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The Australasian Children’s Literature Association for Research (ACLAR) invites applications for the editorship of Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature to run for a period of four years from July 2016. Current editors, Professor Clare Bradford and Professor Kerry Mallan, intend to step down from this role at that point, but will work with the incoming editor(s) during a transition period.
Papers is Australia’s premier children’s literature journal. It publishes two issues each year, which include six or seven scholarly essays on all aspects of children’s literature and related media. It also publishes occasional review essays of recent books on children’s literature. An Editorial Board of international scholars provides support for the review of submissions to Papers. The opportunity to develop and expand the Editorial Board will be open to the new Editor(s).
Papers is supported by ACLAR, in the form of funding for webhosting, promotion through its website and conferences, and access to membership for seeking volunteers and reviewers.
Appointing associate editors to help with the editorial work
Reviewing manuscripts; appointing referees; working with authors as they revise; editing; proofreading; and corresponding with authors and referees
Appointing and working with guest editors for special issues
Reporting to ACLAR Board as required
Promoting Papers through indexing, publicity and outreach to scholars
Experience as a scholar and editor, with a sound understanding of children’s and young adult literature scholarship
Capacity to work proactively in order to advance the journal’s interests
Capacity to set and maintain timelines and schedules
Experience in communicating with authors and referees
Capacity to provide suitable technical support for the layout, uploading, and publishing aspects of journal
It is also highly desirable that editors have institutional backing to take on this role; preferably time release to focus on the role, access to a university library, clerical and technical assistance.
Expressions of Interest are invited from individuals or editorial teams. Please consider the above Duties and selection criteria in making the decision to submit a formal application.
Formal applications (which will be invited following the receipt of EOI’s) will be due by August 31, 2016 and will require the submission of:
A full curriculum vitae for each individual in a primary editorial position
A detailed response to each of the selection criteria above
A brief outline of how you see the journal developing over the course of your editorship, should you be awarded the position
Please forward your EOI by email to: ACLAR President, Dr Anthony Eaton (Tony.Eaton@canberra.edu.au) no later than 30 July 2016.
If you require further information about the role please contact: Professor Clare Bradford (clare.bradford@deakin.edu.au) or Professor Kerry Mallan (k.mallan@qut.edu.au)
CFP – Marvellous Imaginations: Extending Thinking through Picturebooks
Posted on June 24, 2016 by admin
23rd Annual NCRCL MA/IBBY UK Conference
Saturday, 5 November, 2016
Froebel College, University of Roehampton
Marvellous Imaginations – Extending Thinking through Picturebooks
Deadline Extension – New Date 30 June 2016
This year’s conference explores the ways in which picturebooks contribute to the development of the child (or / and indeed the adult) through critical, imaginative, empathetic, creative or other responses. We will look at the international world of picture books; at trends and developments in publishing; at specific academic research on children’s interaction with picture books; and at some of the wide range of programmes and projects that use picture books as a starting point for their work, including established programmes like the Reader Organisation in Liverpool and new programmes like CLPE’s Power of Pictures and Amnesty’s work with the Greenaway awards. We will hear from eminent illustrators, including Laura Carlin who will be presented with her medal for winning Biennale of Illustration, Bratislava, one of the oldest international honours for children’s book illustrators, and about the new Klaus Flugge Prize for the most exciting newcomer to picture book illustration. The conference will include keynote presentations by well-known illustrators, academics, and key figures in the children’s literature world.
Proposals are welcomed for workshop sessions (20 minutes) on different aspects of picturebook production and use, such as, but not only:
Cognitive approaches to children’s literature and picturebooks
Empathy and theory of mind
Exploring values through picturebooks
How illustration works – the brain – influence of neuroscience
Creative thinking / creative responses to picturebooks
We welcome contributions from interested academics, authors, illustrators, publishers etc. in any of these areas. Please email a 200-word abstract (for a 20-minute paper), along with a short biography and affiliation to: Julia.Noyce@roehampton.ac.uk.
Posted in calls for papers
CFP – Disability in Anglophone Literature
Posted on June 20, 2016 by admin
CFP: Panel on “Disability in Anglophone Literature”
48th Annual NeMLA Convention
March 23 – 26, 2017
Institutional host: Johns Hopkins University
This panel examines the significance and the depiction of disability in Anglophone literature (i.e. works written by authors from South African, Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). Examples of such works include: Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, J. M. Coetzee’s Foe and Waiting for the Barbarians, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India, Darren Groth’s Are You Seeing Me?, Rachna Gilmore’s A Screaming Kind of Day, Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day, Cyril Axelrod’s And the Journey Begins, Chenjerai Hove’s Ancestors, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and Songs of Enchantment, Florence Serwaa Oteng’s Give Them A Name, and Keri Hulme’s The Bone People.
