Call for Papers

True Crime and Ethics Symposium

University of Portsmouth

29th May 2026

True crime is a mercurial genre. It shifts, adapts and transforms with and to the popular mediums, motivations and social concerns of the day. From high-budget, horror-infused dramatisations to self-shot Mukbangs, to unmissable Netflix series and 3-minute TikToks, the genre continues to fill production schedules, streaming platforms and social media feeds. Yet, as true crime’s influence has grown, so too have questions about its ethical implications. How should the makers of true crime frame these tragedies, and how should audiences respond to these images of death, abuse and grief? Who has the right to tell true crime stories, and is their commodification worth the very real trauma they can cause? How are social inequities related to gender, race and disability represented in true crime narratives? 

As the genre continues to engage new audiences in innovative ways, its ethical questions become more complex. This one-day symposium, featuring a keynote lecture by Professor Tanya Horeck (author of Justice on Demand: True Crime in the Digital Streaming Era), will bring scholars together to consider these issues with the aim of developing an edited collection. 

Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers on topics that explore true crime and ethics. Topics can include but are by no means limited to:

• Gender, ethics and true crime
• Race, ethics and true crime
• Disability, ethics and true crime
• Class, ethics and true crime
• The body in true crime
• Fictionalising true crime (from dramatisations such as Netflix’s Monster series or The Staircase miniseries to amateur-created fan fiction)
• Ethics of internet sleuthing
• True crime on different platforms (streaming, podcasts, and social media)
• Ethics and true crime fandom/audiences
• Survivor/victim-centred true crime
• True crime and social movements (#MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, etc.)
• The ethics of true crime aesthetics (from text to paratexts) 
• True crime narrative tropes 

Please send abstracts of 200-300 words along with a short biography by 2nd March 2026 to Dr Simon Hobbs and/or Dr Megan Hoffman at the University of Portsmouth. 

simon.hobbs2@port.ac.uk

megan.hoffman@port.ac.uk

Applicants will be informed on or before 20th March 2026.

This symposium is open to all academics and researchers who are interested in true crime and will be in person only. Registration will be free, and lunch will be provided. A number of £50 travel bursaries will be available for precariously employed academics/independent scholars/PhD students. Please indicate in your email if you would like to be considered for one of these travel bursaries. 

If you have any questions, please contact Dr Simon Hobbs and/or Dr Megan Hoffman on the above emails. 

CFP Neo-Victorian Criminalities, Detection, and Punishment

CFP Neo-Victorian Criminalities, Detection, 

and Punishment

University of Wolverhampton, 23rd-24th June 2025

Keynote speakers: Professor Claire Nally, Lee Jackson, and Nat Reeve

Organisers: Dr Helen Davies, University of Wolverhampton, and Dr Maria Isabel Romero-Ruiz, University of Malaga

The contemporary fascination with Victorian criminalities and the popularity of the detection genre within Neo-Victorianism necessitates close critical attention. In particular, neo-Victorian literary and visual representations of criminals, murderers, serial killers, etc. as well as of sleuths raises ethical issues connected with the avidity of audiences for sensation and drama.

The neo-Victorian city becomes the scenario both of petty crimes and dreadful killings that are shaped by current perceptions of the Victorians and our own cultural context. The city is the place where identities become changeable, and choices can have deadly consequences. In this context, the question of ethics comes to the fore as revealing the identity of criminals and victims and dealing with issues connected with the dark side of society can be questionable and exploitative, especially when discussing the Victorian past.

At the same time, we need to explore the intersection of crime and detective fiction in connection with gender, ethnicity, class and disability, together with the LGTBQI+ community; certain groups were more likely to be criminalised in the Victorian era, with a troubling legacy in terms of contemporary social and cultural attitudes. Therefore, establishing the boundaries between historical crime and fictional crime and identity politics in neo-Victorianism become essential in the representation of both criminals and victims as well as sleuths in popular genres such as crime fiction and detection.

This event will run over two days, with public engagement events on 24th featuring Lee Jackson and Nat Reeve.

We invite contributions that include but are not limited to the following topics in relation to Neo-Victorian representations of crime:

-Historical crime versus fictional crime

-Neo-Victorian sensationalism and detection

-The aesthetics and ethics of crime 

-Detection, crime and identity politics

-Gender and detection

-Crime and ethnicity

-Crime and class 

-Crime and Disability

-LBTBQI+ sleuth identities

-LBTBQI+ criminals and victims

-Neo-Victorian remediations of past crimes

Please send a c. 250 word abstract for 20 min papers and c. 100 word biography toneovictoriancrimes@gmail.com by 14th March 2025.

Call for Papers - Silent Echoes: Golden Age Crime Fiction and Trauma

 

Silent Echoes: Golden Age Crime Fiction and Trauma

FSU (Florida State University) London Study Centre, 

12–13 September 2025

The Golden Age of crime fiction, roughly associated with the interwar and immediate post-war period, has been commonly defined as a therapeutic and comforting form of literature. As Alison Light famously puts it, after the First World War, especially in Britain, detective writing became a ‘literature of convalescence’ (Forever England, 1991, 69). The conventions of Golden Age detective fiction – fair play, a closed circle of upper-class characters, isolated settings, ‘sacrificial’ bodies (Plain, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, 2000), and the final restoration of social and moral order – have been interpreted as mechanisms for containing, exorcising, and defusing the cultural anxieties emerging in the wake of war. 

