Divided into sections on literature, culture and media, film, and television, each of which examine a range of artists, themes, and movements represented in cultural and artistic discourse in 21st century America, the volume specifically focusses on the convergence of varying forms, channels of literary, artistic, media and cultural production to understand their respective roles as a means to represent and understand American identity in the current era.
Abstracts are invited on the following areas of 21st century American Studies:
o American Literature
o Film and Television
o Media studies
o American Popular Culture
o Celebrity
o Fashion
1. Literature
How the twenty-first century American literature not only grapples with long standing questions of representation pertaining to history, social, racial, and economic justice, and ethics, but also how it offers new forms, genres, and narrative strategies.
2. Culture and Media
The ways in which visual art, performance art, and other narrative and artistic forms on digital platforms such as (YouTube, Tik Tok, Twitter, Instagram, etc.), offer new sites of cultural and media production to explore contemporary facets of the American experience. In addition, this section will also focus on other platforms of discourse such as talk shows, stand-up comedies, podcasts, and substacks to finely understand the new forms of participatory culture enabled by exponential digitization in the current century.
3. Cinema
Themes include, but not limited to, the (re)emergence and continuance of the trend of auteur cinema through the works of Sean Baker, Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, Yorgos Lanthimos, Brady Corbet, and more. Additionally, papers are also invited on on transnational and immigrant experiences (The Namesake, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, etc.), imagined by cinematic works. Moreover, the role of OTT platforms, and film premieres on OTTs, will also be examined to understand the narrative affordances of serialized and bingeable storytelling and modes of cultural consumption.
4. Television
We welcome contributions that examine popular sitcoms (Friends, Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, The Office), contemporary manifestations of nostalgia (e.g. Mad Men, Marvelous Ms Maisel, The Gilded Age), historical revisioning (e.g. The Man in the High Castle, The Underground Railroad), fashion, class, lifestyle, romance, and gender (e.g. Sex and the City, White Lotus, Euphoria), crime (The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad ), techno- futurities (e.g. Black Mirror, Severance), etc. In addition to shows and drama series, the anthology is also interested in exploring the power of documentaries (Amy, Twenty Feet from Stardom, The Central Park Five, Summer of Soul, etc.)
Important dates for submission
Abstract: 200-250 words by 15 October 2026
Full paper: 6500-7000 words, with references, by 31 August 2027
Please email your abstracts to
1. draysha@zmail.iitm.ac.in : Aysha Viswamohan, IIT Madras, India
2. a.evans@yorksj.ac.uk : Anne-Marie Evans, York St John University, UK
3. neethi@iitmandi.ac.in: Neethi Alexander, IIT Mandi, India
