CALL FOR PROPOSALS: ECOLOGIES OF/AND ADAPTATION
LITERATURE / FILM ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE
UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA, MISSOULA, MONTANA SEPTEMBER 21-23, 2023

With each passing year, the pressures of climate change make it clear that the natural world and human endeavor are irrevocably intertwined. As we head to Western Montana in 2023, we invite scholars to explore how the concept of “adaptation” can serve to further questions of ecologies: the relationships between living organisms and their environments. Adaptations, after all, are always already about networked relationships, exploring not only the connections between texts – including the written word, film, and media – but also the relationships between images and music, performers and performance, human and nonhuman, and bodies and physical spaces. Where do film, literature, and media fit within the larger web of global ecologies, and how can ecological thinking enrich our understanding of the interactions between nature, culture, and adaptation? Inspired by recent work in the environmental humanities and ecocriticism, we invite proposals that bridge the study of the environment (broadly conceived) and the study of textual adaptation.

While we welcome papers on any aspect of film and media studies, we are especially interested in papers exploring one or more of the following topics concerning ecology and adaptation:
● The environment as text
● Landscapes and adaptations
● Adaptation and the anthropocene
● Parasitic and symbiotic adaptations
● Apocalypse or post-apocalypse and adaptation
● Multiverses and alternate realities and adaptations
● Relationships between past, present, and future
● Worldbuilding and transmedia storyworlds as narrative ecologies
● Narratives of survival
● The relationship between biological adaptation and textual adaptation
● Ecocritical re-imaginings of well-known stories
● Fandoms as evolving ecosystems
● How adaptations operate within media ecosystems

We also have significant interest in general studies of American and international cinema, film and technology, television, new media, and other cultural or political issues connected to the moving image. In addition to academic papers and pre-constituted panels, presentation proposals about pedagogy or from creative writers, artists, video essayists, and filmmakers are also welcome.

Please submit your proposal, which will consist of a title, 250-word abstract, and keywords, via this Google Form by April 7, 2023. You will receive a confirmation email within 48 hours. If you have any questions or concerns, contact Amanda Konkle at litfilmconference@gmail.com. Accepted presenters will be notified by April 24, and the conference program will be available by June 1 to enable travel planning.

The conference registration fee is $200 ($150 for students and retirees) before September 1, 2023 and $225 ($175 for students and retirees) thereafter. All conference attendees must also be current members of the Literature/Film Association. Annual dues are $20.
Presenters will be invited to submit their work to the Literature/Film Quarterly for potential publication. For details on the journal’s submission requirements, visit their website here.

Call for Authors of Recent Publications to Participate in Adaptation Conversations:
Have you recently published a work on adaptation? Would you like to participate in an inaugural Adaptation Conversation via Zoom about your work? There’s a space for that on the conference proposal form, or you can reach out to akonkle@georgiasouthern.edu with information about your publication.

Canadian Association for Italian Studies (CAIS) Annual Conference: University of Montreal, May 04-07, 2023

Session Title: Framing Ferrante: Adaptation and Intermediality from Troubling Love to The Lying Life of Adults

This panel surveys the cinematic and televisual adaptations of Elena Ferrante’s literary works, from Mario Martone’s L’amore molesto (1995) and Roberto Faenza’s I giorni dell’abandono (2005) to Saverio Costanzo’s L’amica geniale series (2018-), Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter (2021), and Edoardo De Angelis’s Netflix series La vita bugiarda degli adulti (2023). In their 2021 collection, Ferrante Unframed, Roberta Cauchi-Santoro and Costanza Barchiesi set out to “unframe” Ferrante, “releasing [her] from the tight confines” of the debate around the strangely problematic status of a successful author whose writing has generally been associated with the works of Italian women writers. This panel seeks to build on this research by considering the literal framing and re-framing of Ferrante on TV and film screens. The aim is to extend and expand upon existing scholarship by considering the older forays into Ferrante adaptation alongside the more recent, 21st century remediations. In this respect the panel organizers seek papers that conjoin questions of modality (analog or digital), medium, mediation, and transmediation, with those of authorship, authority, and gender, around such key issues as genre and influence, commercial vs. independent, arthouse vs. ‘prestige,’ etc.