However, the extent to which Golden Age crime fiction reflects, articulates, and reshapes the trauma shaping its consumption remains underexplored. While such a form of literature typically concludes with the apprehension of the criminal, the underlying trauma of profound cultural and individual disruption remains pervasive. War experience, as Wyatt Bonikowski writes, has a traumatic aspect: ‘there is something in the nature of modern war experience, both physical and psychical, that resists representation; it overwhelms the senses, disturbs memory, and leaves traces in the form of disruptive symptoms that persist years after the events have passed’ (Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination, 2013, 3). Additionally, other traumas in the twentieth century – international, national, domestic, and personal – are inextricable from the pages of Golden Age crime novels, thematically, as backdrop, and ‘behind the scenes’ in writing and reception.

For this conference, we thus invite papers examining how, to what extent, and with what implications – textual, literary, sociocultural, political, medical, legal, and historical – the concept of trauma shaped crime writing between the 1910s and the 1950s. It aims to explore the influence of trauma on a variety of aspects (daily life, mental health, gender roles and relations, the environment, levels of violence, cultural memory, national identity, medical theory, and legal practice), examining how Golden Age crime fiction articulates the spatial, temporal, and psychic echoes of trauma.

Potential topics include but are certainly not limited to:

• Mental health
• Remembrance and convalescence
• Space and trauma
• Narrative structure and trauma
• Veterans and the military sphere
• Violence 
• Place and Setting
• Time and history
• Identity, the self, and community
• Gender roles, identities, and constructions
• Disability
• Ideas of ‘echoes’, ‘mirroring’ and ghostly presence as trauma 
• Language and articulation
• Crime, detection, and cultural memory
• Spiritualism and death
• Questions of genre
• Crime, detection, and national identity
• Colonialism and racism
• Crime and emotions
• Crime and insanity
• Psychoanalysis and the unconscious mind
• Medicine and detective narrative

Please submit a short abstract (up to 300 words) and brief biographical note for a 20-minute conference presentation to Directors of Golden Age Mysteries Ltd, Dr J C Bernthal (University of Suffolk), Dr Sarah Martin (Manchester Metropolitan University), Dr Stefano Serafini (Georgetown University, University of Padua) and Dr Mia Dormer: info@goldenagemysteries.co.uk no later than 5th May 2025. You may direct queries to the same address. Tickets to this event are non-refundable. 

The conference is generously sponsored by FSU (Florida State University) and takes place at its London Study Centre on 12 and 13 September 2025. This project has also received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) grant agreement no. 101105463.

CFP Crime Fiction and the Global Challenges of the Twenty-First Century

 

Monash University, Melbourne / Hybrid 25-27 June 

Crime fiction has long since refuted the assumption that its socio-political engagement is somehow not genuine – that it tends to reduce “social problems to so much local colour or authenticating detail” (John Sutherland). Nordic Noir, in particular, is often lauded for its analysis of Scandinavian welfare and gender politics, yet the critical orientation is prominent in contemporary world crime fiction more broadly. Using the nexus of crime and investigation as its lens, the genre is increasingly defined by abandoning the idea of local and containable criminality in favour of a conception of individual crime as a manifestation of larger global challenges such as gender-based violence, economic inequality, climate change, migration, Indigenous rights and the crisis of democracy. Given this orientation towards the key challenges of our time, it is no exaggeration to say that world crime fiction today, like the nineteenth-century realist novel according to Georg Brandes, is defined by its determination to “place problems under debate”.

The conference will focus on crime fiction and the global challenges of the twenty-first century. While this topic allows a new critical assessment of individual crime novels, it also has broader ramifications for our understanding of the crime genre and its global distribution and impact. On the one hand, it enables an examination of how crime fiction’s socio-political engagement requires a revision of classic tropes, for example due to the emerging non- individualistic conception of victimhood and culpability. On the other hand, it opens up opportunities for a new comparative approach to crime fiction focusing on the ways in which shared global issues are dealt with by authors in different countries and regions.

Papers at the conference will examine the global socio-political engagement of crime fiction from a broad range of perspectives, drawing on examples from across the world. We particularly welcome abstracts dealing with one of the previously identified challenges and offering comparative readings of literary texts from different countries and regions. We also welcome papers that reinterpret earlier crime narratives in light of the genre’s contemporary socio-political engagement.

Topics may include, but are not limited to: 

• Crime fiction and the climate emergency 
• Crime fiction and the crisis of democracy 
• Crime fiction and economic inequality 
• Crime fiction and gender and sexual freedom 
• Crime fiction and migration 
• Crime fiction and war 
• Crime fiction and gender-based violence
• Crime fiction and global capitalism 
• Crime fiction and extractive economies 
• Crime fiction and new forms of totalitarianism 
• Post-truth crime fiction 
• First Nations Crime fiction 
• Non-political crime fiction 
• Comparative perspectives on world crime fiction 

Please submit your 250-word abstracts for 20-minute presentations and proposals for panels and a short bio-note (about 100 words) via this form. Submissions are due on 15 December 2024. For postgraduate students and ECRs, a workshop will be held on 24 June before the conference proper begins. If you need an immediate response to apply for funding, please indicate this in your application form. 

Please address any questions to: CaptivatingCriminality@monash.edu

CFP: Literatures and Laws

 

 

CFP: Literatures and Laws online one-day symposium

A one-day symposium hosted online by Bournemouth University, UK, held on 13th April 2024. 

