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  Call for Contributions         The Blackwell Companion to the Historical Film   Editors: Robert A Rosenstone, California Institute of Technology      Constantin Parvulescu, Washington University in St Louis The editors invite contributions to The Blackwell Companion to Historical Film, a volume of 25 to 30 essays devoted to the latest scholarship on the origins, contributions, history, range, codes, strategies, poetics, politics, tropes, production, packaging, and cultural impact of this important genre, the dramatic historical feature film. The Companion will be a major work which will survey the field as it exists today and also be suitable as a textbook for history-on-film and film-studies classes. The collection focuses only on feature films, and will include essays by both leading and emerging scholars in the fields of history, cinema studies, cultural studies, and other fields that have something to offer this inherently interdisciplinary topic.  Scholars such as Robert Burgoyne, Marcia Landy, and Catherine Portugues, Paula Rabinowitz, Alison Landsberg, Denise Youngblood, and Guy Westwell have already committed themselves to essays for the volume. We are currently seeking essays on particular topics, but scholars interested in contributing to the collection need not limit themselves to these themes but should feel free to suggest anything related to the genre of the historical film: •       American history (especially 18 and 19th centuries) on film •       African-American and American-Indian history on film •       Exile and diaspora historical films •       Cinematic adaptations of historical novels •       Minor histories and minor heroes on film •       The historical film and the national mythology (outside Europe) •       History on film and history on other media, including animation •       Production and marketing of historical films Those who wish to contribute should send a working title, a brief description of the proposed essay and a short bio to both editors: rr@hss.caltech.edu and ctparvulescu@gmail.com. Essays are to be between 8,000 and 10,000 words long; they will be due on March 1, 2011. Abstracts submission deadline: May 1, 2010. 

 Proposed Panel for SCMS Conference, Los Angeles, March 17-21  The Artificial Life of Film: Dolls, Puppets, Automata, and Cyborgs in Cinema  Organizer Names:  Deborah Levitt, Assistant Professor, Culture and Media Studies,  Eugene Lang College, The New School  Allison de Fren, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow,  Ammerman Center for  Arts & Technology, Connecticut College  Summary: From the early films of Georges Méliès, Fritz Lang, and the  Surrealist movement to Blade Runner, Being John Malkovich, Ghost in  the Shell, and Lars and the Real Girl, the cinema has had an enduring  fascination with artificial humans due to their unique ability to  picture the tensions between motion and stasis, animation and  inanimation, humanity and artificiality, the real and the virtual,  and the vital and the mechanical. Artificial bodies have also made  diverse appearances in film theory, from the "spiritual automaton"of  Gilles Deleuze to Roland Barthes' meditations on a cinematic  automaton in Camera Lucida to the broad field of reflections on  cyborgs and/in cinema. This panel seeks to interrogate any or all of  these conjugations of cinema and artificial lives — material and  philosophical, live action or animated, in fiction or documentary. We  are interested in the kinds of performativities engendered by these  ambivalent bodies: their uncanniness, their ontological  destabilizations, their epistemological games of masking and  unmasking. Papers might also consider how artificiality is mobilized  within particular genres or what kinds of meanings accumulate around  artificial bodies in relation to gender or race. We are interested in  how these figures help to construct a new genealogy of audiovisual  culture, one that could illuminate cinema's digital or animatic  present and future, as well as connections to various moments in the  historical long durée of dolls, puppets, and automata.  Please send an abstract of up to 300 words, five key references, and  a brief bio to levittd@newschool.edu and adefren@conncoll.edu by  August 10th.

CALL FOR PAPERS Title: From an Intercultural Crossover to a Transcultural Phenomenon: Manga, Comic, Graphic Novel International Conference at the Cultural Institute of Japan, Cologne (Japanisches Kulturinstitut Köln, The Japan Foundation), September 30 – October 2, 2010, in cooperation with CITS (Center for Inter- and Transcultural Studies, University of Cologne) Manga, comics and graphic novels are shaped by different cultural codes and shifting visual and narrative conventions. This conference focuses on the historical development and theoretical aspects of comics and manga by stressing their mutual influences. Whereas European and North American art and popular culture exert a great impact on Japanese manga, such as the Franco-Belgian tradition of “ligne claire” on Ōtomo Katsuhiro and Taniguchi Jirō, Walt Disney’s animated films on Tezuka Ōsamu and Christian and Antique ideas on Miyazaki Hayao, Japanese manga influence the concept and visual conventions of modern European and American comics as well, as can be seen in the work by Frédéric Boilet, Moebius, and Frank Miller, among others. Moreover, the intercultural exchange between the Japanese manga tradition and equivalent forms of sequential art in other Asian countries (i.e. China, India, and Korea) largely contributes to the dissemination of new hybrid art forms in the realm of comics and manga. The purpose of this conference is to bring together scholars and other experts of different countries and different fields, i.e. literary studies, picture theory, cultural studies, linguistics, narratology, film studies, and semiotics, who pursue different areas of investigation in this field. In order to adhere to a general outline for this conference, the papers might deal with one or several of the following topics: • Intermedial, intercultural and narrative perspectives for the interpretation of the graphic novel and other genres of sequential art prominent in both comics and manga • Comparative analysis of the construction of time and setting in comics and manga • The functions of color in comics and manga • Similarities and differences between Japanese and other Asian manga and European and North American comics • Impact of wordless comics and manga • Historical development of the mutual influence of comics and manga • Change of the conventional verbal signs (such as speech balloons, sound effects, typography) • Influence of films and cinematic style on the production of comics and manga • Influence of visual codes derived from art history and popular culture in order to create an individual artistic style Contributions from academics and experts interested in any of these areas and in international perspectives are particularly welcome. There are plans to publishing the proceedings of the conference afterwards in book form. The deadline for proposals is: *31 August 2009*. Please email a 300 word abstract (for a thirty minute paper, followed by 15 minutes for discussion) and a short biography as an attached word document to Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer at: bettina.kuemmerling@t-online.de and Franziska Ehmcke at: amm07@uni-koeln.de Notification of the acceptance of proposals will be made by 30 September 2009. The conference fee will be 120 Euro, including catering, technical equipment, conference folders and various arrangements. The conference venue is located in the Cultural Institute of Japan, not far from the University of Cologne. For details, go to www.jki.de (text in German and Japanese). For further inquiries contact the conference convenors: Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer Universität zu Köln Institut für deutsche Sprache und Literatur II Gronewaldstr. 2 50931 Köln Germany E-Mail: bettina.kuemmerling@t-online.de Franziska Ehmcke Universität zu Köln Ostasiatisches Seminar (Japanologie) Albertus Magnus-Platz 50923 Köln Germany E-Mail: amm07@uni-koeln.de

In the 1950s and 1960s, war responsibility was debated not only in such academic works, but also in massively popular novels and films such as Gomikawa Jumpei’s Ningen no Joken [The Human Condition], which appeared in novel, movie and manga form, and included graphic representations of acts of brutality committed by members of the Japanese armed forces in China. [3]

The company is also buying rights video games and Asian manga books, Cerenzie said.