Category: News

Personal / Website News

Citation News

The New Peplum, specifically Kevin Wetmore’s essay, was referenced in Ancient Rome on the Silver Screen: Myth versus Reality that was published this past May by Rowman and Littlefield.

More information on this book can be found at the publisher’s product page.

CoKoCon 2023

Michele and I will be participants at CoKoCon 2023 this upcoming Labour Day. Michele will be vending a table with her journals and our books. Panels we are on will TBD. More info to come but keep an eye on the CoKoCon 2023 website for the most current news.

Publishing Recap

Below is a recap of my publishing endeavors so far in 2023.

Published in February, this collection contains my essay “Dance or Dēcēdere: Gladiator and Industrial Music Sampling.”Vernon Press Product Page

Published in May, this issue of Weird Tales contains my essay “When the Stars are Right.”

Weird Tales Product Page

Published in late March, the first issue of the zine Footage Fiends, contains my essay “Analisi Della Cosa: Found Footage in Caltiki and Italian Theater Going Practices.”

Limited to 50 physical copies.

Order via Patreon.

Miscellaneous Tidbits

Joan Jocson-Singh Website

Joan Jocson-Singh, who I had the honor of interviewing about her book, Heavy Music Mothers: Extreme Identities, Narrative Disruptions (read here), has just revamped and updated her website, On the Shelves. Check it out!

CFP: Heavy Metal & Global Premodernity II

There’s a brand new call for abstracts for the second Heavy Metal and Premodernity conference. Details are as follows:

Last year, the first manifestation of Heavy Metal & Global Premodernity forged an international fellowship of scholars working in a rich array of disciplines, along with musicians, artists, and journalists, in order to critically explore how metal music and its scenes throughout the world have engaged with the history, mythology, literature, and art of premodern and precolonial cultures. Through panel presentations, roundtable discussions, and unstructured and multilingual social hours, we shed light from a variety of perspectives upon metal’s entanglements in such areas as precolonial Mexico, the ancient Near East, classical Greece and Rome, and medieval Europe and Byzantium.

Here is last year’s conference program and website, and a playlist of the recorded sessions.

Next year, we hope to expand and enrich our fellowship. We invite contributions/proposals for engagement from all interested individuals working inside or outside the academy, including musicians and journalists involved in metal scenes anywhere in the world. We especially welcome those from backgrounds historically underrepresented in either academia or metal. You don’t need an advanced degree or know how to play guitar. If you have a topic of interest you would like to explore, we want to hear from you!

We welcome abstracts for panels and individual presentations, creative and traditional in form and varying in length, related to metal’s reception of the history and culture of any period, people, and place from premodern and precolonial worlds. We define global premodernity as human culture of any period roughly prior to 1600 CE, and we have chosen this delineation to be inclusive of texts, traditions, and narratives outside of the traditional study of classics or biblical studies, which often ignores the rich cultural history of the majority world and narratives outside standard eurocentric education.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to, to following:

• Premodern or neoclassical art, architecture, dress, symbols, and/or other material culture in album artwork, music videos, promotional photography, and live performances
• The incorporation of premodern music and/or instruments into metal songs
• The reception of historical, literary, and religious and philosophical texts and ideas in song lyrics
• Issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, and the reception and inclusion of premodern and contemporary women, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and other historically marginalized groups
• Political activism of musicians who engage with premodernity
• Interviews and/or auto-ethnographies of fans, musicians, (photo)journalists, and/or scholars
• Methodologies in the study of metal’s reception of premodernity
• Pedagogical strategies for teaching premodern history and cultures with metal songs
• Performance and creative demonstrations of music.

Please send abstracts and any questions to metalpremodernity@gmail.com. The submission deadline is 2 October 2023.

Abstracts should be roughly 300 words maximum, and include author name and affiliation (if appropriate).

We are concerned to make the conference as accessible as possible to disabled people and those for whom English is not their first language. Captions will be supplied, but if you have other access needs for presentation please mention these upon submission of your abstract and we will work with you to fulfill these.

Charlotte, Jeremy, & Shamma

Call for Submissions: Three Stooges Zine

Will Sloan is looking to start a zine about The Three Stooges and is looking for submissions. Here is the flyer:

And here is the text:

Call for Submissions: The Journal of Stoogeological Studies: an Unauthorized Three Stooges Fanzine.

Are you a knucklehead? Do you find yourself a “victim of circumstance”? Is your head so full of thoughts and opinions about the life and art of the Three Stooges that a hammer and buzzsaw can barely sent it?

We want YOU to contribute to the world’s greatest Three Stooges Fanzine!

What we want:

• Reviews
• Essays
• Interviews
• Biographical Studies
• Personal Essays/Autobiography
• Journalism/Reportage
• Poetry
• Fiction
• Art/Comics

Suggested Topics:

• Anything and everything to do with Moe Howard, Larry Fine, Shemp Howard, Joe Besser, “Curly Joe” DeRita, Ted Healy, and of course, Jerome “Curly” Howard
• Stooge and Stooge-adjacent movies and TV shows, from the Columbia Shorts Department to Kook’s Tour and beyond
• Stooge supporting players, directors, coworkers
• Personal stories of your relationship with the Stooges’ work
• The Robonic Stooges
• Stooge comic books, records, failed TV pilots, merchandise, and other ephemera
• Three Stooges Coffee (particularly the “Three Bean Blend,” although the “Angry Moe” blend has its good qualities)
• Sociopolitical musings on the Stooges and race, class, gender, sexuality, and other academic lenses

Send submissions to editor/publisher Will Sloan at thewillsloan@gmail.com. Feel free to get in touch if you want to workshop a pitch. Submissions are due Sunday, August 13th at 9pm PST.

Will Sloan