Some of the themes that can be examined are: the implications of depicting disabled bodies or impaired characters in Anglophone literature; the difference between depicting disabled children, as in young adult novels, and disabled adult characters; the difference gender makes; and the role genre plays (autobiographies versus fiction). Papers that analyze immobility and amputations; blindness, deafness, and muteness; autism and cognitive disability; and exceptional, deformed, or monstrous bodies, among many others, in Anglophone and Commonwealth literature are welcome. Priority will be given to proposals that examine recently published works. Please submit a 300-350 word proposal.
NeMLA formatting standards: Paper Title: 100 characters (including spaces); paper Abstract: 300 words
Starting June 15, please submit abstracts for this panel here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16542
Important: all abstracts must be submitted through the above link.
Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2016
Decision e-mails will be sent by October 15.
Please note that NEMLA asks that accepted and confirmed panelists pay their membership/registration fees no later than December 1, 2016 in order to present at the 2017 convention. Current registration and membership fees for full-time faculty members are $170; contingent/two-year faculty: $140; and graduate students/independent scholars: $110.
Posted in calls for papers
CFP – Children and Childhood Studies Area of MAPACA
Posted on June 6, 2016 by admin
Call for Papers: Children and Childhood Studies Area of Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association Conference
DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACT SUBMISSION: JUNE 30, 2016
Children and Childhood Studies (CCS) focuses on the societal, cultural, and political forces that shape the lives of children and the concept of childhood contemporaneously and throughout history. CCS research may originate in any discipline, including: the humanities, the behavioral and social sciences, or the hard sciences. We especially encourage multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary research.
Papers for this area may examine, but are not limited to, the impact of popular culture on children and/or childhood, representations of children/childhood in popular culture, and the roles of children and youth as consumers or producers of popular culture. Paper and presentation topics should address the convergence of popular culture and American childhood in some regard. Single papers, panels, roundtables, and alternative formats are welcome.
Representations of children/childhood in popular texts, images, or media
The relationships between children’s identities and popular culture (race, gender, disabilities, sexuality, ethnicity, class, etc.)
Historical contextualizations of children’s popular culture
Comparative studies of popular culture between America and other nations
Discussions of youth subcultures or youth agencies in relation to popular culture
Children’s digital lives and popular culture
Children’s health and popular culture
The commercialization of children’s popular culture
The role/use of children’s popular culture in education
Contested and conflicting values of childhood in popular culture
Institutional appropriations of children’s popular culture
Methodological challenges in studying children’s popular culture
Proposals should take the form of 300-word abstracts (maximum), and may be submitted online at http://mapaca.net. The 27th Annual Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association Conference will take place November 3-5, 2016 in Atlantic City, NJ.
Contact Area Co-Chairs Brandi J. Venable (brandi.venable@rutgers.edu) or Eva Lupold (eva.lupold@rutgers.edu) for area-specific questions. Please consult the MAPACA website for additional information about the conference.
Posted in calls for papers
CFP – Any Signs of Childness? Peter Hollindale’s Signs of Childness in Children’s Books (1997), 20 Years On
Posted on June 6, 2016 by admin
Any Signs of Childness? Peter Hollindale’s Signs of Childness in Children’s Books (1997), 20 Years On
Day Symposium, May 5, 2017
Department of Education, University of York (UK) – H/G21, The Eynns Room
I wish to argue here that childness is the distinguishing property of a text in children’s literature, setting it apart from other literature as a genre, and it is also the property that the child brings to the reading of a text.
Twenty years ago, Peter Hollindale coined the term “childness” to qualify, or rather evoke, the particular feel of those discourses which express with unique intensity something of the quality of being a child in a certain place and time. Childness, Hollindale argued, is not a static property; always situated, it occurs through reading events, and signals a successful exchange between text and young reader.
This compelling but also elusive concept, although very often mentioned in children’s literature studies, has arguably been underused; children’s literature theorists have not engaged with that text as much as with Hollindale’s other celebrated work, Ideology and the Children’s Book (1988). Yet the “I know it when I see it” dimension of childness continues to condense much of the seduction and frustration of children’s literature as an object of study. In this symposium, we welcome scholarly contributions that reread, update, reevaluate, rethink, or trace the legacy of, Hollindale’s concept in the light of two decades of children’s literature theory and criticism. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
Childness and contemporary children’s literature theory
Childness and exchange: “kinship” and “difference” models; generational gaps and “cultural time-gaps”; adult-child relationships; childness and “adultness”
The reading event: potential uses of “childness” in empirical work
Childness and sociological, political and intersectional approaches to children’s literature
Childness beyond children’s literature: childhood studies, education, sociology and philosophy of childhood; general literary theory
Childness beyond children’s books: multimedia, film, cultural and material productions
We welcome abstracts of 300 words from researchers and postgraduates before February 5, 2017. To submit an abstract or for any questions, please email clementine.beauvais@york.ac.uk.