Department of Humanities & Law, and Narrative, Culture, and Community Research Centre

‘Literatures and Laws' considers law as literature, and law in literature. The first considers how law constructs narratives to make sense of and process non-legal events and experiences. Thus personal experiences of an event or dispute with another have to be translated into their legally relevant features so that a legal narrative can be constructed. Additionally, barristers when presenting a case in court seek to build a narrative to persuade juries. The second explores how law, courtroom spaces and rhetoric, justice, and legal systems and infrastructure (and their associated politics) are represented in (or excluded from) literature.

At a time where legal frameworks and understandings are increasingly contested, it is important that we consider how storytelling enables to the law to operate and how storytelling represents law and affects our understanding of law. An important component of a successful judicial system is the general trust the public have in that system. We want to explore both legal and literary perspectives on how that trust relates to storytelling and fictionality, and how both fictional literature and law construct stories about us as participants within a legal system. 

At Bournemouth University, literature studies and law sit within the same department; inspired by this contiguity, we are inviting research and/or creative papers that explore the ways storytelling and narrative intersect within representations of law, justice, and legal systems. 

Broad themes considered within the symposium, then, may include but are certainly not limited to

• Law and literary genre, for instance papers that focus on representations and significant instances or structures of law and legality in crime and detective fiction, Gothic and historical fiction, procedurals, ecological fiction

• Inventions of law and legal systems in speculative fiction

• Courtroom drama

• Law, politics, and the state in literature

• Historical case studies

• Precedent and storytelling: Cases as links in a storytelling chain

• Lay terminology to legal terminology: Lay and legal understandings

• Genres of law: Conceptualising law as genre

• Storytelling conventions in strands of law: Criminal, civil and human rights

• Fictionality and media framing of law: Sensation, celebrity and perception

  Please submit a 200-word abstract for a 15-minute presentation and a brief biographical note to swalker@bournemouth.ac.uk no later than February 22nd 2024. You may direct general queries to the same address.

  Keynote speakers:

  Professor Hywel Dix (Bournemouth University, NCCR member)

  Hywel is interested in the relationship between culture and social and political change, especially in relation to political devolution in the 4 nations of the UK, as well as autofiction and cultural memory. Recent publications include Compatriots or Competitors: Welsh, Scottish, English and Northern Irish Writing and Brexit in Comparative Contexts (University of Wales Press, 2023). 

  Dr Caroline Derry (Open University)

  Caroline Derry joined the Open University in April 2017. She is a senior lecturer in law, teaching subjects including criminal and evidence law. Her other roles include Law School EDI Champion.  Caroline qualified as a barrister, practising in criminal defence law, and as a solicitor in a large, central London legal aid practice. She then taught for fifteen years at London Metropolitan University, where she was a senior lecturer in criminal and evidence law and gender & law, and course leader for the LLB Law. She has been a visiting lecturer in criminal law at SOAS and at Paris Descartes (Masters in Common Law).

  Symposium organisers

  Dr Rebecca Mills is Senior Lecturer in English and Communication at Bournemouth University. Her publications include work on crime and detective fiction, particularly of the interwar era. Please contact Rebecca if you have any questions about developing a literary topic for the symposium: rmills@bournemouth.ac.uk

  Dr Samuel Walker is Senior Lecturer in Law at Bournemouth University. He researches the notion of embodiment in law, and how literature explores our understanding of law and justice. Please contact Sam if you have any questions about developing a topic on law-focused topic for the symposium: swalker@bournemouth.ac.uk

  
  

  
  

Call For Papers: Environments of Global Crime Fiction

Call For Papers:

 Environments of Global Crime Fiction

Papers to be given at the American Comparative Literature Associaton (ACLA) annual meeting. The meeting will take place will take place at the Palais des congrès de Montréal in Montreal, March 14-17, 2024.

You will need to submit your individual paper abstract by 30 September. All the details here: https://www.acla.org/node/add/paper

Organizer: Patrick Deer

Co-Organizer: Andrew Pepper

Contact the Seminar Organisers

This seminar takes the global environmental crisis – the spectre of ecological and even planetary collapse due to anthropogenic climate change – as a starting point to consider the ways that global crime fiction has sought to expose, mitigate, reflect and reconfigure impending catastrophe. Contributions are invited that consider how or how well ‘the (crime) genre’s central ideological concerns with culpability and criminality’ align to the climate crisis (King 2021). Participants are invited to explore the implications for our understanding of genre; whether crime fiction that addresses climate change and environmental catastrophe continues to function as crime fiction or whether the resulting mutations require new descriptive categories (e.g. King’s "crimate" fiction). Other approaches might be to think about crime fiction’s capacities for addressing the uneven effects of environmental crises and the implications for vulnerable transnational populations especially in the Global South. We are also keen to extend our understanding of crime fiction’s long history of engaging with toxic settings and environmental crises to include other extinction threats (e.g. planetary disasters, nuclear devastation, pandemics and other dystopian imaginaries). This seminar is part of an ongoing enquiry into the complex relations between the situatedness and specificities of crime fiction as genre (and of individual crime stories) and the wider frames of comparative analysis and global politics (see ACLA 2023, 2022, 2021, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015).

Organizers: Andrew Pepper, Nicole Kenley and Patrick Deer

https://www.acla.org/environments-global-crime-fiction

Call For Papers: BIPOC Female Detectives (Theme Issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection)

 

BIPOC Female Detectives 

(Theme Issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection) 

Guest Editor: Sam Naidu, Rhodes University, South Africa 

Seeking to illuminate an often marginalized space, this Clues theme issue will focus on female detectives who are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color); span eras, genres, and geographical locations; and appear in texts, TV programs, films, and other media. Of particular interest are intersections among race, indigeneity, gender, age, class, or sexuality in these works, as well as projects that center BIPOC scholarship. 

