Reading American TV Series: An Interdisciplinary Conference
UdS American Studies Graduate Forum
Call for Papers for the UdS American Studies Graduate Forum „Reading American TV Series: An Interdisciplinary Conference“, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, October 5-6, 2017
Deadline: June 15, 2017
In cooperation with the German-American Institute Saarland, the Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University (UdS) will hold a 2-day American Studies Graduate Forum that invites doctoral and advanced Master students to present their current projects-in-progress in a workshop-style setting. The forum will offer participants a chance to discuss their research with peers as well as experienced and senior scholars. This year, we invite submissions dealing with American television series.
In the context of continually evolving television studies, the UdS Graduate Forum 2017 offers a setting in which television series will be the main object of analysis and academic discussion. We pay tribute to the interdisciplinarity, heterogeneity, and versatility of the field by inviting papers from all disciplinary and theoretical perspectives engaging with American television. Programs to be inquired can be of any genre or decade, yet the approach taken by the papers should be subsumable under the umbrella term of television studies.
Topics can include but are not limited to:
- Television as a repository for meanings and a site where cultural values are negotiated
- Representations of gender, race, class, age, (dis)ability, space etc.
- Paratexts, extended and transmedia narratives
- Intersections with other media (novels, films, comics, video games, music)
- “Quality Television”
- Translation, subtitling and dubbing
- Audience and consumption, including fandom
- Genre (hybridity)
- Narrative and structure
- Different formats (e.g. series, serial, miniseries)
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Stacey Abbott, University of Roehampton
Diane Negra, University College Dublin
Presentations should be about 20 minutes in length and will be followed by a discussion and feed-back round with all participants and staff. The UdS will seek to offer assistance in travel funding to selected presenters; recipients of the funding will be selected based on their proposals.
In order to participate or propose a project, please send an email including a title, a 250 word abstract and a short biographical note to
amerikanistik@mx.uni-saarland.de by June 15, 2017.