Please send 250 word paper proposals and a brief bio note to Russell Kilbourn (Wilfrid Laurier University) and Roberta Cauchi-Santoro (St. Jerome’s, University of Waterloo, Ontario)
Email: rkilbourn@wlu.ca
Email: roberta.cauchi-santoro@uwaterloo.ca

Closing Date for Receiving Proposals for this Session: March 01, 2023

Call for Papers: ReFocus: The Films of Don Siegel

Don Siegel is the rare Hollywood director who worked successfully in both classic Hollywood of the 1930s and 40s and, after the studio system reinvention, New Hollywood into the 1980s. From his start in classic Hollywood as a montage director on Casablanca, through genre work in film noir, science fiction, westerns, and war films, Siegel acted as director, and often producer, to generate a versatile collection of iconic films including Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the remake of The Killers, Dirty Harry, Charley Varrick, and Escape from Alcatraz. Yet, for all his successes, in particular in the five films he made with Clint Eastwood, there is a near absence of critical writing on Siegel.

As this volume will be the first comprehensive study in Don Siegel’s work we seek to contextualize, problematize and theorize his entire canon. We welcome essays from a variety of theoretical, historical, and methodological approaches, and are especially interested in essays that discuss Siegel’s work from a feminist and/or critical race perspective while situating the relevance of his film work in the contemporary moment. Topics may include, but are not limited to, a single film, group of films, his work with Clint Eastwood, his direction on John Wayne’s last film The Shootist, themes and topics that pervade his work, and/or his television directing or influence, the critical and commercial reception of his films especially during the 1970s. We are currently soliciting abstracts of approximately 350 words for essays to be included in a book-length anthology on Don Siegel’s cinema, including his work in television, to appear in 2024. The Films of Don Siegel will be a scholarly volume published in the University of Edinburgh’s ReFocus series, examining American film directors. Series editors are Robert Singer, Gary D. Rhodes, and Frances Smith. ReFocus features a series of contemporary methodological and theoretical approaches to the interdisciplinary analyses and interpretations of the work of these American directors, from the once-famous to the ignored, in direct relationship to American culture –its myths, values, and historical precepts.

Essays accepted and included in the refereed anthology should be approximately 6,000 to 8,000 words and referenced in Chicago endnote style.

A link to the series: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-refocus-the-international-directors-series

Please send a 350-word proposal and a short bio to both editors: Doctor Jamie Popowich (jamie.popowich@ntu.ac.uk) & Aaron Tucker (artucker@yorku.ca)

About the editors

Jamie Popowich is a writer and filmmaker. His next book, Punch Lines (Potential Books, 2023) examines the thin line between jokes and tears. He is currently working on a book about the politics of prank comedy. He holds a doctorate from the University of Hertfordshire and teaches at the University of Surrey.

Aaron Tucker is the author of two film studies monographs, Interfacing with the Internet (2014) and Virtual Weaponry (2017), both with Palgrave Macmillan. His current research utilizes film theory to analyze and critique the cinema of facial recognition technologies. In addition, he is a poet and novelist, whose second novel, Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys, will be published by Coach House Books in Spring 2023.

ASAP/14 Call for Papers – Arts of Fugitivity

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: March 31, 2023

Seattle and Bothell
October 4-7, 2023
Submission deadline March 31, 2023; accepted proposals to be announced in late Spring 2023.

ASAP/14 will have in-person programming, as well as virtual streams, at University of Washington’s Seattle and Bothell campuses in order to maximize accessibility and explore how and why we gather together. We are especially pleased to be able to partner with the Henry, a museum for contemporary art and ideas on the UW campus, and Wa Na Wari for events.

