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.

The edited collection, Familial Influences on Superheroes , will examine the role that the family plays on the development of the superhero as portrayed in radio, comics, graphic novels, television series, and feature films.  Many superheroes have experienced the trauma of losing (a) parent(s), which sets them apart from others.

An area of multiple panels for the 2019 Film &

CAMP TV OF THE 1960s. A collection of new scholarly essays edited by Isabel Pinedo and Wyatt D. Phillips Manifestations of camp became increasingly prevalent across American culture in the 1960s. More significantly perhaps, this was the decade in which camp moved from the margins and subcultures into the mainstream.

Website: http://fift.ugal.ro/30years/ A joint project of the Faculty of History, Philosophy and Theology, the Faculty of Letters, and the Cross-border Faculty of “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galati, the conference is intended as a cultural forum for imparting knowledge and research on the textuality and representation of recent, lived history, from different yet interrelated angles:  History and Memory Studies

There is a lot of talk about mental well-being at the moment, and it’s great to see that we also contribute to this, not least Kerr Castle in his recent blog, based on his PhD, on comfort television. I saw Kerr present last year at the Critical Studies in Television conference, and it really triggered something in me – suggesting that this is something I at once recognised and felt I needed to think more about.

What could be simpler than a week without TV? The idea of avoiding television completely – whether on a TV set, computer, tablet or mobile device – sounds like a straightforward, perhaps even liberating, challenge; and, in many ways, it was.