Narratives of Captivity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium - Call for Abstracts

 

Narratives of Captivity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium

18^th June 2025

Northumbria University

Newcastle and Online

Call for Abstracts

The Northumbria Centre for Evidence and Criminal Justice Studies, in association with the Crime Studies Network, is holding a one-day interdisciplinary symposium on Narratives of Captivity on Wednesday 18th June  2025. This will be a hybrid event, held on campus in central Newcastle and online.

We are interested in how literature, popular culture and law understand situations of loss of liberty or severely restricted freedom, including in the context of imprisonment, kidnapping, (irregular) migration (e.g. visa regimes, human trafficking or migrant smuggling) and coercive and controlling behaviour. In particular, we welcome papers which discuss how far individuals in situations of captivity are portrayed as retaining moral or legal responsibility for their actions, and on the parallels or contrasts between the depiction of ostensibly legitimate imprisonment and illegal forms of confinement. Contributions are welcome from any discipline including literature, history, philosophy, sociology, media studies, criminology and law.

Attendance is free of charge.

Please send abstracts (approximately 300 words) to tony.ward@northumbria.ac.uk by 16 May  2025.

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 - 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

Call for Papers: Frankenstein: A Multidisciplinary Conference 2018

Thursday 14th June 2018

Northumbria University Law School and Department of Social Sciences (in collaboration with the Crime Studies Network) is pleased to announce a multidisciplinary conference to celebrate the bicentenary of the first publication of Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley.

Call for Papers:

Law and literature, criminology and humanities papers and presentations from established academics and postgraduate students are particularly welcome. Other disciplines reflecting medical, scientific, historical, political or social aspects of the novel or of its many realisations in film, other media and the performing arts are strongly encouraged.

As well as papers on Frankenstein itself and related literary works we welcome reflections on the themes of the novel, such as irresponsible uses of scientific knowledge, the creation of ‘monsters’ through emotional neglect and social stigma, and miscarriages of justice (as in the case of Shelley’s Justine Moritz).

We will also consider papers and presentations on related themes if you care to propose them.

Please send a short (150) word abstract to: bl.frankenstein.conference@northumbria.ac.uk

Closing date for submissions is 1 February 2018. 

MWA Announces the 2017 Edgar Nominations

News from Margery Flax of Mystery Writers of America [MWA]

January 19, 2017, New York, NY – Mystery Writers of America is proud to announce, as we celebrate the 208th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, the Nominees for the 2017 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television published or produced in 2016. The Edgar® Awards will be presented to the winners at our 71st Gala Banquet, April 27, 2017 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, New York City.

Congratulations from Shots Magazine to all the Nominees; and thanks for the hard work that the MWA judges put into the Edgar Awards, you are all winners

BEST NOVEL

The Ex by Alafair Burke (HarperCollins Publishers – Harper)

Where It Hurts by Reed Farrel Coleman (Penguin Random House – G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye (Penguin Random House – G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

What Remains of Me by Alison Gaylin (HarperCollins Publishers – William Morrow)

Before the Fall by Noah Hawley (Hachette Book Group – Grand Central Publishing)

BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR

Under the Harrow by Flynn Berry (Penguin Random House – Penguin Books)

Dodgers by Bill Beverly (Crown Publishing Group)

IQ by Joe Ide (Little, Brown & Company – Mulholland Books)

The Drifter by Nicholas Petrie (Penguin Random House – G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

Dancing with the Tiger by Lili Wright (Penguin Random House – Marian Wood Book/Putnam)

The Lost Girls by Heather Young (HarperCollins Publishers – William Morrow)

BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL

Shot in Detroit by Patricia Abbott (Polis Books)

Come Twilight by Tyler Dilts (Amazon Publishing – Thomas & Mercer)

The 7th Canon by Robert Dugoni (Amazon Publishing – Thomas & Mercer)

Rain Dogs by Adrian McKinty (Prometheus Books – Seventh Street Books)

A Brilliant Death by Robin Yocum (Prometheus Books – Seventh Street Books)

Heart of Stone by James W. Ziskin (Prometheus Books – Seventh Street Books)

BEST FACT CRIME

Morgue: A Life in Death by Dr. Vincent DiMaio & Ron Franscell (St. Martin’s Press)

