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Transmedial Worlds in Convergent Media CultureWinter School at the Graduate Academy of the University of Tuebingen, Germany, February 24th to February 28th, 2014In the last few decades, media conglomerates’ move from vertical to horizontal integration in concer twith a number of technological innovations have led to an increasingly convergent media culture. One of the more interesting symptoms of this development seems to be the continued rise of complexentertainment franchises that transgress media borders, arranging narrative texts, films, television series,comics, and video games (among others) into highly interconnected entertainment experiences as well asfacilitating the participation of fans in the negotiation and re-appropriation of transmedial meaning(s).Recent examples of these instances of ‘transmedia storytelling’ (Henry Jenkins) or ‘transmedial worlds’ (Lisbeth Klastrup and Susana Tosca) include the many installments of the novel-based franchises The Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire, the movie-based franchises Star Wars and Indiana Jones, the television series-based franchises Lost and Breaking Bad , the comics-based franchises Batman and Spiderman or the video game-based franchises Tomb Raider and Warcraft. While these cases arecomparatively well-known, many transmedial franchises have not yet received sufficient attention.The Winter School “Transmedial Worlds in Convergent Media Culture” aims to examine the forms and functions of a wide variety of transmedial worlds from a range of different (inter-)disciplinary perspectives. To complement the keynotes on salient aspects of the Winter School’s theme, we hereby warmly invite junior researchers, advanced M.A. students, PhD students, and Post-Docs, to present their own research projects in the form of 15-minute papers during a number of thematically focused workshops that connect to the keynotes and are chaired by the keynote speakers.Confirmed Keynote SpeakersEspen AarsethBenjamin BeilJens EderElizabeth EvansLisbeth KlastrupSusanne MarschallStephan PackardBernard PerronMarie-Laure RyanKlaus Sachs-HombachJan-Noël ThonSusana ToscaPossible Topics for Paper PresentationsTransmedial Worlds and Theories of Authorship/Cultural ProductionTransmedial Worlds and Theories of Fiction/RepresentationTransmedial Worlds and Theories of Participatory Practices/Fan CulturesCase Studies of Film- or Television-Based Transmedial WorldsCase Studies of Comic- or Graphic Novel-Based Transmedial WorldsCase Studies of Video Game- or Web-Based Transmedial WorldsPlease send proposals (including a 300-word abstract and a 100-word bio) for 15-minute papers viaemail (as a PDF or Word-Document) to jan.thon@uni-tuebingen.de no later than October 31th, 2013.For M.A. and PhD students, a limited number of travel grants up to 500€ is available. Please indicate if you want to apply for a travel grant and whether your participation is or is not contingent on receiving it.A publication of the keynotes and a selection of additional papers is planned for late 2014/early 2015