The conference theme—Arts of Fugitivity—addresses strategies of survival and imagination. We encourage the exploration of fugitivity as a concept, practice, and method in contemporary art and culture — what does it mean to hide within plain sight, to create alternative ways of being, seeing, and doing, to escape? More than just longing for something else, arts of fugitivity show us how to get there and suggest that we might, in fact, already be there. Fugitivity is a keyword in Indigenous studies, where it asks us to think critically about the politics of movement and place and their intersections with settler-colonialism. As Jarrett Martineau and Eric Ritskes write, “Fugitivity finds its energetic potency in remaining illegible to power, incommensurable with colonialism, and opaque to appropriation, commodification and cultural theft. That which is fugitive proposes an insurgent force of dissident visibility; it is the hidden that reveals itself in motion.” We are curious about how fugitivity emerges as lines of flight, creative camouflage, and aesthetics. Since we are meeting in the Pacific Northwest–specifically the land which touches the shared waters of all tribes and bands within the Duwamish, Puyallup, Skykomish, Snohomish, Suquamish, Tulalip and Muckleshoot nations–how might fugitivity complicate our understanding of mobility and the global, how might it inform our ideas of travel and home, and how might it shift our practices of engagement? As Fred Moten writes “Fugitivity is immanent to the thing but is manifest transversally.” What emerges when we look elsewhere, sideways, and askance for ways to survive? What happens to representation, creativity, and possibility? How do arts as object, epistemology, and method – across visual arts, music, theatre, performance, film, literary, media, and multidisciplinary arts – animate fugitive ways of being, knowing, and imagining?

We invite proposals from scholars, artists, writers, curators, activists and other practitioners whose work addresses and expands upon the study, collection, exhibition, teaching, and writing of art and culture. We invite proposals with alternative, experimental writing practices and modes of presentation, including workshops that break form with the typical conference paper, panel, or roundtable, as well as with the constraints and possibilities of the conference’s hybrid format. We wish to explore fugitivity as strategy, method, mode of being–all of which we see to be grounded in practice. Panels and papers that consider a range of disciplines and methods, and that speak across geographies, (non)traditional institutional or intellectual divides are especially encouraged. Given the conference’s theme, we welcome submissions that rethink and revisit the stakes, limits, pleasures, and discomfort of representation, movement, and evasion.

Panels and papers are encouraged to engage our theme, but participants are welcome to submit other proposals which contribute to our broader project of exploring the arts of the present. Participants may address the following topics, but are welcome to explore others as well:

• Movement, mobility, and complications of home and the global
• Pace, syncopation, and questions of access
• Camouflage
• Technologies of evasion, escape, or cover
• The minor, the fleeting, the ephemeral
• Escapism, daydreaming, and wandering
• The undisciplined, unschooled, and unruly
• Crossing Borders, Evading Boundaries, (Re)Making Spaces
• Pedagogies of Inwardness, practices of illegibility

ASAP/14 Organizing Committee
Amber Jamilla Musser, Conference Co-Chair/President 2022-23, CUNY Graduate Center
Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud, Conference Co-Chair/Member-at-Large, University of Washington, Seattle
Kenneth Allan, Secretary, Seattle University
Amaranth Borsuk, University of Washington, Bothell
Ching-in Chen, University of Washington, Bothell
Nijah Cunningham, Member-at-Large, Hunter College, CUNY
Jennifer Doyle, 2nd Vice President, UC Riverside
Olivia Michiko Gagnon, University of British Columbia
Summer Kim Lee, Member-at-Large, UCLA
Julian Wong-Nelson, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: March 31, 2023

More info: https://www.cvent.com/c/abstracts/843cdba0-9182-4526-8879-b9248d01d129

Small Screen Supers: Essays on Superhero Television

Deadline for submissions: February 28, 2023
full name / name of organization: academic anthology edited by Anna F. Peppard & Dru Jeffries
contact email: SuperheroTVBook@gmail.com

As superhero films have proliferated, so too has superhero television. But as scholarship on superhero films has similarly proliferated, scholarship on superhero television has not. When superhero television is discussed by scholars, it is often as an offshoot of filmic franchises rather than as a phenomenon in its own right, with its own histories and contexts of production, its own approaches to adaptation, and its own dynamics of reception. 