The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle that Brought Down the Klan by Laurence Leamer (HarperCollins Publishers – William Morrow)

Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane: A True Story of Victorian Law and Disorder: The Unsolved Murder That Shocked Victorian England by Paul Thomas Murphy (Pegasus Books)

While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man’s Descent into Madness by Eli Sanders (Penguin Random House – Viking Books)

The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer by Kate Summerscale (Penguin Random House – Penguin Press)

BEST CRITICAL/BIOGRAPHICAL

Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life by Peter Ackroyd (Penguin Random House – Nan A. Talese)

Encyclopedia of Nordic Crime: Works and Authors of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden Since 1967

by Mitzi M. Brunsdale (McFarland & Company)

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin (W.W. Norton – Liveright)

Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula by David J. Skal (W.W. Norton – Liveright)

BEST SHORT STORY

“Oxford Girl” – Mississippi Noir by Megan Abbott (Akashic Books)

“A Paler Shade of Death” – St. Louis Noir by Laura Benedict (Akashic Books)

“Autumn at the Automat” – In Sunlight or in Shadow by Lawrence Block (Pegasus Books)

“The Music Room” – In Sunlight or in Shadow  by Stephen King (Pegasus Books)

“The Crawl Space” – Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine by Joyce Carol Oates (Dell Magazines)

BEST JUVENILE

Summerlost by Ally Condie (Penguin Young Readers Group – Dutton BFYR)

OCDaniel by Wesley King (Simon & Schuster – Paula Wiseman Books)

The Bad Kid by Sarah Lariviere by  (Simon & Schuster – Simon & Schuster BFYR)

Some Kind of Happiness by Claire Legrand  (Simon & Schuster – Simon & Schuster BFYR)

Framed! by James Ponti (Simon & Schuster – Aladdin)

Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry by Susan Vaught (Simon & Schuster – Paula Wiseman Books)

BEST YOUNG ADULT

Three Truths and a Lie by Brent Hartinger (Simon & Schuster – Simon Pulse)

The Girl I Used to Be by April Henry (Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group – Henry Holt BFYR)

Girl in the Blue Coat by Monica Hesse (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown BFYR)

My Sister Rosa by Justine Larbalestier (Soho Press – Soho Teen)

Thieving Weasels by Billy Taylor (Penguin Random House – Penguin Young Readers – Dial Books)

BEST TELEVISION EPISODE TELEPLAY

“Episode 1 – From the Ashes of Tragedy” – The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, Teleplay by Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski (FX Network)

“The Abominable Bride” – Sherlock, Teleplay by Mark Gatiss & Steven Moffat (Hartswood Films/Masterpiece)

“Episode 1 – Dark Road” – Vera, Teleplay by Martha Hillier (Acorn TV)

“A Blade of Grass” – Penny Dreadful, Teleplay by John Logan (Showtime)

“Return 0” – Person of Interest, Teleplay by Jonathan Nolan & Denise The (CBS/Warner Brothers)

“The Bicameral Mind” – Westworld, Teleplay by Jonathan Nolan & Lisa Joy (HBO/Warner Bros. Television)

ROBERT L. FISH MEMORIAL AWARD

“The Truth of the Moment” – Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine by E. Gabriel Flores (Dell Magazines)

GRAND MASTER

Max Allan Collins

Ellen Hart

RAVEN AWARD

Dru Ann Love

ELLERY QUEEN AWARD

Neil Nyren

THE SIMON & SCHUSTER – MARY HIGGINS CLARK AWARD

The Other Sister by Dianne Dixon (Sourcebooks – Sourcebooks Landmark)

Quiet Neighbors by Catriona McPherson (Llewellyn Worldwide – Midnight Ink)

Say No More by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Tor/Forge Books – Forge Books)

Blue Moon by Wendy Corsi Staub (HarperCollins Publishers – William Morrow)

The Shattered Tree by Charles Todd (HarperCollins Publishers – William Morrow)

The EDGAR (and logo) are Registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by the Mystery Writers of America, Inc.

More Information about the Mystery Writers of America is available from >

http://mysterywriters.org/

Photo A Karim, Edgar A Poe [lookalike] and R J Ellory taken at Westminster Hall, Baltimore [the last resting place of Edgar A Poe], during Bouchercon Baltimore 2008