Some Suggested Topics: 

• • BIPOC female detective figures in African and Asian crime fiction, such as in works by Leye Adenle, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Angela Makholwa, and Jane De Suza. 

• BIPOC female detectives in hard-boiled and traditional mysteries that might include characters such as Carolina Garcia-Aguilera’s Lupe Solano, Eleanor Taylor Bland’s Marti MacAlister, Leslie Glass’s April Woo, Sujata Massey’s Rei Shimura and Perveen Mistry, Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone, Barbara Neely’s Blanche White, S. J. Rozan’s Lydia Chin, Valerie Wilson Wesley’s Tamara Hayle and Odessa Jones, and Paula L. Woods’s Charlotte Justice. 

• BIPOC female detectives in film and television series such as Get Christie Love! (1974–75, TV movie 2018), Angie Tribeca (2016), and Black Earth Rising (2018). 

• BIPOC female detectives in comics and graphic novels such as Storm and Misty Knight of Marvel Comics, Martha Washington of Dark Horse Comics, and Vixen of DC Comics. 

• BIPOC female sidekicks such as Janet Evanovich’s Lula, or Elementary’s Joan H. Watson, or BIPOC detecting teams such as those in Cheryl Head’s Charlie Mack series or Ausmat Zehanat Khan’s Inaya Rahman series. 

• BIPOC female detectives of male authors such as Kwei Quartey, Deon Meyer, and Alexander McCall Smith. 

• Analyses of historical BIPOC female detectives in crime fiction such as that in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter (1901). 

• Queering the BIPOC female detective. 

• Relationships between BIPOC female detectives and criminals/criminality. 

Submissions should include a proposal of approximately 250 words and a brief biosketch. Proposals due: April 30, 2023. Submit proposals to: Prof. Sam Naidu, email: s.naidu@ru.ac.za. Full manuscripts of approximately 6,000 words based on an accepted proposal will be due by September 30, 2023. 

About Clues: Published biannually by McFarland & Co., the peer-reviewed Clues: A Journal of Detection features academic articles on all aspects of mystery and detective material in print, television, and film without limit to period or country covered. It also reviews nonfiction mystery works (biographies, reference works, and the like) and materials applicable to classroom use (such as films). Executive Editor: Caroline Reitz, John Jay College/The CUNY Graduate Center; 

Managing Editor: Elizabeth Foxwell, McFarland & Co. 

Clues Website: https://sites.google.com/site/cluesjournal/ 

CALL FOR PAPERS: Essays on Police and Policing in 21st Century Film and Television

 

The Black Lives Matter movement, the trial and conviction of Derek Chauvin calls to defund the police, and the prominence in the media of killer police such as Joseph James DeAngelo are recent manifestations of intense and even unprecedented levels of media attention on policing at interlocking points of race, inequality, social justice and political agendas. Equally, exciting cross-disciplinary engagement between fields of justice studies, criminology, cultural studies and popular culture are increasingly opening up.

Police have been the inspiration for and focus of countless film and television stories, a long-standing dramatic strain that is a fictional backdrop to the intense recent public scrutiny, and at times rejection of policing. Perceptions of the police are shaped by these long standing narrative forms of film and television that can also convey other shapers of perception, from bodycam footage to mobile phone recordings.

At this point of exceptional pressure on police conduct and the uncertain paths that policing will take in the 21st century, this collection is intended to be a topical opportunity to examine the themes of how police and policing are perceived and portrayed and these points are intended as the focal point for each contribution.

We are assembling a special collection of essays that consider addressing the intersection of police and policing with film and television in the 21st century. Possible areas include:

Genre studies and the procedural

Representations of race

Real and fictional police

Reality television

Televising trials

Police in pornographic films

Representations of police both historical and modern

Policing in dystopias

Moral and political authority

Contributions related to the United States are especially welcomed.

Advice for contributors

This edited collection is under contract.

If you are interested in contributing to this collection, we ask that you submit an abstract of up to 250 words explaining the focus and approach your proposed essay. The proposed volume is intended to be scholarly and will be peer reviewed but accessible in tone and approach. Each final contribution should be around 6000 words.

Abstracts should be emailed to marcus.harmes@usq.edu.au

Abstract submission deadline: October 15, 2021

Full paper submission deadline: March 1, 2022

About the editors

Associate Professor Marcus K Harmes has published extensively in the field of popular culture. His most recent publications include Roger Delgado: I am usually referred to as the Master (Fantom Publishing 2017) and Doctor Who and the Art of Adaptation (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). He is the author of numerous studies on the church in modern popular culture, including book chapters in the collection Doctor Who and Race, and articles in journals including Science Fiction Film and Television, and Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. In 2018 he edited the Handbook for Springer on Postgraduate Education in Higher Education.

Meredith A Harmes teaches communication in the enabling programs at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia. Her research interests include modern British and Australian politics and popular culture in Britain and America. Her most recent publication in the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture was on race and cultural studies on American television. She holds an honours degree from the University of Queensland in political science and a Graduate Diploma of Journalism and a Masters of Public Relations from the University of Southern Queensland. She is co-editor of Postgraduate Education in Higher Education(Springer, 2018).