Superhero television matters because it is an historically popular and increasingly influential piece of the American media landscape. In addition, examining this distinct combination of genre and medium can productively deepen our understanding of what superheroes are or might be, as well as what comic book adaptations are or might be. For instance, superhero comics and films are commonly treated as masculine texts, appealing primarily to straight men and boys. Television, by contrast, has historically been viewed as a more “domestic” and thus stereotypically feminized medium, prioritizing emotional affect over spectacular effects. Tellingly, only one big budget superhero film to date has included a wedding (2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer), while many superhero television shows have had plots focusing upon weddings and romantic engagements. Relatedly, superhero television tends to be more diverse than superhero films, spotlighting more female and LGBTQ+ superheroes. Superhero television thus suggests that the superhero genre is not as exclusively straight or masculine as many critics and scholars make it out to be. By the same token, the blending of romance and action within superhero television can help us interrogate understandings of domestic and public spaces, further illuminating links and ruptures between gender and genre. These are just some of the many ways studying superhero television might productively reframe existing discourses. 

This edited collection, tentatively titled Small Screen Supers: Essays on Superhero Television, will explore, through as many lenses as possible, what makes superhero television special. Essays can examine specific network, cable, or streaming shows or dynamics within groups of shows, either within a specific era or across eras. While emphasizing the relevance of superhero television within the 21st century American media landscape, we hope to highlight the long history and neglected diversity of superhero television. To this end, we welcome proposals on both live-action and animated productions from the 1950s to the present. We are, however, limiting our scope to American productions. All critical approaches are welcome. Essays can explore fandom, production contexts, or perform close readings, though ideally, all essays will relate content to form and context. We will prioritize submissions that take up the central questions that animate the collection—what is superhero television and why does it matter? We strongly encourage submissions to consider the politics of representation. We will also be prioritizing essays on underexplored texts and/or new approaches to familiar texts. If a chosen subject of analysis does not obviously conform to expectations of the superhero genre, the abstract should make a case as to why the subject matter is worth considering in this context.  

Specific dynamics/topics we are hoping to address include:

• Issues of representation (related to gender, race, sexuality, disability, etc.)
• Dynamics of serialization, franchising, and transmedia intertextuality
• Dynamics of adaptation, both technical and narrative
• Political references and/or allegories
• Televisual animation, both all-ages cartoons and adult-oriented (Harley Quinn, Venture Bros., Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, etc.)
• Superhero television fandom communities
• “Forgotten” shows (Night Man, M.A.N.T.I.S., The Greatest American Hero, Mutant X, The Secrets of Isis, Shazam!, Superboy, etc.) and failed pilots (Wonder Woman [1974 and 2011], Generation X [1996], Justice League of America [1997], etc.) 

Those interested in participating in this collection are asked to send a max. 500-word abstract and a max. 1-page prospective bibliography for a 6000-word chapter as well as a 50-word bio to the collection’s editors, Anna Peppard (editor of Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero) and Dru Jeffries (author of Comic Book Film Style: Cinema at 24 Panels Per Second), at: SuperheroTVBook@gmail.com. Deadline for proposals is February 28th, 2023. All proposals will be adjudicated by March 31st, with first drafts of accepted chapters due fall 2023.

https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/12/30/small-screen-supers-essays-on-superhero-television

