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Pitch Deadline: 28 May 2012
Final Deadline: 20 June 2012
Contact: Bill Gibron and Arnold Pan
Email: gibron at popmatters dot com AND arnoldpan at popmatters dot com. (Please include both of us on your correspondence)

PopMatters is looking for talented music critics and bloggers.

We’re looking for talented writers with deep genre knowledge of music and its present and past alongside a cultural generalist perspective with strong interests in many areas of culture.

PopMatters seeks essays (1,200 to 3,000 words, usually) about any aspect of popular culture, present or past. (If you are interested in pitching a review of some specific current work or performance, please contact the appropriate reviews editor.) We prefer careful analysis of the chosen subject matter with the intention of supporting an original thesis; we aren’t particularly interested in articles that merely want to promote their subject. An assessment of what ideological work a given pop culture phenomenon performs (i.e. what has allowed something to become popular, what’s at stake in its popularity besides money, how it is situated in a historical or geographical context, etc.) is especially welcome. Ideally essays will draw on sophisticated interpretive strategies derived from a theoretically informed point of view, but will be presented for a general reader in lively, accessible language.

For examples of the diversity of topics and range of approaches we welcome, please have a look at PopMatters features and columns archives.

With the intent of providing continued intelligent and entertaining content in the PopMatters’ Columns section, we are looking to broaden our staff of columnists and the voice of our writers’ community. We’re particularly interested in writers who live and work outside of the US, but that is not a deciding factor; in all cases, no matter the writer’s locale, we’re looking for those who can approach an array of cultural subject matter from their patch of the world with an international sensibility; that is, contextualize the local with an awareness of its place, historical and current, in the broader world.

Qualified writers for these posts are already readers of PopMatters (as but just one vital supplement in their varied intellectual diet). They are familiar with the work of our current columnists, as well as other areas of the magazine, and they have a solid sense of what we’re looking for in content and caliber in these essays. We deliberately use the terms “essays” and “columns” interchangeably; as pieces are broad in scope yet grounded in real-world examples, and they are tied to regular deadlines and an established identity (and therein lay the “columnist” element). With these expectations in mind, we have monthly and every-other-month column slots available. Suitable writers are dedicated to regular deadlines and enjoy participating in friendly, ongoing communications with their editor.

Pitch Deadline: 30 March 2012
Final Deadline: 4 May 2012
Contact: Calum Marsh, Jordan Cronk and Sarah Zupko
Email: calummarsh at gmail dot com, jordancronk21 at gmail dot com, editor at popmatters dot com

Over the course of a week-long special feature, PopMatters is excited to offer a new venue for film scholars, historians, critics, and social theorists of any stripe to reexamine the legacy of one of the American cinema’s most iconic but divisive masters, Orson Welles.