CFP Sponsored Session - Silly Old Bear? Adaptations, Appropriations, and Transformations of Winnie-the-Pooh (7/15/2025; NEPCA online 10/9-11/2025)

Silly Old Bear? Adaptations, Appropriations, and Transformations of Winnie-the-Pooh

Co-sponsored by the Monsters & the Monstrous Area and Disney Studies Area

Call for Papers for 2025 Virtual Conference of the Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA)

Thursday, 9 October, to Saturday, 11 October, 2025

Submissions are open until Tuesday, 15 July by 5 PM EDT

A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh has always been a bit of a shapeshifter manifesting under various names and appearances since the start of his now over one-hundred-year career as a transmedia figure. Over the past century, Pooh and his associates from the Hundred Acre Wood have been adapted and appropriated to feature in artwork, cards, clothing, collectibles, comics, cookbooks, fiction, films, games, illustrations, memes, musical theater, original videos, philosophical treatises, plays, poems, radio broadcasts, self-help manuals, stuffed animals, songs, streaming video, television programs, theatrical productions, theme park attractions, and translations as well as critical commentaries and works of scholarship. These stories tell of their adventures across time and space, and each text offers a unique approach to the characters. Notably, Pooh and his band have often undergone radical transformations through various parodies and pastiches, with many more innovative approaches appearing since their move into the public domain beginning in 2022. 

In this session, we seek to catalog and critique some of these various takes on Winnie-the-Pooh and his companions. We ask you to explore how these adaptations, appropriations, and transformations of these familiar figures connect to and/or diverge from the Poohian tradition established by Milne and illustrator E. H. Shepard. We want you to uncover what these works might say about the gang from the Hundred Acre Wood, the creators of these new works, and, ultimately, ourselves as the receivers of these texts. We encourage you to make use of the resource guide provided at https://tinyurl.com/SillyOldBearRG in formulating your approach. 

To submit a proposal, please review the requirements and procedure from NEPCA’s main conference page at https://www.northeastpca.org/conference. Proposals should be approximately 250 words; an academic biographical statement (75 words or less) is also requested. Payment of registration and membership fees will be required to present. More details on exact costs will be forthcoming. 

Direct submissions to the Monsters & the Monstrous Area can be made at https://cfp.sched.com/speaker/sTP9T9X3cW/event. Address any questions or concerns to the area chair at popular.preternaturaliana@gmail.com. 

Further information on the Monsters & the Monstrous Area can be accessed on our blog Popular Preternaturaliana: Studying the Monstrous in Popular Culture at https://popularpreternaturaliana.blogspot.com/.  

Further information on the Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) can be accessed from our new website at https://www.northeastpca.org/. 

CFP Dying of Laughter: Horror Spoofs and Parody (9/13/2023)

Dying of Laughter: Horror Spoofs and Parody

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/06/21/dying-of-laughter-horror-spoofs-and-parody.

deadline for submissions:
September 13, 2023

full name / name of organization:
Reece Goodall, University of Warwick

contact email:
r.a.goodall@warwick.ac.uk



A young woman played by a big-name actress is home alone, making popcorn. She receives a phone call from a mysterious man, who wants to know her favourite scary movie. When she asks why the caller wants to know her name, he provides a terrifying answer: “I want to know who I’m looking at.” But, no sooner has this wham line been uttered than the tension turns to comedy – we cut to the killer, enjoying a spread of Carmen Electra in Playtime magazine. This is the beginning to the successful Scary Movie, evoking the canonical Scream in a parodic manner in order to produce audience laughter. A further four Scary Movie films followed, which were all commercially successful if increasingly critically derided, and this series is just one example that demonstrates an audience for horror parody.

Despite a proven interest from viewers, scholarship has been slow to dig deep into parody on our screens. Specifically, although writing on parody has acknowledged the ways that parody and spoof texts play with genre more generally, there is space for focused work taking up the question of how parody operates within particular genres. This is, in part, because there have been very few major academic studies of parody as a mode in visual media in its own right, with the exception of Wes Gehring’s Parody as Film Genre (1999) and Dan Harries’ Film Parody (2000). Neil Archer has written about parody in English media (2017), and Simon Bacon has edited a collection on spoof and comedic depictions of the vampire (2022), but there is still room for a much-needed collection on the theoretical and industrial intersections between parodies/spoofs and the horror genre.

The horror genre is an interesting target for parodising and spoofing, and the resultant texts often sit in a novel place on the affectual scale – they send up texts designing to make you scream in order to make you laugh. Horror visual media has consistently been spoofed and parodised throughout its history, proving a rich well of material for comedy writers and directors. Major comedy stars (such as Mel Brooks, Leslie Nielsen and Gene Wilder) have been involved with this particular mode, and it has even been able to draw on canonical actors such as Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr.

The collection will be the first to provide a sustained interrogation of the relationship between parodies/spoofs and the horror genre, exploring an underdiscussed but significant part of the genre corpus. It will bring together writing on major canonical spoofs and underdiscussed films, as well as expanding the scholarly writing on horror spoofs into non-Hollywood and non-Anglophone films and other forms of media.

Suggested topics for this proposed collection include, but are not restricted to:

• Re-evaluations of canonical horror spoof and parody texts (Abbott and Costello Meet... series, Carry On Screaming!, Young Frankenstein, Scary Movie)
• Evaluations of underdiscussed horror spoofs and parodies (Student Bodies, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Stan Helsing)
• Theoretical discussions of the relationship between a horror film/subgenre and its parody
• Horror parodies/spoofs and genre theory
• Representations of gender in horror spoofs and parodies
• Representations of race in horror spoofs and parodies
• Horror spoofs and parodies on television (The Simpsons ‘Treehouse of Horror’ episodes, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, The Scooby-Doo Project) and other forms of media (Silence! The Musical)
• Horror spoofs and parodies in a non-Hollywood context (What We Do In The Shadows, Shaun of the Dead), particularly those emerging from non-Anglophone media systems (Au secours!, Bad Trip 3D, Il mio amico Jekyll)
• Audience engagement with horror spoof and parody
• Industrial analysis of horror spoof and parody
• Canonical comedy stars (Abbott and Costello, Mel Brooks, Leslie Nielsen) and horror spoofs/parodies
• Marlon Wayans and spoof horror (Scary Movie, Scary Movie 2, A Haunted House)
• Post-modernism, irony, and the horror spoof/parody

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and an academic bio of no more than 100 words to Reece Goodall (r.a.goodall@warwick.ac.uk) by 13 September 2023. All notifications of acceptance will be emailed no later than 27 September 2023. If an abstract is accepted, essays can be expected to be between 6,000 and 7,000 words in length (including references). University of Wales Press has expressed interest in the volume as part of their Horror Studies series.

Further inquiries should be sent to Reece Goodall (r.a.goodall@warwick.ac.uk).



Last updated June 27, 2023