The Comics Studies Society invites submissions of scholarly paper proposals for its first annual conference, “MIND THE GAPS! The Futures of the Field,” to be held from August 9-11th, 2018, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This inaugural conference seeks to bring together scholars, artists, and other members of the international Comics Studies community for critical conversations about the futures of the field, in all its multidisciplinary and transcultural formations. Presentations should focus on gaps and opportunities in existing scholarship and may choose to address one or more of the following questions:

• What are the overlooked, understudied, and emerging areas of comics studies?
• How might comics studies expand its methodologies? What disciplines should comics studies engage with more fully?
• How can comics studies foreground issues of representation, equity and justice?
• How might new technologies and platforms change the way we define, read, teach, draw, and write about comics?
• What are the significant challenges and opportunities for the futures of comics studies?
• Topics may include, but are not limited to:
• Regional gaps and understudied geographic areas
• Historical gaps and recovered cartoonists and comics
• Comics, illustration, and art history
• Collaboration in comics and comics scholarship
• Comics pedagogy and classroom canons
• Scholarship in comics form
• Comics, conflict, and geopolitics
• Webcomics and digital technologies
• Critical race theory, ethnicity studies and comics
• Queer theory, sexuality studies and comics
• Postcolonial theory, settler studies, and Indigenous comics
• Science in/and comics
• Disability studies and comics studies
• Educational, governmental, and religious comics

Guidelines for Submission

We are accepting submissions for: Individual papers, Panels of three papers, Roundtables of short (5 min.) presentations by 4-5 presenters followed by discussion. See http://www.comicssociety.org/conference/ for the conference submission templates. The deadline for all submissions is January 1, 2018. A presenter’s name may appear twice in the program. All proposals should be sent as Word files or PDFs by email to: comicsstudiessocietyconference@gmail.com. The conference organizers will send out notifications of acceptance by February 1, 2018. Conference presenters need to be current members of CSS in 2018 at the time of registration.