Issue 16, Winter 2019 Chief Editors: Ana Maria Sapountzi & Peize Li Book    Review Editor: Patrick Adamson Almost every culture on earth contains within its history some form of magic and magical women.

There’s nothing as loyal as a prisoner fan (Val Lehman, 2019) On June 25 a capacity crowd met at the St Kilda Town Hall in Melbourne – the city that is the home of iconic Australian television series Prisoner (1979-1986) – to celebrate 40 years since the show made its debut on Australia’s Network 10. *Prisoner’*s extraordinary 692-episode run is made more remarkable by the fact that it was commissioned as a 16-part standalone

Special Issue of the Journal of Tolkien Research Co-edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Kristine Larsen janet.b.croft@rutgers.edu; larsen@ccsu.edu Connections between any of the works of both creative geniuses are fair game for this interdisciplinary volume. Some possible topics include: world-building, horror and the monstrous, critiques of heroism, women’s roles, Buffy-speak and elf-speak, and villainous motivations.

Back in January 2012, when I was nudging towards the end of my PhD, two old friends and I embarked on a road trip to Wigan to celebrate another chum’s fortieth birthday.

Incongruity, Immanuel Kant once observed, is an essential element of humor.

Across the Live / Mediatised Divide A Cross-Disciplinary Audience Research Conference Tuesday 17 September 2019 Department of Theatre, Film & Television, University of York Keynotes Professor Martin Barker (Aberystwyth University) Dr Kirsty Sedgman (University of Bristol) Audience research is a growing area in many diverse areas of study, from film, television and theatre to music, communications media and gaming.

Keynotes: Elizabeth Wilson (http://www.elizabethwilson.net) Richard Dyer, King’s College, London Deadline for proposals: Thursday 1 August 2019 Camp has enjoyed many definitions throughout decades of academic discussion and debate.

*Well to me it [country music] is soul music.  It’s probably white man’s soul music.  And it comes from the heart. * — Kris Kristofferson from Country Music (2019) in Episode One: ‘The Rub’ (Beginnings-1933)

A few years ago a colleague suggested that I watch an unusual television programme about people watching television programmes. Obviously, such a description didn’t initially tempt me to spend my valuable leisure time observing a bunch of boring strangers make silly comments about this week’s programmes. I’m more than capable of doing this myself.

Digital technology has altered all aspects of media cultures, including questions of identity that can affect everything from the production of texts, their content, their distribution, their reception, and more. At the same time, popular and academic understandings of queerness have evolved to incorporate expanding ideas of gender, sexuality, race, disability, ethnicity, and other identity categories.

There is a gathering consensus that television began to undergo a marked transformation at the end of the twentieth century. Two decades into the twenty-first century, an ever-increasing number of cable and streaming series conjure the emergence of a world liquidated of normative authority, saturated with media-technological developments, and struggling to find its bearings in the fray.