Special Issue on Histories of Celebrity

Guest Editor:  Hilary A. Hallett, Columbia University

We invite proposals for a special issue of Feminist Media Histories devoted to Histories of Celebrity. This volume will explore celebrity’s relationship to the development of, and contestation over, new ideas about gender and sexuality emerging between the 1850s and the 1950s.  It seeks articles that interrogate men and women whose “mediated” celebrity became bound up with public debates about sexuality and gender roles.  We are interested in articles that are historical and international in their scope and that consider celebrity’s engagement with a range of media including print, theater, film, television, and digital technologies.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• the labor of celebrity
• celebrity and gender performativity
• race, ethnicity and celebrity
• feminist/anti-feminist celebrities
• scandal and celebrity
• celebrity’s audience: fans and fan culture

Interested contributors should contact guest editor Hilary Hallett directly, sending a 300-word proposal no later than February 1, 2016:hah2117@columbia.edu.  Contributors will be notified by February 15, 2016; completed articles will be due April 1, 2016 when they will be sent out for peer review.

Feminist Media Histories is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted to feminist histories of film, video, audio, and digital technologies across a range of periods and global contexts. Inter-medial and trans-national in approach, Feminist Media Histories examines the historical role gender has played in varied media technologies, and documents women’s engagement with these media as audiences and users, creators and executives, critics and theorists, technicians and laborers, educators and activists. Feminist Media Histories is published by the University of California Press.  More information is available here:  http://fmh.ucpress.edu/content/submit