A Tuebingen University Winter School, organized by Lukas R.A. Wilde, brings together eleven international keynote speakers and ten junior researchers to discuss

“De/Recontextualizing Characters: Media Convergence and Pre-/Meta-Narrative Character Circulation”

Topics concerning comics and manga are especially prominent within the 4day-program, likely due to the high number of ComFor participants: Jaqueline Berndt (Stockholm), Jan-Niklas Meier (Bielefeld), Christina Meyer (Osnarbrück), Stephan Packard (Cologne), Johannes Schmid (Hamburg), Jan-Noël Thon (Nottingham), Jeff Thoss (Berlin), and Vanessa Ossa (Tübingen) .

The conference takes place in the Turmzimmer of Castle Hohentuebingen. Due to limitations regarding the number of participants we would kindly ask you to register your participation at contextualizingcharacters (ät) graduiertenakademie.uni-tuebingen.de.
The conference is supported by the Institutional Strategy of the University of Tübingen (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, ZUK 63).

Continue to the full Program (Pdf)
Continue to organizer’s page

Continue to the organizer’s announcement

The Comic Studies Board (AG Comicforschung) of the German Society of Media Studies (GfM) warmly invites to its international conference “Graphic Realities: Comics as Documentary, History, and Journalism”. Organized by Laura Schlichting (Gießen) and Johannes C.P. Schmid (Hamburg), in cooperation with the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at the Justus-Liebig-University of Gießen, the conference encompasses 4 sections with 12 international presenters, including Prof. Dr. Jörn Ahrens (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen), Dr. Nina Mickwitz (University of the Arts London), Prof. Dr. Dirk Vanderbeke (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena), and Prof. Dr. Wibke Weber (Züricher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften, Winterthur).

Admission is free, but attendants are kindly asked to register until February 10th 2018 at graphicrealities@gcsc.uni-giessen.de.

Organizer’s outline:
“While comics have traditionally been associated with fictional, especially funny and/or fantastic stories, they have in recent decades become a major vehicle for nonfiction, as well. This development coincides with a time that has been described as ‘post-truth’, in which established news media face a crisis of confidence. The turn towards comics is a turn towards a medium, which inherently promotes simplification and exaggeration. Cartoon imagery thus immediately exhibits the subjectivity of the artist and her or his interpretation – but what could be considered a hindrance towards factual reporting has become an important resource. The overt display of subjectivity and medial limitations as a show of honesty has been described as an authentication strategy of graphic nonfiction. In contrast to formats based on camera-recorded images like photography and film nonfiction comics cannot lay claim to indexing premedial reality. Rather, individual graphic styles index their own creator who as witness becomes the main authenticator. Thus, comics shift the weight of authentication from medial prerequisites towards their authors and artists and thus the textual properties referencing them. One of the questions that will be discussed at the conference is thus the relation of inherent medial properties of comics as vehicle for nonfiction.
While among graphic nonfiction life writing in particular has received widespread scholarly attention, this conference will focus on recent approaches to comics as documentary, history, and journalism. As opposed to graphic memoirs in which authors reflect upon their own lives and experiences, these works focus on the lives and experiences of others. Thus, authors and artists need to do justice towards their subjects, as well as to their own experience and negotiate their own voices within their stories. This becomes especially relevant as a majority of graphic reportages centers around highly traumatizing crises and catastrophes, such as war, displacement, natural disasters, and oppression. The conference is intended to explore how authors and artists utilize the medium of comics for nonfiction and address these ‘graphic realities’.”

Organizer’s page

Read more: Full Program

Stories of Illness/ Disability in Literature and Comics.
Intersections of the Medical, the Personal, and the Cultural

PathoGraphics research group

Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies
Freie Universität Berlin
www.fsgs.fu-berlin.de/pathographics

Organizer’s announcement:
“This conference examines the ways in which knowledge and experience of illness and disability circulate within the realms of medicine, art, the personal and the cultural. Speakers address this question from a variety of different perspectives, including literary scholarship, comics studies, media studies, disability studies, the health humanities and sociology.

With a Keynote by Leigh Gilmore (Wellesley College): “Tainted Witness: Risking Aversion in Autobiographical Comics”. Places will be made available for free and on a first-come, first-served basis. To register, please email alexandrahu@zedat.fu-berlin.de between (but not before) 2-20 October 2017.”

