For this panel on Twentieth-Century Visual Humor, we’re looking for paper proposals addressing any aspect of humor in American or cross-cultural visual culture, including but not limited to: film, TV, digital media, painting, photography, children's books, political cartoons, comics, graphic novels, and caricature.

The Humor Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association (ASA) seeks paper proposals for this panel for the 2010 ASA meeting, held November 18-21 in San Antonio, Texas. Proposals should explore historical, theoretical, and/or methodological issues in American humor. They should seek to address the 2010 meeting theme, “Crisis, Chains, and Change: American Studies for the 21st Century”

(see http://www.theasa.net/annual_meeting/page/submitting_a_proposal/).

To paraphrase the 2010 call for proposals, the ASA is particularly interested in projects that engage broadly with the ways ordinary people create power. In inviting us to consider changes in response to multiple global crises (war, capital, economies, hunger, climate change), the ASA encourages us to analyze “topics central to American Studies — indigeneity, gender, race, sexuality, laws and status, dispossession, documentation, wage and custom, boom and bust, primitive accumulation, love for and loathing of risk, and stretching or shrinking states, glaciers, empires, horizons.” . The meeting theme and location present an opportunity to explore immigration, trans-border activism, and the convergences and divergences of US and Mexican culture.

Please submit session proposals by January 15, 2010 to Philip Nel philnel@ksu.edu and Juniper Ellis jellis@loyola.edu, of the Humor Studies Caucus.