Dr Barbara Harmes lectures in communication at the University of Southern Queensland, with a particular focus on international students. Her doctoral research focussed on the discursive controls built around sexuality in late-nineteenth-century England. Her research interests include cultural studies, postgraduate education and religion. She has published in areas including modern Australian politics, postgraduate education, 1960s American television and her original field of Victorian literature.

Call For Papers - Global Histories of Crime Fiction: Redefining a Popular Genre

 

CFP: Global Histories of Crime Fiction: Redefining a Popular Genre

American Comparative Literature Association 2022 Annual Meeting, 15-18 June 

National Taiwan Normal University

Seminar organisers: Jesper Gulddal (University of Newcastle, Australia) and Stewart King (Monash University)

Crime fiction today is a uniquely global genre in the sense of being written, published, sold and read on a significant scale on all continents and in almost every country. It is also global in the sense that it serves across a wide range of locations as an important vehicle for investigating and interrogating relationships between law, crime and justice. This global orientation challenges the persistent notion that crime fiction is predominantly a UK and US phenomenon and that other crime fiction traditions are either peripheral or derivative. Publishers have already embraced the idea of world crime fiction, as evidenced by the large number of crime fiction translations, not only with English as the source or target language, but also between other languages. Similarly, readers around the world have few concerns about reading foreign crime novels, and the combination of familiar forms and unfamiliar, “exotic” content has become one of the major selling points of global crime writing. The scholarly literature has been slow in catching up with these developments, but the last few years have seen lively debate around the concept of crime fiction as world literature. Following on from these discussions, this seminar seeks to overcome one of the last bastions of conventional crime fiction scholarship, namely the tendency to write the history of crime fiction either as the succession of canonical Anglophone formats (classic, hardboiled, etc.) or as accounts of individual national traditions. We pose the question, how can we globalise the historical narratives around crime fiction and move towards an account of the genre that recognises its global diversity and transnational connections.

We welcome papers dealing with any aspects of world crime fiction and the historiographical challenges it presents. Suggested focal points include:

• The historiographical challenges presented by world crime fiction

• Autochthonous crime fiction traditions in China, Japan, India, the Arab world and elsewhere

• Appropriations and localisations of canonical English-language formats around the world

• Translation as a means of localising crime fiction

• Lateral circulations of crime fiction that bypass the Anglosphere (such as between China, Japan and Korea, in the Mediterranean, and within the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War)

• Comparative perspectives on world crime fiction

• Formal innovation and hybridisation at the “periphery”

• Indigenous and First Nations crime fiction

• Reinterpreting British and American crime fiction from a transnational perspective

• Digital and data-driven approaches to world crime fiction

Enquires: jesper.gulddal@newcastle.edu.au

stewart.king@monash.edu

Conference website: https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting-2022

Submit a paper proposal here: https://www.acla.org/node/add/paper

Cinematic Bond at 60: National and International Perspectives - Call For Papers

 

A History Research Group Symposium

Bournemouth University (Online), 4 March 2022

Keynote Speaker: Professor Andrew Spicer (University of the West of England)

In 1962 the first James Bond film, Dr No (Terence Young) was released. The film was a huge financial success for EON productions, catapulted Sean Connery to lifelong stardom and started a period of Bondmania that lasted for most of the 1960s. As a cultural icon and cultural phenomenon, James Bond and the Bond film have become a globally recognised brand.

The films have been widely analysed for their spectacle, their often problematic engagement with masculinity, gender relations and cultural appropriation as well as the ideological implications of how they engage with their backdrop of social and geopolitical change across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 

With 2022 marking 60 years of the cinematic Bond and the latest instalment, No Time to Die (Cary Fukunaga), due (allegedly) for release in October 2021, critical reflections on this ongoing franchise are relevant and timely.

This one-day online symposium, hosted by the History Research Group at Bournemouth University, will offer delegates the opportunity to discuss and interrogate the Bond franchise across diverse concepts. We are especially keen for scholars from outside of the United Kingdom to bring international and transnational perspectives to the character of Bond and the films. Likely topics include but are not restricted to:

• Gender
• Class
• Race and ethnicity
• Imperialism and post-imperialism
• Colonialism and post-colonialism
• Cold War and/or Cold War I
• Stars and stardom
• Fashion/style/aesthetics
• Music and/or sound design
• Adaptation/adoption/appropriation
• Fans and fandom
• Audiences
• Reviews and reception
• Marketing and merchandise

Delegates will be invited to submit their papers for an intended edited collection to be published in the Routledge Studies of Espionage and Culture series.

We seek proposals for 20-minute papers, or for pre-constituted panels of three or four papers, that engage with any aspects of the above topic. 

Abstracts of no more than 300 words, along with a short biographical note, should be submitted for peer review to:

Dr Laura Crossley: lcrossley@bournemouth.ac.uk by 29^th October 2021.

Call for Papers: Investigating True Crime & the Media.

 

A conference hosted by Journalism@Newcastle and 

Ethical Space, the International Journal of Communication Ethics. 

23 June 2022 – Deadline for abstracts 29 October 2021

True crime has a long and popular history in journalism, literature, drama, radio, film and television – and now the podcast. A warning for fair women (1599), the anonymous dramatisation of the 1573 murder of London merchant George Sanders by his wife’s lover, was the curtain-raiser for many more playwrights to adapt true murder narratives in the decades and centuries that followed (Rohrer 2019). True crime podcasts today clock up tens of millions of downloads (Punnett 2018) and research suggests that the audience is overwhelmingly made up of women (Boling and Hull 2018). Perhaps because of this, it is often dismissed as ‘a genre of cheap paperbacks with little literary merit and highly sensational, pornographic content (Rowen 2017).

