2012-2013 Conference Round-Up, Part 2: Metal, Music, and a Little (Non)Seriousness

Despite the overwhelming abundance of conferences and conventions listed in my last post on upcoming speculative fiction cons, it didn't come anywhere close to covering the interesting conference activities that have caught my eye recently. Part two here turns from science fiction, fantasy and horror to heavy metal, popular music studies, and a cultural studies approach to seriousness or the lack thereof. See you there, perhaps?

NOCTIS METAL MUSIC CONFERENCE

Part of the Noctis V Metal Fest
September 28-29, 2012

Ramada Hotel
Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Guest appearances include: Venom front-man and black-metal legend, CRONOS, music journalists JOEL MCIVER and MARTIN POPOFF, label head CHRIS BRUNI from Profound Lore, professor at Bowling Green University, DR. MATT DONAHUE, journalist and metal scholar SARAH KITTERINGHAM, and many more.

For more information on all the speakers, bands, venue and tickets please visit: www.noctisvalkyries.com

Heavy Metal and Popular Culture

Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University, in collaboration with Heavy Fundametalisms: Metal, Music and Politics and the International Society for Metal Music Studies (ISMMS)

April 4-7, 2013
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, Ohio, USA

Featured at the conference will be keynote lectures by Robert Walser, Laina Dawes, and Keith Kahn-Harris, a screening of the film Motörhead Matters, three roundtables featuring Niall Scott, Steve Waksman, Deena Weinstein and other international metal scholars to be announced, and a special exhibit on facepaint and masks.

All materials must be electronically date-stamped by December 1, 2012 at midnight CST and emailed to Clifford@ucmo.edu with “HMPC Submission” in the subject line and required documents attached.

You Can’t Be Serious: An Exploration of the Idea, Importance and Influence of Seriousness and Nonseriousness in the Contemporary Humanities

The 2013 John Douglas Taylor Conference
May 15-17, 2013
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Confirmed Keynotes: Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London), Julie Rak (University of Alberta).

Please submit all proposals (paper and roundtable) via e-mail attachment by October 15, 2012 to tayconf@mcmaster.ca with the subject line “Taylor Conference: Seriousness.” Attachments should be in .doc, .docx or .rtf formats.

Music and Labour

IASPM-Canada 30th Annual Conference
May 23-26, 2013

McMaster University

Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

From the earliest days of academic popular music studies, concepts of labour have been of paramount importance both for their intellectual richness and for their ability to link academic practices with broader patterns of social and political action. The site of this conference, in Hamilton, Ontario, resonates both with the history of labour in Canada and with the contemporary transformation and reinvention of those urban spaces which originally developed around heavy industry.

While proposals on any topic relating to popular music are welcome, the conference organizers especially invite proposals for individual presentations, panels, workshops or performances on topics related to the theme of the conference. Please submit your abstract in French or English, depending on the language in which the paper will be presented by 31 October 2012 to willliam_echard@carleton.ca.