “non-monstrosity.” Here then hierarchies of class, caste, gender and ability can be seen to be equally monsterising in the way it differentiates both inside and outside the category of “us”.

This call for proposals then asks for consideration of the above in relation to differing cultures and societies as well as specific historical moments that produced and utilised ideologies of monstrosity, in terms of sex, gender, ethnicity, disability, class etc., to delineate notions of societal inclusion and exclusion, and various hierarchies within them.

Examples of the above can be seen in, but are not exclusive to, the following categories:

Collective, Social, National- neighbours, enemies and outsiders – real and imaginary lands
- supernatural realms and spiritual otherness
- human, non-human and animal
- colonialism, post-colonialism and borderlands
- barbaric acts, piracy, cannibalism, genocide
- surveillance, control and dissemination

Gender and Sexuality- heteronormativity, male hierarchy, patriarchy, matriarchy and  feminism
- LGBTQ
- asexual, non-sexual, hermaphrodite and non-reproduction
- alternative sexual practices, pedophilia, bestiality, necrophilia

Individual, Internal- skin colour, hair colour, blemishes, tatoos, piercing
- fashion, costume, cosmetics and body enhancement
- customs, rites and religious practice
- disability, body difference, chronic conditions and mental health
- class, caste, age, language, dialect

Phenomena- natural disasters, acts of God, global warming and extreme weather
- ideological monsters, economic collapse/crisis and GM crops and foodstuffs
- media, internet and virtual spaces, hacking, trolling and bullying
- WMD’s, chemical weapons, warcrimes and enhanced torture

Proposals for panels and alternative forms of presentation are strongly encouraged on the above and any related topics.

In order to support and encourage interdisciplinarity engagement, it is our intention to create the possibility of starting dialogues between the parallel events running during this conference. Delegates are welcome to attend up to two sessions in each of the concurrent conferences. We also propose to produce cross-over sessions between these groups – and we welcome proposals which deal with the relationship between Monsters and the Monstrous and Sins, Vices and Virtues.

What to Send
Proposals will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word proposals should be submitted by Friday 14th February 2014. If a proposal is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper of no more than 3000 words should be submitted by Friday 16th May 2014. Proposals should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in programme, c) email address, d) title of proposal, e) body of proposal, f) up to 10 keywords.

E-mails should be entitled: Monsters12 Proposal Submission

All abstracts will be at least double blind peer reviewed. Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs .

Rob Fisher: m12@inter-disciplinary.net
Simon Bacon :simonmonster@inter-disciplinary.net

CFP A Fiend in the Furrows Conference - Queen’s University Belfast 2014

Segnalo questo interessante CFP:

‘A Fiend in the Furrows’ is a three-day conference in association with the School of English at Queen’s University Belfast, exploring British “folk horror” in literature, film, television, and music. The event will include academic papers, film screenings, musical performances, and readings.

Supernatural and horrific aspects of folklore inform the Gothic and weird writings of M.R. James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, where philosophical and religious certainties are haunted and challenged by the memory of older cultural traditions. Folklore has a profound and unsettling impact on the imaginative perception of landscape, identity, time and the past. Folk memory is often manifested as an intrusive and violent breach from an older repressed, ‘primitive’ or ‘barbarous’ state that transgresses the development of cultural order. Gothic and weird fictions are burgeoning as the focus of serious academic enquiry in philosophy and literary criticism, and the genres continue to have an impact on popular culture. Through the writing of Nigel Kneale and Alan Garner, among others, the tradition has influenced British horror cinema and television, being revived and reimagined in films such as Quatermass and the Pit (1967), The Devil Rides Out (1968), Witchfinder General (1968), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), The Wicker Man (1973), and more recently in Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) and A Field in England (2013). The conference will examine “folk horror” texts, films and music in their period context and the implications for British culture’s understanding of its own unsettled past. Proposals are welcomed for presentations that engage with various aspects of ‘folk horror’ from researchers in the disciplines of Literature, Film Studies, Music, Drama, History, Anthropology, Archaeology, Folklore, Geography, Art History, Philosophy and Theology. Presentation topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Late 19th century Gothic literature
• Early 20th century weird fiction
• Modernism and weird fiction
• The ghost story
• Contemporary horror and fantasy fiction
• Children’s literature
• Folklore collectors and redactors
• Folklore and the supernatural
• Primitivism, atavism, degeneration
• Rural and urban folklore
• Horror cinema and television
• Folkmusic

Please submit a 300 word abstract together with a brief biography to:
folkhorror@qub.ac.uk – by 1st June 2014.

Italian Horror Cinema: an International Conference

Ancora una segnalazione per una conferenza che si preannuncia molto interessante!


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Italian Horror Cinema: an International Film Conference


The University of Bedfordshire, Luton, Friday 9th – Saturday 10th May 2014

In association with the second annual ‘Spaghetti Cinema’ Film Festival @spaghetticinema

Keynote speaker: Professor Peter Hutchings (Northumbria University).

Italian Film Studies increasingly situates its subject matter within discourses that complicate merely ‘national’ orientations, as is evident in scholarship surrounding the country’s wide array of horror films from the 1950s onwards. It has become common practice to examine in these films and their various cycles a tension between a culturally specific register pertaining to ‘Italian’ outlooks on the one hand, and cosmopolitan, transnational or ‘translocal’ flows of influence on the other. Spanning a period of traumatic socio-political upheaval, an ever-increasing importation of American fashions and styles, and lucrative international co-production models, Italian cinema’s various vampires, witches, zombies, cannibals and serial killers document the complexities of cultural moments finely perched between the local and the global.

This conference will offer delegates the opportunity to bring together diverse perspectives on the historical and political coordinates of Italian horror cinema. Encompassing the broad and porous cycles of gothic horror, gialli, zombie and cannibal films (among many others), the event will reconsider the heterogeneous strands of influence that feed into and out of these films, to examine negotiated, transitional and mobile Italian identities. 

Likely topics include:

▪   Cinematic / literary antecedents to Italian horror films.

▪   Studies of Italian horror cinema’s political / historical contexts.

▪   Transnational / transcultural routes of influence and cultural significance.

▪   Industrial histories (eg co-production funding structures, key production companies).

▪   Studies of domestic or international distribution patterns / reception.

▪   Considerations of individual films / trends.

▪   Translation studies / cultural translation.

▪   Italian horror auteurs / directors.

▪   The on-going global legacies of Italian horror.

▪   Italian horror cinema today.

We seek proposals for 20-minute papers, or for pre-constituted panels of three or four papers, that engage with any aspects of the above topic. Abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with a short biographical note, should be submitted for peer-review to spaghetticinema@beds.ac.uk by Friday January 17^th 2014.

The Department of Media Arts and Production, University of Bedfordshire, Park Square, Luton, Bedfordshire, LU1 3JU, UK.