Call for Papers
“Breath: Image and Sound,” a special issue of New Review of Film and Television Studies

New Review of Film and Television Studies seeks contributions for a special issue on “Breath: Image and Sound.” Contributors are encouraged to consider, among other topics, the interplay between breath and particular media; phenomenologies or phenomenalities of breath and air; and breathing in different affective modes and genres. Possible research questions include, but are not limited to:
- What role has breath played in the development of screen technologies?
- How have the narrative and world-building properties of breath transformed across screen cultures? And how is breath conventionalized in various genres—be it Linda Williams’ “body genres” (melodrama, pornography, and horror) or other, perhaps emerging, genres?
- How does breath operate as a locus of viscerality in situations of intimacy, radical freedom, or violence?
- How does breath mediate race, gender, sexual orientation, dis/ability, and citizenship?
- How does breath render environments, from confined to expansive, from toxic to pastoral?
- How is breath mobilized to convey (or withhold) emotion? How does breath induce mimetic or nonmimetic reactions on the part of the spectators?
- How does breath produce continuity in or disrupt dialogue, gestures and actions, and diegetic or extradiegetic sound?

Please send a brief abstract (and direct all inquiries) to guest editor Jean-Thomas Tremblay (tremblay@uchicago.edu) by September 15th, 2017. Full essays (below 9,000 words, including references), should they be commissioned, will be due on February 1st, 2018.