CFP
Shaw Session (for 2016 MLA)
Austin, Texas
January 7-10, 2016
Deadline: March 15, 2015

In mid-2015, Shaw’s work will become “new media” in the most obvious of ways, when the National Theatre Live digitally broadcasts their high-profile production of Man and Superman (via satellite) to movie theatres around the world. While the organizers invite papers on this and other examples of digital Shaw, they encourage proposals that adopt the broad and historically contingent definition of “new media” suggested by Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (2003). Briefly employed by the Edison Telephone Company, and acquainted with the family of Alexander Graham Bell, GBS was intensely interested in an array of emergent media in the 19th and 20th centuries. The organizers welcome studies of Shaw’s engagements with media in his work, as well as accounts of how his work and persona have appeared in print, film, radio, television, digital forms and formats (from Wikipedia and BrainyQuotes to YouTube and beyond), and other media.

Possible topics include (in no particular order):

• Shaw's use of real (e.g., typewriters and phonographs) and imagined (e.g., videophones) media in his novels and plays
• Film versions of Shaw’s plays; Shaw’s comments on film and cinema
• Shaw’s photographs; photographs of Shaw
• Shaw’s plays as radio drama; Shaw’s comments on radio
• Shaw’s plays on television
• Shaw’s gramophone recordings
• The NT Live Man and Superman, and "digital theatre" more broadly
• Media theorists' and historians' use of Shaw and his work
• Digital renditions of Shaw's novels, plays, and criticism (including excerpt quotations, and clips)
• Shaw in databases
• Digital humanists' work on Shaw

Please send a 250-word abstract, CV, and short bio to Jennifer Buckley, Assistant Professor of English and Rhetoric, University of Iowa (jennifer-buckley@uiowa.edu).