Ankündigungen & Berichte

MA Comics Studies at the University of East Anglia

Posted on 2020 02 13, 00:01

Good news in the academic field of comics studies: the University of East Anglia introduces an MA in Comics Studies – the first one of its kind worldwide, they say -, starting this fall; applications are open now and should not be submitted later than 31st of July 2020. Tuition fees for the academic year 2020/2021 are: £7,850 for full time UK/EU Students and £16,400 for full time international students.

Course Website

Overview:

“The MA in Comics Studies is the only MA programme of its kind in the world, and whether you are new to the field of comics studies or are developing existing interests, the programme will serve to deepen and broaden your understanding of comics and their associated cultures.

As a student on the programme, you will learn about comics from a range of international contexts such as Great Britain, the United States, Europe, Japan and others. You will also learn about the various theoretical approaches to studying comics, including the unique ways comics make meaning from the combination of words and images.

World-leading comics scholars will guide you through the complex histories, cultures and politics of the form. You will take a year-long, team-taught module focusing on key issues in comics studies, with additional compulsory modules in the theory and practice of comics studies and the long-standing relationship between film and comics. You will also choose from a wide variety of optional modules that touch upon such issues as politics, gender, sexuality and race in both comics and related media.

Through these modules, you will develop your ability to undertake advanced independent research projects. In addition, you will deepen your critical and analytical skills, especially in relation to understanding and evaluating visual art and storytelling.”

Another helpful resource on comics studies might be Nick Sousanis‘ linklist on comics programs.

Final Post of the Year 2019

Posted on 2019 12 23, 00:05

As in previous years, the editorial team of the Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) will take a brief holiday break. We wish a Happy New Year to all of our members, friends, and readers and hope that 2020 will be a successful year full of exciting reading experiences and research opportunities for all of us. We will be back on 9 January 2020 with regular news on comics studies. As usual, we will begin the new year with some reading recommendations (in German) by our ComFor members.

Happy holidays,
Robin-M. Aust, Alexandra Hentschel, Julia Ingold, Katharina Serles & Natalie Veith

Summer Break and Initiative for more Diversity in the Field of Comics Studies

Posted on 2019 08 15, 00:00

The ComFor‘s web editorial team will take a break over the summer months. Therefore, there will be no regular posts on the website until 30 September 2019. We will, however, keep updating the sections on ongoing calls for papers and on exhibitions.

But before we say good bye, we would like to announce the formation of a new committee within the ComFor, the Committee for Diversity, an initiative instigated by ComFor Vice-President Véronique Sina.

The aim of this committee is to contribute to an equal, gender-neutral research culture by promoting the visibility of non-hegemonic, queer-feminist research and researchers, both within the ComFor as well as in the comics studies community in general. The initiative is a reaction to a lack of diversity that characterises the field of comics studies in many ways, for example in terms of methodological approaches and the canon of works as well as the research community in general. To counteract these excluding mechanisms of representation, the Committee for Diversity aims at establishing a more inclusive research environment and introduce new academic impulses.

Last year’s annual ComFor Conference, which was dedicated to topics relating to intersectional gender and diversity studies, showed both the great necessity of and interest in queer-feminist questions and perspectives in the field of comics studies. But it also clarified the desideratum and the gaps that need to be explored to arrive at a critically reflexive and interdisciplinary engagement with comics.

With the foundation of the Committee for Diversity, the ComFor takes an important step to fill these gaps and to send a clear message against any form of discrimination and exclusion.

Currently the committee is in the planning phase, but during this year’s annual ComFor Conference at Schwarzenbach, a constitutive meeting will take place on 10 November, 2019, during which the committee‘s approach and line of work will be decided.

For further information, contact the Committee for Diversity via email: AGDiversity@comicgesellschaft.de

For now, we wish all of our readers a nice summer and look forward to once more keep you posted with regular news on comics studies in early autumn.

All the best,

Robin-Martin Aust, Katharina Serles, and Natalie Veith

on behalf of the web editorial team

Conference Report: ComFor Annual Conference 2018

Posted on 2018 10 29, 00:01

A Conference Report by J. Rehse, P. Zwirner, M. Pollich, Y. Neuhaus, S. Böhm, and L. Respondek (students of the University of Cologne), Photography by Philin Zwirner

From September 17th to 19th 2018 the 13th Annual Conference of the German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor) took place at the University of Cologne. Under the main theme “Spaces Between – Gender, Diversity and Identity in Comics” the conference schedule – planned and organized by Véronique Sina and Nina Heindl – offered a wide range of interesting insights into state-of-the-art research on the nexus between the medium of comics and categories of difference and identity such as gender, dis/ability, age, and ethnicity. Participants who already arrived on Sunday (the day before the official start of the conference) had the opportunity to become familiar with the city of Cologne. In the afternoon, the cultural program started with a guided tour through the exhibition “Avengers Assemble” held at the Cöln Comic Haus. With highly entertaining host(s) and a lot of interesting details, the visit of the exhibition was a perfect start for the conference. Afterwards, the group took a stroll along the Rhine in warm and shiny weather. With a boat-trip along the picturesque panorama of the most beautiful part of Cologne, the pre-program ended and gave the participants the opportunity to enjoy the rest of the evening in the historic center of Cologne.

