Henry Jenkins and Jason Mittell are the keynote speakers of this one-day conference. “Contemporary Screen Narratives: Storytelling’s Digital and Industrial Contexts” is taking place on 17 May 2012 at the University of Nottingham.
Deadline for proposal submission: 4 March 2012.

Info: Contemporary Screen Narratives 2012

IAMHIST master class on Media and History

Date: Friday January 13^th, 2012 – 09.30 am

Location: University of Southern California (Los Angeles)

Are you a graduate or doctoral student, post-doc, or young professional currently working on a project in which you engage issues concerning historical film, radio or television or issues in media history? Are you interested in presenting your project to a small group of experts and peers? Then this master-class of the International Association for Media and History may be just what you are looking for. Participants are expected to give a short introduction to their project and to prepare some central questions for discussion. Senior members of IAMHIST will engage with your paper and discuss sources and strategies for developing the project.

The MAD-faculty (KHLim and PHL) is one of the organizers of the 4th Screenwriting Research Network Conference on 8, 9 and 10 September 2011, in Brussels. “Beyond Boundaries: Screenwriting Across Media” is the topic of this fourth conference.

We would like to invite submissions on (but not limited to) these topics:

- Screenwriting history research (and archiving)
- Theorizing screenwriting and the screenplay
- Rethinking screenwriting in intercultural perspective
- New approaches to developing the screen idea

• Non-linguistic screenplays (video-art, comics, etc.)
• Writing for television: tv-series nowadays seem to be the avant-garde of narrative experimentation
• Transmedial scriptwriting: coping with medium-specific features
• Screenwriting for animation; how it differs from traditional screenwriting

- Pedagogics of screenwriting: can it be taught? And how? Also: practice as research and how to teach screenwriting theory and practice within an academic or practice based contex
- How theory and practice of screenwriting can collaborate for better screenwriting: panel (meeting/discussion) between theoreticians and practitioners

Confirmed keynote speakers:

- David Bordwell (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
- Steven Price (Bangor University)
- Marida di Crosta (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3)

Read more about the Screenwriting Research Network or the entire call for papers (Word document).

From 1 January to 30 June 2011, professor Jostein Gripsrud of the University of Bergen (Norway), will reside as International Francqui Professor in Belgium. Within the context of his Francqui professorship, communication and media studies departments from the VUB, UGent and ULB organise a series of masterclasses for PhD students in the field of communication and media studies, for which a call for abstracts is now opened.

The masterclasses are organizes around four topics:

• Changing structures of the public sphere
• Media policy challenges in a context of convergence and multilevel governance
• Screen cultures in digital times (narrative cinema, television, games, blogs, etc.)
• The politics of popular culture

More information:  Francquimasterclass

Alternative Worlds

A retrospective of the last 111 years

Call for Papers/ Art Presentations

Seminar in Visual Culture 2011

Deadline for proposals: 13 Dec. 2010

Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, Room ST 274 (School of Advanced Study, Stewart House, 32 Russell Square, WC1B 5DN London)

This series of seminars acts as a forum for practicing artists, researchers, curators, students, and others interested in visual culture who are invited to present, discuss and explore a given theme within the broad field of Visual Culture.

In an attempt to escape the doom and gloom of the economic crisis the theme for 2011 is ‘Alternative Worlds’. The aim is to examine the dreams, plans and hopes, but also the nightmares and fears reflected in utopian thinking since 1900 in the Western hemisphere. What has become of all those possible worlds? How do they reflect their contemporary culture and society and what, if anything, do or can they mean for our present, or indeed, our future? What alternative worlds are engendered by our own times, by the world of 2011 itself? This is, hence not only a retrospective of past utopias and their after-lives but also an invitation to look towards our possible futures.