Open Call for Papers for the 41st Annual Conference of the German Studies Association, Atlanta, GA, Oct. 5-8, 2017; Deadline: January 25, 2017

The War and Violence Network of the German Studies Association (GSA) invites paper proposals for the upcoming 2017 GSA meeting in Atlanta, Georgia (5-8 October 2017).

This GSA interdisciplinary network seeks to bring together scholars concerned with any aspect of the field of war and violence studies. The network focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to a range of topics under a broad methodological umbrella, including comparative history, entangled history, & cultural transfer history [Vergleichs-, Verflechtungs-, Transfergeschichte], as well as approaches from literary and cultural studies such as narrative-theoretical approaches, trauma theory, psychoanalysis, memory studies, & media studies.

The network will sponsor a series of panels for the 2017 GSA meeting with the theme:"War, Violence, and Visual Culture”. For capturing and transmitting wars and war-related violence, visual forms have played a particularly significant role, using all available media and expanding further with every new technical advancement. They stretch from battle models, paintings, and sculptures to photographs and film, to video games and multi-media installations. These representations have been used to illustrate and document, glorify and celebrate, propagate and manipu-late, to entertain and narrate, to criticize and shock, to arouse emotions and spur action, to teach and warn.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- The development, function, and use of battle models, paintings, panoramas
- Topographical representations
- The complexities of photographs and film as documentary sources of war and violence
- Visual renderings and experience-making – enactments, video games, museum exhibits, and other interactive representations, the blending of adventure and battle genres
- Propaganda posters and advertisements, postcards
- The role of illustrations in fictional and non-fictional texts, including graphic novels and textbooks
- Visual forms and surveillance
- Private versus public war photography
- The role of visual media and visual culture in the understanding and academic study of war and war violence in various disciplines
- War films; war monuments and memorials

We invite proposals that address any dimension of visual culture/ visual media and war within the German context, whether as everyday-life renderings of war, as historiographical sources, or in artistic or fictional war representations, from such fields as Military History, Media Studies, Visual Studies, Cultural History, Film Studies, Literary Studies, Affect Studies, Museum Studies, and other disciplines that focus on either case studies or on theoretical and methodological aspects.

Please note two important GSA rules: All panel participants including the commentator and moderator must be registered GSA members by February 10, 2017. No individual at the GSA Conference may give more than one paper/participate in a seminar or participate in more than two separate capacities.

Please send abstracts, brief c.v., and AV requests, if applicable, by Jan. 25, 2017 to all three network coordinators:
- Jörg Echternkamp (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) at joerg.echternkamp@geschichte.uni-halle.de
- Stephan Jaeger (University of Manitoba) at stephan.jaeger@umanitoba.ca
- Susanne Vees-Gulani (Case Western Reserve University) at shv2@case.edu

Successful applicants will be informed by February 7, 2017. This allows proposals which cannot be included in the network panels to be submitted directly to the GSA by the overall deadline of February 15, 2017.