But such perspectives are challenged by research which identifies a focus on advocating for justice where the formal justice system has failed (Rowen 2017). True crime podcasts represent women in ways that ‘use the affordances of mass media to draw support from the public, effectively inviting the audience to perform as an alternate jury’ and engendering change in judicial processes (Pâquet 2020). The sub-genre of criminal biography uses the voice of the accused to challenge institutional truth-claims (Buozis 2017) and journalistic investigations repeatedly expose miscarriages of justice (Larke-Walsh 2021). Kelli Boling (2019) argues thattrue crime podcasts are impacting the criminal justice system in unprecedented ways and could challenge both criminal justice and media reform. But proponents also areaccused of complicity in the propagation and popularisation of narratives of female-directed violence and the visualisation of mutilated female bodies (Greer 2017). Erica Haugtvedt (2017) interrogates the range of ethical tensions which emerge when, for example, the conventions of fiction are applied to reportage, people become characters and factual narratives are developed as plots. And a focus on particular types of criminal activity address critical social issues of our day such as femicide (Mahadeen 2017); the persecution of racial (Oliver 2003) and LGBTQ+ communities (Polchin 2019); human trafficking (Gregoriou 2018) and crimes against the planet (Ruddell 2017). Case Punnett (2018) charts the theoretical landscape that we might draw on – but much of the topography remains to be mapped.

Journalism@Newcastle – the journalism department at Newcastle University, UK – and Ethical Space invite papers for a global conference: Investigating True Crime & The Media. Submissions are welcome which explore its rise in popularity in recent years, shifting perceptions and receptions, changing platforms, new understandings. To be held at Newcastle University and online, June 23, 2022. Authors are also invited to submit their papers to peer review to feature in a subsequent winter 2022 special double edition of Ethical Space. 

Submissions are open to researchers, PhD students, and practitioners working in the field, and parity of esteem will be afforded to both theoretically-driven and practice-related papers. 

We particularly welcome submissions from diverse voices and nations and regions beyond Western perspectives. The aims of the conference and double issue are to explore current and emerging concepts, developments and potential future trajectories of true crime narratives and production from a global perspective. 

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Feminist perspectives (production, consumption, reception)

• Theorising the field 

• Queer theory and true crime

• True crime in Africa, Asia, South America and the Pacific 

• European perspectives and the Nordic Noir

• The rise of the true crime podcast and dedicated channels and platforms 

• Ethical tensions 

• Campaigning and investigative journalism

• Literary true crime – critical reception and unease 

• Media reporting

• Representations of victimhood

• The accused and control of the narrative 

• The writer’s mission

• Fictionalisation and negotiations of truth

• The commodification of fear

• Institutional failure and the quest for social justice

• True crime and a warming planet

• Commercial imperatives and the public interest

• The political economy of true crime
  
  Deadlines: 
  Please submit abstracts of 500 words plus a 50-word biography to Barbara.henderson@newcastle.ac.uk by Friday 29 October 2021. Authors will be notified of the outcome by 19 January 2022. PowerPoint presentations are acceptable for the conference on 23 June 2022, but full papers (5,000 words including references) for publication in Ethical Space Winter 2022 should be submitted by 31 August 2022.

  Works cited:

  Boling, K. S. and Hull, K. (2018) Undisclosed information –Serial is my favorite murder: Examining motivations in the true crime podcast audience, Journal of Radio & Audio Media, Vol. 25, No. 1 pp 92-108 

  • Boling, K. S. (2019) True crime podcasting: Journalism, justice or entertainment?, Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, Vol. 17, No. 2 pp 161-178
    
    Buozis, M. (2017) Giving voice to the accused: Serial and the critical potential of true crime, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 pp 254-270
    
    Greer, A. (2017) Murder, she spoke: The female voice’s ethics of evocation and spatialisation in the true crime podcast, Sound Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 pp 152-164
    
    Gregoriou, C. (2018) Representations of transnational human trafficking: Present-day news media, true crime, and fiction, Springer Nature
    
    Hauhgtvedt, E. (2017) The ethics of serialized true crime, McCracken, Ellen (ed.) The serial podcast and storytelling in the digital age, London, Taylor & Francis pp 7-24
    
    Larke-Walsh, G. S. (2021) Injustice narratives in a post-truth society: emotional discourses and social purpose in Southwest of Salem: The story of the San Antonio Four, Studies in Documentary Film, Vol. 15, No. 1 pp 89-104
    
    Mahadeen, E. (2017) ‘The martyr of dawn’: Femicide in Jordanian media, Crime, Media, Culture, Vol. 13, No. 1 pp 41-54
    
    Oliver, M. B. (2003) African American men as ‘criminal and dangerous’: Implications of media portrayals of crime on the ‘criminalization’ of African American men, Journal of African American Studies, Vol. 7 pp-18
    
    Pâquet, L. (2020) Seeking justice elsewhere: Informal and formal justice in the true crime podcasts Trace and The Teacher’s Pet, Crime, Media, Culture
    
    Polchin, J. (2019) Indecent advances: A hidden history of true crime and prejudice before Stonewall, London, Icon Books
    
