Welcome to the Pulp Studies community! We’re so happy you’re here and we want you take full advantage of the opportunities our new platform provides. Please read over the code of conduct so we can continue to ensure a safe and supportive space for all. Thank you for your dedication to the Popular Culture Association!

 

Call for Presentations:

Pulp Studies Area – Popular Culture Association National Conference 

 

Pulp magazines were mass-market periodicals printed on inexpensive pulpwood paper, featuring  vividly illustrated covers and accessible fiction for a wide audience. While remembered for their lurid  adventure, horror, and science fiction tales, pulps were equally known for best-selling genres like  romance, western, and crime/detective fiction. Titles such as Love Story, Ranch Romances, Black  Mask, and Dime Western shaped popular taste and defined genre conventions for generations. 

 

The Pulp Studies Area of the Popular Culture Association invites proposals for presentations  examining the pulps in all their variety and legacy. We especially encourage work that expands pulp  scholarship beyond its familiar adventure and science-fantasy canon to include romance, westerns,  detective fiction, and other popular genres that dominated the newsstands. 

 

Possible topics include but are not limited to: 

 

• Genres and Magazines: Love Story, Ranch Romances, Black Mask, Dime Western, Spicy Detective,  Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, Argosy, All-Story, and many more 

 

• Writers and Editors: Daisy Bacon ( Love Story), Farnsworth Wright ( Weird Tales), John W. Campbell  ( Astounding), Joseph Shaw ( Black Mask), and influential authors such as Dashiell Hammett, Zane  Grey, Nora Roberts (as a contemporary inheritor of the romance tradition) 

 

• Pulp Marketing and Readership: Targeting of gendered markets, working-class readerships,  regional variations, circulation data 

 

• Themes and Social Issues: Gender roles and romance formulae, the cowboy mythos, urban crime  and hard-boiled realism, race and ethnicity in pulp fiction, representations of class 

 

• Visual Culture and Art: Cover artists, interior illustration styles, gendered marketing through  imagery 

 

• Periodization and Evolution: From dime novels to pulps to digest magazines, comics, paperback  originals, and digital revival 

 

• Transmedia and Adaptations: Film, television, radio serials, comics and graphic novels, RPGs,  video games 

 

• The Pulp Aesthetic in Contemporary Culture: Neo-pulp fiction, film homages, contemporary  romance and westerns, hard-boiled and noir revival, fan fiction, indie publishing 

 

• Defining the “Pulp Aesthetic”: What makes something “pulp”? Connections to gothic fiction, dime  novels, popular magazines, and mid-century paperbacks 

 

We welcome proposals that approach pulps from any disciplinary perspective, including literary  studies, media studies, history, cultural studies, art history, gender and sexuality studies, and digital  humanities. 

 

 

Questions?  Contact Pulp Studies Area Chairs --

Dr. Jason Ray Carney,  jason.carney@cnu.edu

Dr. Daniel Look, dlook@stlawu.edu

 

Important Dates to Remember:

 

• Database opens for Submissions - Sept. 1, 2025
• Early Bird Registration Begins - Sept. 1, 2025
• Deadline for Paper Proposals - Nov. 30, 2025
• Travel Grant Applications Due - Dec. 15, 2025
• Early Bird Registration Ends for Presenters - Dec. 31, 2025
• Regular Registration Begins for Presenters - Jan. 1, 2026 
• Travel Grant Decisions / Notifications - Jan. 31, 2026
• Regular Registration Ends for Presenters - Jan. 31, 2026
• Late Registration Starts for Presenters - Feb. 1, 2026
• Preliminary Program draft available - Feb. 6, 2026

 

Those Presenters Not Registered by Feb. 15 Will be Dropped from the Program

 

CONFERENCE IN ATLANTA, GA - April 8-11, 2026