The Fan Studies Network

University of Portsmouth Centre for Studies in Literature Postgraduate Conference 2015
Keynote Speaker: Professor Susan Pearce (University of Leicester)

For centuries humans have conceptualised their identities through the activity of collecting. The practice of defining culture, space and time through interactions and relationships with objects appears to be a recurring feature of human history and has led to a long tradition of memorialising the past in libraries, museums, archives and personal collections. Since civilisation began, there has been an ever-increasing trend for collecting objects, from exotic souvenirs of antiquity to photograph albums, objets d’art to folk tales and songs, literary mementoes to governmental archives. In recent years, this has led to the meaningful object being explored and theorised in many disciplines, including literature, art and museum studies, to name but a few.

This conference aims to look at all aspects of collecting from early modern collections of souvenirs to Victorian forms of control through categorisation and the nostalgic renewal of past forms; from the eclectic juxtapositions of Modernism all the way through to today with modern creative uses of the archive, fandom and cult collectors.
Our keynote speaker is Professor Susan Pearce, currently Professor Emeritus of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, who has written extensively on the meaningful object, and the interrelations between individuals and artefacts. She is the editor of The Collectors Voice vol. 1-4 (2002), and On Collecting: An Investigation Into Collecting in the European Tradition (1995) and the author of Objects of Knowledge (1990).

For this interdisciplinary conference, we invite papers from postgraduates on any aspect of collections, including the practices of collectors and the representation of collections in archive and museum studies, history and the arts including literature, film, and visual art. Abstracts should be approximately 300 words in length for papers of 20 minutes. Potential speakers should also include a brief biography of 50 words. The deadline for submission of abstracts is Sunday 22nd March 2015. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Collectors and collections from the perspective of literary, film and art history disciplines
• The representation of collections and collectors in literature and film
• Collections in museums, archives, libraries and galleries
• Literary collections and literary collectors
• Fandom and cult collecting
• The Imperial Archive and postcolonialism
• Expanded definitions of the collection – countries, people, memories
• The psychology of collecting and habits of collecting
• The history of collecting; the relations of collecting to history
• Collections of: photography, manuscripts, souvenirs, postcards, stamps, naturalists’
collections (insects etc.), books, music, stories, autographs, magazines, albums and scrapbooks, letters, life-writing etc.
• Theories of the collection including thing theory, archive theory, object theory, museum theory and cultural memory theory
• Subjectivity and objectivity in the collection
• Experiences of researching the collection and fictional researchers

Please send your abstract and biography by 22nd March 2015 to: cslpgconf@port.ac.uk in Microsoft Word or PDF format.
For further information, please visit: https://collectorsandcollecting.wordpress.com

Call for Papers and Topic Proposals:
A Celebration of Supernatural

Now accepting submissions and ideas for the third annual Pop Culture Colloquium at DePaul University in Chicago!

The Media and Cinema Studies program, along with the College of Digital Media, the English Department, and American Studies, at DePaul University is hosting a one-day celebratory colloquium in honor the tenth anniversary of the television series Supernatural on Saturday, May 09, from 9am-6pm. This event will feature roundtable discussions from scholars and fans of Supernatural, speaking about the cultural impact of the show, as well as analyzing aspects of the episodes. The even will also feature special guests, screenings, screenwriting workshops, and (perhaps) a sing-a-long or two…

The audience for this event is both graduate and undergraduate students, both fans and scholars, and the focus should be on informed and enlightening discussion rather than formal academic papers. “A Celebration of Supernatural” will take place on DePaul’s Loop campus.

If you’re interested in speaking on a round table, please send a 200 word abstract of your topic and a CV or resume to Paul Booth (pbooth@depaul.edu) by Mar 01. For more information, please check out the website http://www.mcsdepaul.com/a-celebration-of-supernatural.html and sign up for updates on Facebook (search “A Celebration of Supernatural”). We hope that you will be able to join in the discussion and celebration!

Fan Fiction and the Study of Biblical Commentary and Scribal Culture Workshop

Chairs

Sonja Ammann, Humboldt Universität Berlin (sonja.ammann@hu-berlin.de)

Mette Bundvad, University of Copenhagen (mbu@teol.ku.dk)

Solveig Grebe, Universität Göttingen (solveig.grebe@phil.uni-goettingen.de)

Frauke Uhlenbruch, De Gruyter Berlin (f.uhlenbruch@gmail.com)

Programme

This workshop uses the model of fan fiction to conceptualize early Jewish and Christian text production.