    Punnett, I. C. (2018) Toward a theory of true crime narratives: A textual analysis, London, Routledge
    
    Rohrer, M. (2019) 'Lamentable and true': Remediations of true crime in domestic tragedies. Early Modern Literary Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3 pp 1-17. Available online at https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls/article/view/439/360
    
    Rowen, L. (2017) True crime as a literature of advocacy, Bellarmine University, Kentucky
    
    Ruddell, R. (2017) Oil, gas, and crime: The dark side of the boomtown, Springer

  
  

Scritture Migranti - Call for Papers

 

Narratives of Mobility: The Transnational and Transculutral Turn 

in European Crime Fiction

Edited by Maurizio Ascari, Silvia Baroni, Sara Casoli

This issue of Scritture migranti (15/2021) aims to investigate a phenomenon that is highly characteristic of contemporary crime fiction on a global level: the representation and thematization of multiculturalism, international mobility, and transcultural identities. Thanks to its transnational circulation and its aptitude to highlight social and political issues throughout the lens of the investigation, crime fiction offers a privileged perspective through which to observe the encounters and the conflicts associated with social and cultural mobility. Moreover, the critical reflections on the connections between social norms and otherness expressed in crime fiction encourage also to take into consideration the mobility of the genre itself in terms of genre-blending.

In particular, we aim at analysing authors and characters whose transnational and multicultural perspective epitomizes an alienating gaze questioning the social norms of hegemonic groups. Describing mobility across national borders and cultural contexts, these figures suggest alternative readings of the society in which they live, and thus reflect on notions such as “cultural identity”, “integration”, and “transnationality”.

On that standpoint, possible case studies include the works of “expatriate writers” (expat), who write their stories in a different language from that spoken by their characters and/or set their stories in a cultural background (that is, a country) where they currently live or have resided, but which is not their country, which is not the background where they belong by birth, language, culture, education and the like. Examples range from the Italian mysteries written by authors of British, American or German origin such as Magdalene Nabb, Donna Leon, Michael Dibdin, or Veit Heinechen, to those written by authors with a migratory background and a non-native cultural origin that have influenced their work, like Lakhdar Belaïd, Sascha Arango, Nadine Buranaseda, Tonino Benacquisto, Susanne Ayoub, Rosa Ribas, Vladimir Hernàndez and more.

Other possible case studies may emphasise the construction of transnational characters. Contemporary European crime fiction features more and more detectives living and operating in multicultural and/or transnational contexts, like Arne Dahl’s Op-Cop Group, Jacob Arjouni’s private detective Kemal Kayankaya and Deputy Commissioner Luca Who, created by Andrea Ciotti. By thematizing the transcultural contexts in which they live within the diegetic universe, these characters allow us to explore the stratified and multicultural fabric of European society.

This issue of Scritture migranti will welcome proposals exploring the ways in which contemporary European crime fiction writers (from 1989) and characters are recast in the role of cultural mediators from a variety of theoretical and critical perspectives, which may include, among others: narratological analyses focused on the aesthetic structure and thematic contents of the texts; studies on the transnational circulation and translation of crime novels; inquiries on the transmedia outputs of the crime narratives dealing with cultural and national mobility issues.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• The transnational circulation of the works of transcultural writers, in the more general frame of the production, distribution and reception of the crime genre across the European cultural market;

• The construction of an European identity and its borders in relation to the narrative space in which the criminal and investigative plots are set and to the mobility of the characters;

• How the construction of transcultural characters calls into question racial, cultural and social stereotypes in the representation of narrative as well as socio-cultural mobility in a national context;

• The critical and deconstructive potential of the crime genre in bringing out and highlight forms of collective repression connected to socio-cultural mobility and transnational contexts;

• The comparison between the definitions and the notions of “expatriate” and “migrant” in relation to specific crime fiction writers and works.

Founded in 2007, Scritture migranti is the first Italian peer-reviewed journal with a strong commitment in international research on Migrant literature.

Scritture migrant is an annual journal that publishes articles in English, French and Italian.

Proposals– title and abstract of 250 words, author’s affiliation and contact (email), personal information – will have to be sent by May 31, 2021 to redazione.scritturemigranti@unibo.it. Acceptance of the proposals will be notified by June 15, 2021.

Final papers of 6000-7000 words will be due no later than October 31, 2021, with publication anticipated in January 2022.

Contact email:

redazione.scritturemigranti@unibo.it

maurizio.ascari@unibo.it

sara.casoli2@unibo.it

silvia.baroni9@unibo.it

Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies - Call for Papers

 

 Giallo! The Long History of Italian Television Crime Drama

Special issue edited by Luca Barra (Università di Bologna) and Valentina Re (Link Campus, Rome)

 Most of the Italian television drama able to circulate internationally belongs to the multifaceted crime genre, both in some sparse examples from the past and in growing contemporary productions (from premium channels and digital platforms to public service and commercial broadcasters). However, for many decades, only a limited range of titles has been given scholarly attention, drawing a useful yet partial account of an otherwise dense and multi-layered history. Moreover, exceptions have often been studied far more than the most conventional crime series in the ‘giallo’ spectrum: most police procedurals are deemed too formulaic, or too popular, to be distinguished. Therefore, this special issue intends to overcome these limits by focusing on the historical evolution of the crime genre inside the development of Italian television, from the early stages to the latest mainstream and niche successes, and by highlighting the many crime titles that have become familiar to large Italian audiences.