CFP: Exhibition in Crisis, Aniki 10, no. 2

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a generational crisis for film exhibition around the world, as movie theaters have been forced to close their doors temporarily or permanently, alter their modes of presentation and the parameters of the theatrical experience, and otherwise transform their operations. But COVID-19 is certainly not the first crisis in film exhibition, nor the only one that is currently in progress. For the editors of this special section of Aniki, the pandemic has instead drawn attention to the transformative effect that crises past and present have had on film exhibition as a mode of cultural practice, a set of institutions and actors, and an object of research in film and media studies. In this dossier, we investigate the concept of crisis in the study of film exhibition and the crises that have altered cinemagoing practices over time, opening up opportunities to analyze a broad array of historical and cultural impacts in the process. In this, we follow the work of authors like Laura Baker (1999), Phil Hubbard (2003), and Gary D. Rhodes (2011), who have studied risk, danger, vice, and violence at the cinema; in addition to these issues, we hope to illuminate crisis in its philosophical, existential, and disciplinary forms. In soliciting and selecting papers, we seek to develop an international scope on these issues that is truly global, while remaining open to submissions that study cinemagoing from any geographic location.

Film exhibition’s death has been declared many times in the hundred and twenty years preceding its most recent existential crisis. In assembling this section, we do not wish to replicate narratives of exhibition’s long decay or inevitable demise; instead, we root our development of this dossier in a consciousness of film exhibition as a longstanding cultural experience that has persisted in part due to its changeability, adaptability, and its modulation of crisis. While the exhibition industry is heterogeneous and its fate is still indeterminate, looking beyond exhibition as a highly systematized commercial practice helps us to expand our understanding of the effects of exhibition’s historical crises. In this, we recognize the work of scholars like Anat Helman (2003), Nicholas Balaisis (2014), Donna De Ville (2015), Solomon Waliaula (2018), and James Burns (2021), who have drawn attention to cinemagoing practices that often take shape outside the traditional movie theater industry or film festival circuit. This framing does not preclude moments of loss, degradation, or failure in particular modes of cinemagoing, but nonetheless allows us to grasp crises as coinciding with moments of transition and adaptation instead of the dead ends so often predicted in popular narratives about theatrical exhibition.

This moment of crisis in theatrical exhibition coincides with corresponding crises in film studies and film historiography. The first issue concerns archival access and research. Since the beginning of the pandemic in late 2019, access to global archives has vacillated between impossible and unpredictable. This has had a deleterious and global impact on film historiography and, therefore, the study of theatrical exhibition and moviegoing. In addition, inequities within government and other support of these archives have led to local, regional, and national crises for scholars seeking archival materials. Other crises within the study of film exhibition are evergreen. Recent exhibition research, such as that done by scholars of “new cinema history,” has made major strides in research on cinemagoing forward within film studies (Maltby, Biltereyst and Meers 2011; 2019). But the continued US- and Eurocentrism of film exhibition research in which the largest number of monographs, edited collections, and peer-reviewed articles are written in English and/or focused on issues related to exhibition or moviegoing in Europe or North America is an issue that requires redress. Work by Luciana Corrêa de Araújo (2013), Laura Isabel Serna (2014), Nolwenn Mingant (2015), Lakshmi Srinivas (2016), Laura Fair (2018), and Jasmine Trice (2021) offer compelling examples of the possibilities for global cinema research. Even outside Europe, the United States, and Canada, however, English is still the lingua franca in the large cache of research written on this topic, such as in work from or on Australia, India, and South Africa. Research by Rodrigo Fagundes Bouillet (2020) that brings film exhibition history closer to ethnic-racial relations studies in Brazil, and by Diana Paladino (2018) and Pedro Butcher (2019), on Latin-American histories of film distribution, suggests emerging efforts in this area that we aim to further. With these geographical, linguistic, structural, and other issues in mind, we seek new works from around the world that see an opportunity within our disciplinary and global crises to generate and disseminate new questions, new arguments, and new vistas for research. We also hope to take advantage of the transnational backgrounds of our editors who hail from Brazil, Canada, and the United States and our venue in a multilingual journal to seek new foci and new research written in Portuguese, Spanish, and English. For us, the film exhibition crises of the past, present, and future and the internal crises of archival access and Eurocentrism present opportunities and not just challenges for the creation of new directions and new models of research on film exhibition.