Fan fiction are texts, films, or other media created by fans of TV series, films, books, or book series, etc. Fans engage with the universe created by the makers of a specific series, film, or book. For example, they create new storylines, “repair” plots they do not agree with, write prequels or sequels, and fill in scenes that are missing. The internet allows an unprecedented visibility of fan fiction – up to the point where writers of the “canonical” series look to fan fiction and take the opinions of fans into account when writing new “canonical” material. Significantly, writers of fan fiction work within a set of rules defined by the fandom over time. For example, inventing a new character who does not exist in the “canon” is frowned upon; also, one does not write oneself into the storyline.

As an interpretative model, fan fiction provides excellent heuristic tools for exploring anew the composition of early Jewish and Christian texts. Two perspectives are particularly relevant. Firstly, fan fiction helps us explore questions of textual authority. How did the early Jewish and Christian texts acquire their authority, and in what ways did they make creative use of the authority of already existing texts? Contemporary fan fiction offers a very useful analogy here. As texts are rewritten and reimagined by their fans, they may gain in authority, for example. Similarly, the rewritten media itself occasionally gains a measure of authority, inspiring perhaps further rewritings.

Secondly, fan fiction enables us to study the continuity between the production and reception of texts. Fan fiction writers are readers of texts who become writers of their own texts. A similar relationship between the reception of existing material and new text production existed in early Judaism and Christianity. Here practitioners of fan fiction can offer important insights about writing additional material to supplement an existing “canon”.

This workshop brings together contributions by biblical scholars and writers and theorists of fan fiction. Two sessions are planned. Half of the first session will be an interview with a fan fiction theorist and practitioner, conducted by a biblical scholar. The second half of this session will feature three invited papers. We welcome paper proposals for a second open session.

Call for Papers

We welcome paper proposals which apply fan fiction as an interpretative model to study any text(s) in the range of Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, Dead Sea Scrolls, Pseudepigrapha, New Testament, Christian Apocrypha, or Rabbinic literature. Of particular interest are papers dealing with issues such as a) forms and techniques of literary production based on a revered tradition; b) scribal conventions and restrictions on creative supplementation; c) possible effects of the production of additional material on the development of a “canon”.

The EABS conference is being held in Cordoba, Spain, July 12-15 2015 and the deadline for proposals is March 15.

You can submit abstracts here:
http://www.eabs.net/ocs/index.php/annualmeeting/EABS2015

The University of Northampton, United Kingdom
Saturday 30th May 2015

As the academic study of popular music has developed over the last thirty years, reaching both across disciplines and across the globe, our understanding of the economic, social, political and cultural significance of this most ubiquitous of forms has only become ever more sophisticated and dynamic. Whilst the discipline(s) has developed both scholars of international repute and a thriving postgraduate research body, the work produced by undergraduate students studying relevant courses has had little opportunity to be recognized outside their own institutions.

Following the highly successful Undergraduate Panel at the PopLife conference at the University of Northampton in 2014, students and staff recognized the need to offer a conference platform to the very best work in the field coming out of undergraduate courses in popular and commercial music. As such we would like to offer undergraduate students working in the field of Popular Music Studies the opportunity to submit proposals for the First International Popular Music Studies Undergraduate Conference to be held on the 30th May 2015. The aim of the conference is to promote the very best scholarship at undergraduate level and to encourage continued engagement with the field, and the introduction of new blood into the research community.

Submissions

There is no fixed theme for the conference as long as it relates to the study of popular music. Both conventional papers and practice-based research may choose to engage with the following themes:

Music making
Performing popular music
Audiences / fandom / subcultures
Patterns of consumption
Music media
The music industry / industries
Pop historiography
Writing about music
Technology and innovation
Popular music and the political realm
Proposals may be entirely novel pieces of work or may be presentations or extensions of current dissertation or project work.

Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words (for a 20 minute paper) and should be submitted with a short author biography to nathan.wiseman-trowse@northampton.ac.uk by 14th February 2015. Proposals for dedicated panels or for practice-based sessions will also be considered.