At the official beginning of the conference on Monday, the conveners Véronique Sina and Nina Heindl, as well as Manuela Günter (Vice-Rector for Gender Equality and Diversity of the University of Cologne), and Stephan Packard (President of the German Society for Comics Studies) welcomed all speakers and guests. They stressed that it is their great pleasure to open a conference that not only focuses entirely on gender, diversity, and identity in comics, but also presents a majority of female speakers as well as an all-female organizational team – a premiere for the German Society for Comics Studies.

Continue reading →

Summer School Cologne “Virtual Children’s Media in a Global Perspective”

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Termin:

2018 09 03 - 2018 09 16

ALEKI, Seminarräume 12/13, Universität zu Köln

Gabriele von Glasenapp, Felix Giesa, and Andre Kagelmann just announced the following Summer School (which, incidentaly, takes place at the same time as Patrick Noonan’s and Stephan Packard’s Cologne Summer School „Constructing Space, Building Place: Topographies of Comics and Visual Narration“ from August 27 to September 7)

Cologne Summer School: “Virtual Children’s Media in a Global Perspective | Globale virtuelle Kindermedienwelten” September 3.-16 2018, University of Cologne

The application for participation is open until March 31, 2018 (details below)

Research Perspective:

“As literary channels of communication are increasingly digitalised and virtualised, the study of children’s and young adult literatue should be recalibrated towards a more encompassing concept of children’s and young adult culture and media studies. So far, however, this has been limited to isolated endeavours often limited in scope, lacking a more systematic approach. Further complications arise from the fact that many relevant products on the German market are translated from other languages.

While this ›transnational flow‹ has well been recognised, its processual logics have yet to be charted in detail. Both aspects – a transnational flow and a transmedia expansion of narrative worlds – fundamentally alter the experiential worlds of children and young adults, including new practices of appropriation and consumption such as booktubes, online collections of solutions for computer games, or the integration of narrative computer games and social media. Existing academic work based on comparative transmedia and/or transnational paradigms provides first steps towards a more fundamental shift of perspective, paving the way for children’s and young adult culture and media studies.

These approaches form the bedrock of our summer school. Tracing the transdimensional quality of changing mediascapes, we propose a research design which combines perspectives from traditional philology, studies in children’s and young adult fiction and transmedia narratology as well as transnational and visual culture studies. The summer school thus aims to foster a deeper understanding of globalised virtual media worlds as targeted at children and young adults, and simultaneously, to sharpen the theoretical profile of studies in children’s and young adult literature research in an age of transnational media convergence. In this vein, it will bring together accomplished experts, excellent junior researchers and students.
Weiterlesen: Details zur Teilnahme

Report “Summer School: Transnational Graphic Narratives”

Posted on 2017 09 28, 00:02

University of Siegen, Germany. July 31st – August 5th 2017

Contributed by Amadeo Gandolfo, Pablo Turnes, Laura Nallely Hernández Nieto and Lia Roxana Donadon

Illustration by Suraya Binti Md Nasir (artistic web profile: https://www.behance.net/jonsuraya); excellent visual work was created by several other participants as well (e.g., Subir Dey’s: https://www.instagram.com/p/BYFjQGWhVDC/?taken-by=subirdraws).

Introduction

The first Transnational Graphic Narratives Summer School (abbreviated TGN) was held at the University of Siegen, Campus Unteres Schloß, from July 31^st to August 5^th of 2017. The participants included the following scholars (in alphabetical order): José Alaniz (University of Washington, USA), Benoît Crucifix (Université de Liège, Belgium), Veronica Dean (University of Los Angeles, USA), Subir Dey (Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India), Harriet Earle (Sheffield Hallam University, England), Franca Feil (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany), Moritz Fink (Academy for Civic Education Tutzing, Germany), Amadeo Gandolfo and Pablo Turnes (National University of Buenos Aires / CONICET, Argentina), Isabelle Guillaume (University of Bordeaux Montaigne, France), Olivia Hicks (University of Dundee, Scotland), Ganiyu A. Jimoh (University of Lagos, Nigeria), Kenan Koçak (Bilecik Şeyh Edebali University, Turkey), Sarah Lightman (University of Glasgow, Scotland), Suraya Md Nasir (Kyoto Seika University, Japan), Laura Nallely Hernández Nieto (National Autonomous University of Mexico), Barbara Postema (Concordia University, Canada), Johannes Schmid (University of Hamburg, Germany), Pfunzo Sidogi (Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa), Simon Turner (Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Culture, England), Jocelyn Wright (University of Texas, USA), Tobias Yu-Kiener (University of the Arts London, Great Britain), Giorgio Buzzi Rizzi (University of Bologna, Italy), Lia Roxana Donadon (University of Siegen, Germany).

