UdS American Studies Graduate Forum 2017

Reading American TV Series: An Interdisciplinary Conference

5-6 October 2017

In the context of continually evolving television studies, the UdS Graduate Forum 2017 offers a setting in which television series will be the main object of analysis and academic discussion. We pay tribute to the interdisciplinarity, heterogeneity, and versatility of the field by inviting papers from all disciplinary and theoretical perspectives engaging with American television. Programs to be inquired can be of any genre or decade, yet the approach taken by the papers should be subsumable under the umbrella term of television studies.

Topics can include but are not limited to:

• Television as a repository for meanings and a site where cultural values are negotiated
• Representations of gender, race, class, age, (dis)ability, space etc.
• Paratexts, extended and transmedia narratives
• Intersections with other media (novels, films, comics, video games, music)
• “Quality Television”
• Translation, subtitling and dubbing
• Audience and consumption, including fandom
• Genre (hybridity)
• Narrative and structure
• Different formats (e.g. series, serial, miniseries)

Keynote Speakers:
Stacey Abbott, University of Roehampton
Diane Negra, University College Dublin