Interventions: New Perspectives on Politics, Freedom, and Democracy May 10, 2019 – Leicester, UK.  Keynote address from Professor Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway. Deadline for abstracts and panel proposals: February 1st, 2019.  Please send all submissions to interventions2019@gmail.com. Interventions 2019 aims to critically explore pertinent socio-political issues and their cultural representations. Papers of twenty minutes might include, but are not limited to: •    Post-truth politics •    Neoliberalism and freedom •    Democratic participation •    Class and austerity politics •    Globalisation, migration, and citizenship •    Censorship, offense, and free speech •    Autonomy and marginalised identities •    Resistance and activism in the arts and humanities •    Theoretical interventions with regard to freedom and democracy •    Cultural responses to political events •    Social media and social movements •    Politics and the academe •    Corporations, governments, and accountability •    Politics and mental health •    Technologies and democracy •    Anti-semitism and Islamophobia

Queer Celebrity Conference University of Portsmouth 6th-7th June 2019 Keynote Speakers: Professor Richard Dyer (King’s College, London) Professor Jack Halberstam (Columbia University) Dr Michèle Mendelssohn (University of Oxford)   The focus of celebrity studies on the cultural mediation and function of a diverse range of public personalities has foregrounded an ever-growing archive of queer celebrities. This conference aims to explore how the entry of queer figures into the public imagination, in different historical periods and geographical locations, has had a transnational, even global, impact, changing perceptions, attitudes and the way individuals live their lives. LGBTQ figures, for example, have risen to public prominence and become positive role models, while negotiating their fame alongside cultural associations of homosexuality with crime, scandal and blackmail. The refusal of closeted celebrities to come out underlines the detrimental effects of homophobia on popularity, but also celebrity culture’s preoccupation with the open secret. ‘Straight’ celebrities have […]