We seek new work on moments of crises for specific exhibition venues:

• Drive-ins
• Repertory and second-run theaters
• Arthouse theaters
• Microcinema or transitory cinema spaces
• Multi- and/or megaplexes
• Nickelodeons
• Movie palaces
• Rural and quotidian moviegoing
• Segregated movie houses

Or specific movie theater-related issues such as:

• Concurrence with other leisure activities
• Adaptation to crises (economic, health, social, etc.)
• Distributor versus exhibitors’ interests
• Content availability, theatrical windows
• Exhibition technologies
• Local films and local theaters
• Preservation of materials and/or sites
• Adaptation of theatrical spaces to multiple uses
• Race, gender, and/or class in cinemagoing practices

We welcome any and all soft inquiries about new or ongoing research that might fit our special issue. Mostly, we are seeking a wide variety of scholars and scholarship to help drive new directions and new questions related to film exhibition precisely at the moment when audiences are rediscovering the importance of collective viewing and in which the film and film exhibition industry are charting a path forward. How might this moment encourage us to think broadly about the crises of the past? How might it encourage us to think broadly about the crises of the moment in the way journalists, executives, and other scholars have over the past three years?

This special section is guest-edited by Rafael de Luna Freire (Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil), Charlotte Orzel (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA), and Ross Melnick (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA).

Rafael de Luna Freire is associate professor in the Film and Video Department and in the Film and Audiovisual Program at Fluminense Federal University, in Niterói (Brazil), where he is the head of the Audiovisual Preservation University Lab – LUPA. He also works as curator, researcher and film archivist. He is the author of numerous publications on Brazilian film history, including the books Cinematographo em Nichteroy: história das salas de cinema de Niterói (2012) and O negócio do filme: a distribuição cinematográfica no Brasil, 1907-1915 (2022).

Charlotte Orzel is a doctoral candidate and Chancellor’s Fellow in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara who holds an MA in Media Studies from Concordia University. Her doctoral research analyzes the recent history of film exhibition in the United States and Canada and the way shifts in exhibitor practice reflect changing industrial visions of cinemagoers. She has also written about film historiography, IMAX, cinema advertising, and the international ownership of cinema chains, and presented work at conferences hosted by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Canadian Communication Association, the Film Studies Association of Canada, and the Histories of Moviegoing, Exhibition and Reception scholarly network.

Ross Melnick is professor of film and media studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. He was named an NEH Fellow (2015) and an Academy Film Scholar (2017) for his book, Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World (Columbia University Press, 2022). He is also the author of American Showman: Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry (Columbia University Press, 2012), co-editor of Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive (AFI/Routledge, 2018), and co-founder of the Cinema Treasures website.

The deadline for submitting original and complete articles is 15 January 2023.

All submissions received within the deadline will undergo a selection process (by the editors), followed by blind peer review (by external reviewers). The texts should not be longer than 8000 words, and must include, in English and Portuguese (and also Spanish, if that is the language used): a title, an abstract of up to 300 words and a maximum of 6 keywords.

Before submitting your complete article, please read the full instructions here.

For any queries, please contact: aniki@aim.org.pt.

Media Architecture Biennale 2023

Event Dates and Locations
June 14-15, 2023 (Online)
July 21-23, 2023 (In-Person in Toronto, Canada)

The Media Architecture Biennale 2023 (MAB23), the world’s premiere event on the design and role of media in the built environment, will bring together over 400 students, academics, and professionals from architecture, art, design, urban planning, media and communication, urban informatics, and public policy to share new ideas and shape the evolving field of media architecture.

The week-long event, split into a 2-day online and 3-day in-person program, will feature keynotes, academic papers and industry roundtable sessions, symposia, workshops, exhibitions, an awards ceremony, and a gala dinner. It also includes a number of related activities with partner organizations in the year before the event including talks, roundtable discussions, and exhibitions that help to introduce the themes of the event and build connections.