Peter Hollindale has kindly agreed to be present at the event.
Posted in calls for papers
CFP – Reimagining Beauty and the Beast
Posted on June 2, 2016 by admin
Reimagining Beauty and the Beast
Dr. Amy Davis, University of Hull
Prof. James Williams, Royal Holloway University of London
“Since myths can be made to mean an indefinite number of things, it is more fruitful to study what in fact myths have been made to mean.” Northrop Frye (1957)
Beauty and the Beast seems to possess a perennial fascination, having persisted in various forms for somewhere between 2500 and 6000 years (da Silva and Tehrani 2016) even before Gabrielle de Villeneuve published her famous version in 1740. It has held a particular attraction for makers of cinema and television: more than fifteen audio-visual adaptations have been produced since Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film. 2016 seems an appropriate time in which to reflect on the tale’s continuing resonance, given that this year is both the 70th anniversary of Cocteau’s version and the 25th anniversary of Disney’s much-loved take on the story; a new (live-action) Beauty and the Beast is scheduled for release by Disney in 2017.
For this one-day interdisciplinary conference, we are inviting proposals for twenty-minute papers or video essays not only on any aspect of any version(s) or rendering(s) of the tale – whether in cinema, literature or other media – but also on the pairing of “beauty” with “beast” in the widest possible sense. One of the virtues of myth is its inexhaustible applicability, so we are particularly interested in proposals that discover Beauties and Beasts in places we had not thought to look for them. We warmly encourage proposals from interested postgraduate and professional researchers working across the arts and humanities.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Studies of particular retellings or adaptations of the story (in literature, film, television, theatre, etc.)
The history of the tale (social, textual, material, etc.)
Beauty and the Beast as a motif reworked throughout the arts (music, painting, etc.)
Beauty and the Beast online (social media, fan fiction, memes, cosplay, etc.)
Gendering and/or queering Beauty and the Beast
Global and/or national perspectives on Beauty and the Beast
Critical reception and/or legacy
Beauty and the Beast as a tool for thought
Discovering Beauty and the Beast in unexpected places
Speakers are invited to submit abstracts of 250 words in English, accompanied by a brief biography (100 words) to beautybeastbristol@gmail.com by 15 June 2016.
Posted in calls for papers
CFP – Transitions: New Directions in Comics Studies
Posted on June 2, 2016 by admin
TRANSITIONS – New Directions in Comics Studies
at Birkbeck College, London, on Saturday, November 19, 2016
Organised in collaboration with Comica- London International Comics Festival, Transitions at Birkbeck College is unique in offering a regular comics studies symposium and meeting point in London, a platform for emerging research at an event that is free of charge and open to all. Originally convened by PhD students in 2009, Transitions has become an annual fixture in the UK comics scholars’ calendar.
We are still especially supportive of postgraduate and early career presenters, but open to any new and ongoing research in our field. Our aim is to provide a platform for debate and a space from which further collaborations can emerge, to further strengthen our area of study and academic community, and to support connections between comics scholars working in diverse academic departments and contexts.
We welcome abstracts for 20 minute papers, or pre-constituted panels of three, on topics including, but not limited to:
comics, comix, graphic novels, manga, manhwa, bande dessinée
superheroes, genre comics, religious comics, documentary comics, children’s comics
politics of representation in comics, formal approaches, trauma and comics, transgressive comics, propaganda and comics
readers and fandoms, creators, publishing histories, transnational approaches, comics and the law, web-comics and comics exhibitions
Alongside traditional panel presentations we would like to trial the more interactive format of a 20-minute workshop, potentially as a way of data collection and/or feedback on research-in-progress. Please indicate your preference by stating PAPER or WORKSHOP following your abstract title.
You can apply by email to transitionssymposium@gmail.com. Please attach your abstract of 250-300 words plus short biographical note (preferably as a Word document), indicating “abstract” in the email subject line and your name in the file’s title.
The deadline for submissions is August 26, 2016.
Posted in calls for papers
IRSCL Book Award 2022- Applications open
Open Position: Assistant Professor in Global/Transnational Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies