The University of Florida Comics Studies program is now accepting proposals for paper presentations at the 12th UF Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels. The dates for the conference will be April 10 to April 12, 2015, and the conference’s title and theme is “Comics Read but Seldom Seen: Diversity and Representation in Comics and Related Media”, and its overall goal is stated as “to celebrate and interrogate the representation of marginalized groups in comics and related media.”
As it has in previous years, the conference actively welcomes papers on Japanese cultural products. Some of the specific themes and topics that the conference’s organizers suggest include:
- Representations of disability and disorder in manga
- Representations of homosexuality, alternative sexualities, and related issues in manga
- Representations of diverse races, ethnicities, nationalities, genders and sexualities in anime/manga
- Anime adaptations of lesbian/gay/bisexual/transsexual/queer manga
- Particular titles to examine include With the Light, Real, Revolutionary Girl Utena
The deadline to submit a proposal for the conference (200-300 words) is January 1, 2015.
2015 UF Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels – Call for Papers
The UF Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels was first organized in 2002, and has been held almost every year since then, except 2011. Some of the presentations on anime/manga that have been featured on the schedule over the years have included:
- Disempowering visions of ideal love in shoujo manga Nana and Gravitation (Mia Lewis, 2013)
- Critiquing masculine impressions of feminine storytelling: In defense of Moto Hagio’s The Heart of Thomas (Carolynn Calabrese, 2013)
- Postmodernism and posthumanism in the work of Hitoshi Tomizawa (Connor Shea, 2012)
- The urban center in cyberpunk animation (Andrew Shaner, 2010)
- Commercialization and the loss of innocence: Children’s manga from the 1920s to the present (Matt Thorn, 2006)