To the organizer’s page

Continue Reading: Full program

The AG Comicforschung hosts an English-language panel entitled “Cartoon Bodies and Graphic Sensuality” on Saturday, 1 July 2017 as part of the annual conference of the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS). Panel chair is Erwin Feyersinger (Tübingen).

Panel description (shortened):

“This panel combines four approaches to re-examine this idiosyncratic graphic sensuality: Ranging from the ambiguously emancipatory and racist traditions of physiognomically deformed bodies in the early 20th century, through their redrawing in the genre-defining art of underground comix and the political implications of their mutual naturalization and denaturalization in mainstream comics, to the yet innovative re-distribution of depicted and elicited agency in digital comics, these contributions are posed to focus the discussion of this aesthetic ambivalence and promise through four concrete analyses.”

Panel talks:

• Lukas R.A. Wilde (Tübingen), “Interfacing (Digital) Comics: The Distribution and Negotiation of Agency and Control”
• Markus Engelns (Duisburg-Essen), “Seeing fragmented Bodies – Towards an inherent political quality of comic books”
• Stephan Packard (Freiburg/Cologne), “‘Striking Our Time in Its Face’: The Implausibly Denied Aggression of Caricature in Cartoons Focused Through Karl Kraus’ Battles with the Genre”
• Véronique Sina (Bochum), “‘If only I’d had a nose job’ – Representations of the Gendered Jewish Body in the Works of Aline Kominsky Crumb”

Website of the AG Comicforschung (with extensive abstracts)

Website of the NECS conference

Description:

“In recent decades the graphic memoir has emerged as one of the most successful genres of alternative comics. These works address real experiences ranging from war and persecution to migration and discrimination. Graphic illness writing, as a major sub-genre, tells of personal encounters with physical and mental illness. The comics form is particularly well-suited to express highly emotional experiences of personal crisis and trauma. The abstraction of the cartoon drawing style, as well as, the blanks in between panels for the readers to fill, enable artists to visualize experiences that elude other media.

In her recent graphic memoir Lighter than my Shadow (2013) British author Katie Green depicts her adolescent experience of eating disorders and abuse. But the self-described “trip into the black heart of a taboo illness“ is also a story of recovery, coming of age, and self-expression through art. The drawing process itself becomes a way to work through her experience, give them a shape, and, finally, of getting better. This workshop will seek to explore how lines and scribbles can express complex emotional trauma and comic panels frame, contain, and explain where words fall short.”

Program:

• Katie Green, “Drawing Shadows”
• Lukas Etter, “Lines, Curls, Scribbles: Individual Drawing and Individual Style”
• Panel diskussion with Katie Green (Author of Lighter than my Shadow), Lukas Etter (University of Siegen), Christina Maria Koch (University of Marburg) and Johannes C. P. Schmid (University of Hamburg); moderator: Astrid Böger (Director Arbeitsstelle für Graphische Literatur, University of Hamburg)

Website

Facebook-Event

Comics and Memory is an international NNCORE conference (Nordic Network for Comic Research) organized at the University of Ghent from April 19-21, 2017, in collaboration with the KU Leuven, UCLouvain (GRIT), and the ACME comics research group (University of Liège). This conference examines the complex relationships between comics and memory through the prisms of personal, collective, and medial forms as well as practices of remembering.

The conference is free and open to the public.

To the Conference Page

Continue Reading: Full Programm

Professor G. Thomas Couser (New York) is going to speak about the topic “PathoGraphic Embodiment: Ethics, Politics, and the Visual Representation of Disability” at the FU Berlin. The lecture is organized by the PathoGraphics research project and the Friedrich-Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies (FU Berlin).

Organizer’s announcement:
“Thomas Couser, Professor emeritus of English and founding director of the disability studies program at Hofstra University (USA) is internationally renowned for his research in the areas of life writing and disability. He is known within American literature and cultural studies circles specifically for his books Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (1997),
Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (2004), Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing (2009) and Memoir: An Introduction (2010).

In his lecture at Freie Universität Thomas Couser will speak about his work to date on literary pathographies as compared to visual/textual narratives of illness and disability in comics and graphic novels. What significance do the respective genres have for authors and their readers? What are the ethical, political and aesthetic concerns in narratives of illness and disability in both literary and graphic form?

