It is no doubt that with the dynamic evolution of fantastic narratives a world-centered model of storytelling has started to proliferate, changing the way one can interact with fictional representations of worlds in literature, movies, video games, comic books, any other media. A growing interest in media-conscious world-building, both amongst scholars and fans, clearly shows that the future of narrative and media studies lays not with monomedial, but transmedial studies—especially when no-one seems to question cross-overs, retellings, remediations, or any other narrative devices so common in contemporary storytelling. From Star Wars Expanded Universe/Legends top-down and bottom-up transfictional storytelling or transmedial campaign for The Hunger Games the movie to multimodal storytelling in Doug Dorst's "S" or Bioshock: Infinite"—we all engage in a plethora ways of world-making, and what transmedial narratology needs nowadays to do, is to analyze these storyworlds in their variety without imposing any paradigmatic world-building model for creators to follow. Consequently, organizers of the conference will welcome presentations or full panel proposals covering:

·         key and emerging concepts in transmedia studies and transmedial narratology;

·         theoretical discrepancies between transmediality, multimodality, and transfictionality;

·         theory, history, and philosophy of world-building in literature and other media;

·         top-down and bottom-up world-building and storytelling;

·         ways of inhabiting fictional/virtual worlds: immersion, interactivity, and beyond;

·         franchises and franchised universes: their expansion and narrative potential;

·         fan & fandom studies with an emphasis on participatory authorship in shared universes, entertainment supersystems, and more;

·         means of narrative/economical control (i.e. canon, moderated/curated content, licencing etc.) in massive world-building enterprises;

·         psychological and philosophical contexts of world creation;

·         case studies of transmediality, transfictionality, and world-building across media (MCU, Game of Thro­nes, StarCitizen, Star Wars, DC Universe, and many more);

Keynote speaker

Confirmed conference keynote speaker is a prominent narrative theorist, Marie-Laure Ryan, author of the most important books in possible worlds theory, hypertextuality, transmedia storytelling, transfictionality & multimodality, immersion theory, and narrative studies, such as Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (1991), Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (2001), Avatars of Story (2006), or (co-edited), Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling (2004) and Storyworlds Across Media. Toward Media-Conscious Narratology (2015).