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.
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.”
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.”
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 Kunsthalle Details |
Location: Kiel University, Leibnizstraße 1 (room 204), 24118 Kiel
| Saturday, 10 Sep 2016 | |
| 09:15–09:45 h | Conference Opening and Short Introduction |
| Panel 1 | |
| 09:45–10:30 h | Joachim Jordan (Berlin, Germany): The Sleepless Nights of Major Stefanov. Uncertain, Endless Beginnings in the Bulgarian Comic of the Eighties. |
| 10:30–11:15 h | Carmela Artime Omil (Barcelona, Spain): Claiming Truth: Beginnings in Spanish Graphic Novels on the Civil War (2005-2015) |
| 11:15–11:30 h | Break |
| Panel 2 | |
| 11:30–12:15 h | Paul M. Malone (Waterloo, Canada): Werbecomics at the Beginning of German Comics |
| 12:15–13:00 h | Camilla Murgia (Geneva, Switzerland): Speech Balloons, Bubbles and Captions: the Rise of Narrative in 18th-Century British Comics |
| 13:00–14:00 h | Lunch Break |
| Panel 3 | |
| 14:00–14:45 h | Janek Scholz (Aachen, Germany): Game Over and Reset. Serielle Neuanfänge im Comic Daytripper von Fábio Moon und Gabriel Bá |
| 14:45–15:30 h | David Turgay (Wörth, Germany): First Page, First Issue, New Volume: Starting a Character Again and Again |
| 15:30–16:15 h | Annina Klappert (Erfurt, Germany): Anders anfangen. Building Stories von Chris Ware |
| 16:15–16:45 h | Break |
| 16:45–17:45 h | Keynote: Silke Horstkotte (Warwick, UK): Textanfänge, Weltanfänge. Peer Meters Serienmörder-Trilogie |
| 17:45–18:15 h | Break |
| 18:30–open end | Conference Dinner |
| Sunday, 11 Sep 2016 | |
| Panel 4 | |
| 09:30–10:15 h | Lukas R. A. Wilde (Tübingen, Germany): On the Contemporary ›Mangaization‹ of Japanese Public Spaces: the Base-Narrativity of Manga-Pictoriality |
| 10:15–11:00 h | Jasmin Böschen (Hamburg, Germany): Neuanfang in der Wissenschaft? Comic als Initiator für Visuelle Bildung |
| 11:00–11:15 h | Break |
| Panel 5 | |
| 11:15–12:00 h | Pascal Lefèvre (Brussels, Belgium): Publication Format and Beginnings |
| 12:00–12:45 h | Bettina Egger (Salzburg, Austria): Aesthetics of Polemics: L’Association and the Transformation of the Comic Book in the 1990s |
| 12:45–13:15 h | Break |
| 13:15–14:00 h | Closing Discussion |
| 14:00 h | Farewell |
Contact:
closure@comicforschung.uni-kiel.de
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
Tuebingen University’s Winter School 2015/16, organized by Jan-Noël Thon, brings together nine international keynote speakers to discuss “Transmedial Narratology: Theories and Methods”.
Karin Kukkonen (Oslo) opens up the Comic Book-workshop of the Winter School with “Transmedial Narratology and Comics Storytelling”. Anne Rüggemeier (Heidelberg) gives a presentation on “’I pose for all the characters in my book’: The Multimodal Processes of Production in Alison Bechdel‘s Are you my mother?” and Laura Schlichting (Giessen) continues with “What Transmedia Can Do for Graphic Journalism”.
Other keynote-speaker are Werner Wolf (Graz), Alison Gibbons (Leicester), Jan Alber (Aarhus), Erwin Feyersinger (Tübingen), Michael Butter (Tübingen) , Jan-Noël Thon (Tübingen) himself, Irina O. Rajewsky (Berlin) and Marie-Laure Ryan (Independent).
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).
From April 24th to 26th 2015 the University of Tübingen hosted the 2nd Workshop of the AG Comicforschung (Comic Studies Board) of the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft GfM (the German Society for Media Studies) under the header “The Mediality and Materiality of Contemporary Comics”. Keynote-speakers Daniel Merlin Goodbrey (Hertfordshire), Ian Hague (Comics Forum), Karin Kukkonen (Turku), Véronique Sina (Bochum) and Daniel Stein (Siegen), as well as 10 additional presenters, discussed how this relationship has changed in the context of digitalization and an increasingly convergent media culture. A detailed conference report , written by Christian A. Bachmann and Stephan Packard , is now available at Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (ZfM) , the online journal of the GfM.
The 2nd workshop of the Comic Studies Board (AG Comicforschung) of the German Society for Media Studies (GfM), „The Mediality and Materiality of Contemporary Comics“, examines the relation between the mediality and the materiality of comics, particularly focusing on how this relation has changed in the context of digitalization and an increasingly convergent media culture. Various aspects of the topic will be addressed in 10 paper presentations and 5 keynote speeches by international experts.
The conference takes place in Room 027 of the Neuphilologicum, also known as Brecht-Bau, which is located at Wilhelmstrasse 50, 72074 Tübingen.
Due to limitations regarding the number of participants we would kindly ask you to register your participation at contemporarycomics@graduiertenakademie.uni-tuebingen.de no later than April 15, 2015.
Organization:
Jan-Noël Thon & Lukas R.A. Wilde
Department of Media Studies
University of Tübingen