The lecture will be followed by a discussion between Thomas Couser and MK Czerwiec (Chicago), American comic artist, nurse, and co-founder of the online platform Graphic Medicine, as well as author of the graphic novel Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371. Lecture and discussion are open to the public: all those interested are warmly welcome to attend. Reception to follow.”

Continue to the FU page

Organised by the editorial team of CLOSURE, Kiel University’s e-journal for comics studies, Kiel’s first comic conference will be held from the 9th to the 11th of September 2016 at the University of Kiel. The conference focuses on ›Beginnings‹ and ›Renewals‹ in comics and takes into account both formal and historical aspects of the genre. The conference explicitly seeks to approach this topic from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Panels consist of 11 papers delivered by international comics scholars, a keynote address by Silke Horstkotte, and a concluding panel discussion. On Friday night, the conference opens with a comic book reading at the art gallery in Kiel. Four comic book artists – Tanja Esch from Hamburg, Jul Gordon and Sascha Hommer (»Kontaktcenter Hamburg«) and Gregor Hinz (comic magazine »Pure Fruit«) – read from their respective works, thereby approaching the topics of Beginnings and Renewals from a performative perspective. Presentations and the comic book reading are free of charge and open to university members as well as to the general public.

Attending the conference is free of charge and open to the public. Lectures will be given partly in English and partly in German

On the conference’s topic:
“On your marks! More than any other narrative field, graphic storytelling is determined by beginnings. Case in point: 2012 saw the newest in a long line of reboots, as DC comics renumbered and restarted its series and its universe. It is not just the context of serial superhero stories, however, that is characterized by ›beginnings‹ and ›renewals‹ – any historical perspective requires both comics and comics studies to re-examine the question of beginnings.

The conference, held on September 9-11, 2016 in Kiel, Germany, will focus on the themes of ›beginning‹ and ›renewal‹ in comics, seeking a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches to the question of what constitutes a new start in comics and for comics. This includes ›beginning‹ as a formal device as well as related inquiries into the narratological, stylistic and theoretical implications of beginnings within the structure of comics. Further approaches include the question of beginnings of the medium, its discourses and the study of comics. Last but not least: ›beginnings‹, ›renewals‹ and ›fresh starts‹ will also be analyzed as themes and motifs.”

Programme:

Location: Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Düsternbrooker Weg 1, 24105 Kiel

Friday, 09 Sep 2016
17:30–18:15 h	Registration
18:30–19:30 h	Welcome and Reception
20:00–21:30 h	Comic Reading at the KunsthalleDetails

Location: Kiel University, Leibnizstraße 1 (room 204), 24118 Kiel

Contact:
closure@comicforschung.uni-kiel.de

Continue to the conference page with full abstracts

The Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Films (ITFS) will be the host of an academic symposium on “Narrative Structures and Visual Storytelling”, organized in collaboration with the Society of Animation Studies, the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University Singapore, the Institute of Media Studies at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, the AG Animation and the Literaturhaus Stuttgart.

Organizer’s announcement:
“The symposium negotiates the role and use of narrative structure and visual storytelling in literature, illustration, graphic storytelling and animation. International experts will address this fascinating theme in presentations. Topics include the relationship between color and visual storytelling, choices of graphic techniques in adaptations for comics and animation and the socio-cultural context of color in illustration, animation and comics. We will welcome internationally renowned experts from around the globe plus a highly distinguished keynote speaker.”

SCHEDULE/PROGRAM

10.00-11.00:
Prof. Michaela Pavlatova: The stories without the story / From my kitchen (Keynote)
11.00-11.30:
Prof. Michael Schwertel: Digital Storytelling – What we could learn from the past to handle virtual reality (Keynote)
12.00-12.30:
Lea Vidakovic: Animation installation and spatial storytelling
14.00-15.00:
Assoc. Prof. Benjamin Seide: The Influence of Digital Visual Effects on Storytelling Structure (Keynote)
15.00-15.30:
Naima Alam: So Relatable: Comic Medium as a Portrayal of the Social Realities of Bangladesh
16.00-17.00:
Markus Watzl: Writing for modern-day-children – Geschichten aus Märchental

Entry: 15,- Euro at box office/ Free with accreditation or Festivalpass ITFS

Continue to organizer’s page