Group Shot by Jimoh Ganiyu

Organization

Prof. Dr. Daniel Stein and Dr. des. Lukas Etter (University of Siegen) were in charge of the organization of the TGN Summer School, with logistical support of student assistants Katja Dosztal and Yvonne Knop (University of Siegen). The Summer School was generously funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

Continue Reading: Conference Report

Invitation to subscribe: “ADVENTURES OF A NEW TELEMACHUS”

Posted on 2017 06 15, 00:01

ADVENTURES OF A NEW TELEMACHUS:
A Picture Story from 1786

Edited and Introduced by Dietrich Grünewald; translated to English by Stephan Packard;
German and English Edition; hardcover, c. 100 Seitepages, with numerous colourful illustrations;
to appear in winter 2017/18;

ISBN 978-3-941030-46-6, € 25,00 (inkl. gesetzl. USt.);
€ 25,00 (incl. VAT) Subscription price available until 31 Oktober 2017: € 15,00 (incl. VAT).

In order to subscribe, please write to bestellen@christian-bachmann.de. Continue to Publisher’s page (German).

Publisher’s announcement:
“For his 30th birthday Christian Gottfried Körner, Friedrich Schiller’s friend and benefectator, received a picture story hand-drawn by the scandalous author of The Robbers. Initially intended as a private jest among close friends and later presumed lost, it has since been recovered an is finally presented in print complete with the accompanying manuscript by Ferdinand Huber for the first time. For ease of reading this edition complete with a transcript of the Huber’s manuscript in German and English. The historical context and aesthetics of Schiller’s picture story, in which Körner doubles Hercules, faces voracious crocodiles in Egypt, and even gets corned, is explained by Dietrich Grünewald in an extensive introductory essay.”

Flyer herunterladen (deutsch)
Download flyer (englisch)
Publisher’s page (German).

Conference Report “On the Aesthetics of the Made in Animation and Comic”

Posted on 2017 03 27, 00:01

From November 9-11 2016, a co-operation of two commissions of the German Society for Media Studies (GfM) brought us a symposium on the aesthetics of artificiality in animation and comics, at Herrenhausen near Hannover: “On the Aesthetics of the Made in Animation and Comic”. The program was put together by Hans-Joachim Backe (Kopenhagen), Julia Eckel (Marburg/Bochum), Erwin Feyersinger (Tübingen), Véronique Sina (Köln), and Jan-Noël Thon (Tübingen).

Just now, two conference reports have been published in different journals:

On März 15 2017, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal (12.1) published English conference proceedings by Sebastian Bartosch (Hamburg):
Continue to the English report.

And on März 20 2017, ZfM – Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft released a German article on the conference by Vanessa Ossa (Tübingen):
Continue to the German report.

Masterclass with Lev Manovich

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Termin:

2015 09 23 10:00-17:00

Universität Potsdam

Hybride Narrativität_Förderer

MASTERCLASS ON CULTURAL ANALYTICS WITH LEV MANOVICH

Date: 23 September 2015, 10am-5pm, University of Potsdam
To sign up for the workshop, please contact Jochen Laubrock at: laubrock@uni-potsdam.de. Participation is free but will be limited to 20 seats, so please register early.

Lev Manovich is Professor of Computer Science at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and founder and director of the Software Studies Initiative. In 2014 he was included in The Verge’s list of the 50 “most interesting people building the future”. He is well known for the automated exploration, analysis, and visualization of big image data, as exemplified in the “One million manga pages” or “Selfiecity” projects. Manovich is the author of Software Takes Command (Bloomsbury, 2013), Black Box – White Cube (Merve, 2005), Soft Cinema (MIT Press, 2005), The Language of the New Media (MIT Press, 2001), Metamediji (Belgrade, 2001), Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (Chicago University Press, 1993) as well as over 120 articles which have been published in 30 countries and reprinted over 450 times. He is also one of the editors of the Software Studies book series (MIT Press) and Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Science (Springer).

Organizers’ Page

Short interview with Bart Beaty on “What Were Comics?”

Posted on 2015 07 06, 00:01

During the last weeks, the research group “Hybrid Narrativity” of the universities of Potsdam and Paderborn received a lot of attention, not least because of their successful funding through the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The project is sometimes compared to a somewhat similiar Canadian approach, “What Were Comics?”: a relatively new project by Bart Beaty, Benjamin Woo and Nick Sousanis, supported by the University of Calgary and Carleton University.
“This project will develop a random sample set of comic books representing two per cent of all publications produced in the United States each year from 1933 to 2014. Comics will be indexed for a variety of formal elements (story length; page layout; panel composition; volume of text in captions, word balloons, and sound effects; scene transitions; etc.), producing a systematic survey of comic books’ material and symbolic characteristics over time” (cf. project description).
Since not all too many people in Germany are aware of What Were Comics? yet, the ComFor editorial board had a short interview with Bart Beaty, explaining a little bit of the backgrounds:

Read on: Bart Beaty-short interview