“MAB23 will help to facilitate the sharing of ideas, research, and best practices in Media Architecture across multi-industry, multidisciplinary groups of stakeholders,” said Dave Colangelo, General Chair, of MAB23, and Assistant Professor of Digital Creation and Communication at Toronto Metropolitan University. “With our four key themes: Equity and Access, (Dis)Engagement, Civic/Creative/Commercial, and Intermedial Media Architecture, we hope to inspire students, artists, designers, and business and civic leaders in their uses of Media Architecture in smart city-building and placemaking/placekeeping initiatives.”

MAB23 seeks contributions from industry, academia, and government in the form of Papers, Workshops, and Explorations & Prototypes. We also seek projects for consideration for our MAB Awards and MAB Student Awards. Details about each can be found on our website. Calls close in late January 2023.

Registration for the event will open in January 2023.

About the Media Architecture Biennale
The Media Architecture Biennale (MAB) is the world’s premier event on media architecture, urban interaction design, and urban informatics. It brings together architects, artists and designers, leading thinkers on urban design, key industry and government representatives, and community activists. Together, they explore the design and role of media in the built environment and its implications for urban communities and ecosystems.

Previous MABs have been held in Amsterdam/Utrecht (2020), Beijing (2018), Sydney (2016), Aarhus (2014, 2012), Vienna (2010), Berlin (2008), and London (2007). MAB23 Toronto will be the first time the event will be held on Turtle Island (North America).

For more information, please visit:
Website: https://mab23.org/
Social Media: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter

#MAB23 #MAB23Toronto

One day symposium: Reflecting on 35 years since Penny Marshall’s Big

University of Leicester, 19th May 2022
Keynote speakers

Dr James Russell (DeMontfort University)

Dr Deborah Jermyn (Roehampton University)

Thanks to the support of the BAFTSS event fund, The University of Leicester is hosting a one day symposium reflecting on 35 years since Penny Marshall’s Big.

2023 marks 35 years since Penny Marshall became the first woman director to make over $100 million at the American domestic box office with Big. Following on from this Marshall had an impressive career as a director-for-hire, directing the Oscar-nominated Awakenings (1990) and the much-loved A League of Their Own (1992), amongst numerous other films. Following Marshall’s death in 2019 there was an outpouring of grief from her contemporaries, evident in social media and obituaries that noted her significance and influence as a trailblazer for women in Hollywood. Despite this, there is no academic work focused on Marshall or her films and she does not appear in histories of Hollywood.

This one-day symposium will use the anniversary of her most commercially successful film to reflect on Marshall, her films, her career and her wider influence on the film industry. The conference will not only focus on Marshall and her films, but also those women directors who followed in her footsteps to break boundaries in Hollywood

Topics for papers may include, but are not limited to:

Exploration of Marshall’s films

Marshall’s career and/or route into the industry

Marshall’s early work as an actress

Marshall’s influence as a trailblazer

Women directors in Hollywood – in the 1980s and beyond

Studying directors for hire and their absence in film scholarship

Big and its enduring appeal

The problematic sexual politics of Big

A League of their Own and its feminist potential

Abstracts for 20 minute papers should be approx. 200 words, accompanied by a short bio. Pre-prepared panel submissions of three papers are also welcomed.

Deadline for submissions 24th February 2023
Email submissions to cmj23@le.ac.uk

Colloque international « Réinventer la scène. Innovation, création, diffusion »

1er au 3 juin 2023
Grande Bibliothèque de BAnQ, Montréal

Merci de faire parvenir vos propositions, en français ou en anglais, (500 mots max.), d’ici le 15 janvier 2023, à l’aide du formulaire suivant : 

https://reinventer-la-scene.labocinemedias.ca/soumettre/

Pour toute question, utilisez l’adresse suivante : reinventerlascene@gmail.com.

