The 2013 Automobile Culture Area of the Popular Culture Association encourages submissions for the annual conference March 27, 2013 in Washington D.C.

There is virtually no part of contemporary life that has not been shaped by the automobile. Where we live and work can depend upon the mobility which the automobile provides. How and with whom we spend our leisure time would not be the same without the automobile. Our landscape has been reshaped and our built environment configured to accommodate the automobile. Poetry, literature, music, film, television, photography, and other arts have featured the automobile, sometimes celebrating it and sometimes reviling it but never indifferent to its importance. Automobiles make—or are believed to make—powerful statements about race, gender, ethnicity, wealth, politics, social class, and personality. Automobile culture concerns how all of this has been, and is, happening.

The Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association are committed to serious academic scholarship while also encouraging the exploration of new subjects or new approaches to more familiar ones. The national conference is an exciting gathering of a diverse group of scholars that is always a fascinating source of interesting ideas. Deadline for submissions: 30 November 2012