 Through the Italian crime drama and its evolution over the decades, an original history of Italian television and media can be easily outlined, where ‘giallo’ would often mark changes of pace, innovations, successes and failures. Already in the first twenty years of the so-called paleo-television and monopoly period, crime drama was facilitating the Italian ‘sceneggiato’’s turn towards a medium-long seriality: the investigations of ‘tenente’ Sheridan (from 1959 to 1972, first with Giallo club. Invito al poliziesco and later with Ritorna il tenente Sheridan, Sheridan squadra omicidi and Le donne del tenente Sheridan) or Le inchieste del commissario Maigret (1964-1972), starring Gino Cervi; or Nero Wolfe (1969-1971). Further on, it was crime drama that marked the transition—even the lexical transition—from ‘sceneggiato’ to ‘fiction’, with the great success of La Piovra (1984-2001). It was crime television that punctuated the golden age of public service fiction in the late Nineties: Il maresciallo Rocca (1996-2008), Il Commissario Montalbano (1999-), La squadra (2000-2007) and the reassuring Don Matteo (2000-). It was crime drama that underlined the innovations of commercial networks: Distretto di polizia (2000- 2012), RIS. Delitti imperfetti (2005-2009) and Squadra antimafia. Palermo oggi (2009-2016). Once again, it was the crime genre that marked the arrival of premium original productions, first with Sky – Quo vadis, baby? (2008), Romanzo criminale. La serie (2008-2010) and Gomorra. La serie (2014-) – and later with Netflix – Suburra. La serie (2017-2020). Lastly, crime is one of the main battlegrounds for the return of Rai and Mediaset competition, innovating genres and aesthetics and establishing global partnerships, with titles like Non uccidere (2015-2018), Rocco Schiavone (2016-), La porta rossa (2016-), I bastardi di Pizzofalcone (2017-), Maltese (2017), Il Cacciatore (2018) and Il Processo (2019). In Italy, as in many other countries like the United States, the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, the entire nation is reflected in the history of its TV crime drama, mixing the reverberations of a changing society – which experiences new tensions and conflicts in terms of economic insecurity, political uncertainty, family and gender norms – with formal experiments and the shared imageries of a long-lasting, rich and always new genre.

 The editors encourage submissions that cover, but are not limited to, the following subjects and topics:

 1. The genre and its polymorphism. How has Italian TV, across its entire history, interpreted the many subgenres of ‘giallo’ (noir, police procedural, legal drama, detective story, crime, etc.)? How are these subgenres related to different periods, specific formats, channels and platforms?

 2. The familiar hybridizations with comedy and melodrama. What are the strategies to ‘balance’ the roughness of crime in the Italian tradition? How have these interacted with the crime genre?

 3. The less familiar hybridizations with other genres. How have popular genres like fantasy, the supernatural, gothic, science fiction and thriller impacted the ‘giallo’ traditions and innovations?

4. The geography of Italian crime. How have the places represented in the Italian ‘giallo’ changed in television history (center vs. peripheries; urban vs. rural stories)? How have locations affected the narrative developments, the production and the national and global circulation of these series?

 5. Literary adaptations and original productions. How has the frequent adaptation of literary investigators (i.e. Maigret, Nero Wolfe, Montalbano, etc.) influenced the narratives, characters, production and promotion strategies of Italian TV dramas? How do fully-original stories differ?

6. The Italian ‘giallo’ as a transmedial phenomenon. How have crime dramas hybridized languages, figures, characters and topics from different media, such as radio, comics and cinema?

7. Mainstream dramas and quality ‘giallo’. How has ‘quality’ or ‘complex’ TV impacted Italian crime by featuring ambiguous heroes and antiheroes, multiple storylines, unconventional locations and a sophisticated visual style? And what is the role of more traditional, mass-oriented crime?

8. From amateur to professional female investigators. How have crime dramas, from Laura Storm to Thou Shalt Not Kill’s Valeria Ferro, shown an increasingly strong interest in female detectives? How does this help us understand, question and renegotiate evolving gender and genre norms?

9. The reality and fiction of Italian ‘giallo’. How have Italian crime dramas reinterpreted or hinted at the news of ‘cronaca nera’, in a complex entanglement between unsolved cases and judiciary truths? In which ways has the recent explosion of serial true crime also impacted fictional series?

10. The international circulation of Italian crime. After the first success of La Piovra, in recent years more and more national productions have met with foreign acclaim. What are the elements that facilitate this international circulation, and what are the effects on narratives and productions?

11. Italian ‘giallo’ and the past: national history and national memory. How has the Italian ‘giallo’ tradition been proven capable of turning our gaze on the past and addressing unresolved social and political conflict? How do ‘gialli’ contribute to a shared national memory of mysteries and traumas?

12. Italian ‘giallo’ and the present: social tensions and moral dilemmas. From financial issues to terrorism, from immigration to the ties between politics, corruption and organized crime, how has the contemporary crime drama contributed to narrating conflict and fear in our societies?

The deadline for the submission of abstracts is 30 April. Interested contributors should send the following materials to the guest editors Luca Barra, Università di Bologna (luca.barraATunibo.it) and Valentina Re, Link Campus, Rome (v.reATunilink.it): a 500 word abstract in English of original and unpublished articles, outlining the topic, approach and theoretical bases with a relevant bibliography and filmography; and  a 200 word biographical note. The accepted proposals will be notified by 31 May; completed articles should be sent by 15 October for peer-review; authors will be notified of the results of the peer-review by 15 December 2021.