Tribe & Rite: A Heavy Metal Student Conference issues call for papers

The University of Victoria English Department and the Heavy Metal department at the University of Victoria invite paper submissions for their upcoming conference, Tribe & Rite: A Heavy Metal Student Conference. The conference will be held at the University of Victoria, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada on November 8-9, 2014.

According to the organizers, “Metal culture celebrates the wild, the grotesque, and the forbidden. We invite papers on these themes from across the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, and related disciplines. Papers can draw on lyrics, musical technique, aesthetics (music, fashion, album art), innovations in metal, regional and historical metal movements, and more.”

The organizers suggest the following possible topics:

• The makings and markers of a metalhead
• Metal as genre, subculture, counterculture, or tribe
• Rites and rituals of regional/historical metal movements
• The transformation of metal by academia and vice versa
• Generational differences in metal
• The influence of metal on other cultural movements (e.g. punk, hippy), and vice versa
• Comparison of metal with other cultural movements
• Comparison of subcultures within metal (e.g. the radical politics of crust, the Satanism, neo-paganism, and occultism of black metal)
• The future and fate of metal
• Inclusive and exclusive behavior among metalheads
• The relationship between metal music and memorabilia

Submissions must be send in Microsoft Word format to metalcon@uvic.ca by October 3, 2014. For more information, see the Tribe & Rite: A Heavy Metal Student Conference homepage.