“Reinventing the Stage: Innovation, Creation, Dissemination” International Conference

June 1-3, 2023
BAnQ’s Grande Bibliothèque, Montréal

Historically, the performing arts have been defined by the encounter, in a specific location and for a limited period of time, between performers and their audience, a stage and a hall, a production and its reception. They normally presuppose a co-present, synchronous, and localized community, live and onsite. At the same time, theatre, opera, music, and dance have, ever since Ancient Greece, continuously interrogated the questions of shared space, performance, representation, mediation, and the positioning of the human and the non-human.

The goal of this transdisciplinary international conference is to bring together researchers, performers, producers, distributors, and creators involved in the performing arts and media arts to discuss what has for a long time epitomized the fundamental identity of theatre, opera, music, and dance: the stage. How does the shift from live, on-site performances to the many possible configurations — recorded and offsite (capturing, recording, and disseminating events and performances to be viewed at another time and place than that of the performance); live and off-site (radio, television or live Internet broadcasts, or remote presence, making it possible to attend an event or performance remotely); or pre-recorded and on-site (when an event or a performance is reprised at the same place but different time, as is the case with certain uses of virtual, augmented, or mixed reality) — transform the spectators’ experience and the very nature of the event of which they are a part?

Alongside the various technological developments of our age — already with the telephone, cinema, radio, and television, but also more recently with virtual reality, the Internet, and social media — the COVID-19 pandemic has called physical space into question even more dramatically and, by extension, the art forms that appear to be inseparable from the places devoted to them. Notably, the pandemic has reinforced the impression of the gradual obsolescence of physical space and of the crisis of the performing arts. Nevertheless, the past few years have also made it possible to reconsider and rethink the very meaning of the stage, its materiality, its forms, and its sites. Numerous recent innovative initiatives allow us to see the pandemic as a catalyst for a reinvention of the stage through media and technological innovation that has made possible new relations and encounters between performances and audiences. From the production of works using augmented reality to live performances on Zoom, accompanied by the challenge posed by the “musical chatroom” and facilitated by, among other things, applications such as Endlesss, many explorations and experiments have aimed at breathing life back into performance, while using new modalities, each of which profoundly alters the traditional ecology of the stage. In a post-pandemic reality, with the increase of connected screens, ranging from giant fixed screens to mobile platforms, each with Internet access and a camera, with the possibility of motion tracking and geolocation technologies, we are witnessing a rediscovery of the physical space, but in a new, more complex form, hybrid or mixed. In this expanded field — named in turn “mixed reality” (Milgram et al.), “hybrid space” (Benford and Giannachi), “smart city” (Halegoua), “net locality” (Gordon and de Souza e Silva), or “geomedia” (McQuire) —, public space and communities, the stage and audiences, assemblies, events, and shows are reconfigured.

This conference proposes to examine the recent reconfigurations of the stage by various digital technologies that bring into dialogue connectivity and location, virtual online spaces and physical offline spaces, in order to evaluate their impact on this new ecology of the stage and to fully grasp the inherent complexity of this technological and media renewal. We invite proposals for individual papers (20 minutes) that explore these topics, without chronological or language restrictions with respect to the corpus and phenomena under study. Papers may engage with the following topics, without being limited to them:

• The ways in which the “stage” is expanded by new technologies and their impact on the content, form, dissemination, or reception of performances.
• The social and sensorial extension of the spectator’s experience through immersive, emersive, participatory, and interactive experiences.
• The political repercussions of reconfiguring the stage and the performance hall through technology, of the skènè though technè, providing a new “sharing of the perceptible,” a different allocation of “places and roles,” of powers and the shared (Lyotard, Rancière, Dardot and Laval).
• The redefinition and democratization of the performing arts through new technologies.
• The connection between recent transformations of the stage and past experiments.
• The question of presence in experiences on a reconfigured “stage.”

Please send your proposal, in English or French (500 words max.), by January 15, 2023 at : 

https://reinventer-la-scene.labocinemedias.ca/en/submit/

Please address all questions to : reinventerlascene@gmail.com.