Permanent Section Calls for PapersPermanent Sections address a range of established topics of perennial concern to scholars in our discipline. Because the field is continuously evolving, the MMLA welcomes proposals to establish a new Permanent Section on an emerging topic. Inquiries may be sent to [email protected]. Each Permanent Section has a pre-selected, qualified Organizer/Chair who not only decides whether the panel will be tied to a version of the Convention's theme or have an open topic but also drafts its call for papers by the March 15 deadline. The Organizer then receives and vets individual paper proposals to build a full, three-paper panel, which may also include a paper of his/her own. All proposals accepted to a Permanent Section are automatically added to the MMLA's Convention program and do not require a second round of approval by the Program Committee. Individual proposals to a Permanent Section are due to the Organizer by his/her imposed deadline but no later than April 25 (please see the calls for papers below for more information). After soliciting, reviewing, and selecting individual proposals, all Permanent Section Organizers must submit the following materials to the MMLA by May 01:
For a helpful resource that breaks down the primary components of a strong abstract, visit Karen Kelsky's "How to Write a Paper or Conference Proposal Abstract" page on her website, The Professor is In. Calls for PapersThe MMLA is in search for a new chair for this permanent section! If you are interested in serving in this capacity, please email your CV and a statement of interest to [email protected].
Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues that “archives…are neither neutral or natural” but “they are created” (48). In alignment with this year’s theme After the Archive, the African American Literature Permanent Section of the MMLA seeks proposals which interrogate and engage the archive as not only a physical repository but also as sites of memory and resistance. We are particularly interested in papers that demonstrate how the African American literary project:
· Investigates archival silences and losses
· Participates in Black Archival Practice as well as archival refusal
· Performs memory work as a form of communal and cultural care work
· Functions culturally as a shadow archive
· Challenges institutional authority
· Emerges as its own system of power
Proposals of 250-300 words should include the author’s name, email address, and institutional affiliation. Proposals should be sent to [email protected] by Friday, April 24, 2026.
Proposals due: April 25, 2026
Please email 250-300 word proposals and CVs to [email protected].
In keeping with the presidential theme of the 2026 MMLA Conference, “After the Archives,” papers that incorporate and/or interrogate the archives are welcomed for this year’s panel on American Literature before 1870. How have the archives shaped American Literature, and how do they continue to inflect and inform our critical reception of the past? The term “archive” should be construed broadly, from the traditional to the digital. Archives are central in the preservation and erasure of cultural memory. Scholars might consider new directions and applications of archival research in our technological age. Alternatively, they might examine the relevance of traditional archival research, even “after the archive.” How does the archive shape and inform our present engagement with the cultural legacies of the past? How does American Literature before 1870 embody an archival practice in its own right? Papers that excavate the archive broadly conceived to shed new light on American Literature before 1870 are welcomed.
The American Literature II: Literature after 1870 Permanent Section of the Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA) is seeking proposals for this year’s in-person convention in Chicago, Illinois. This year’s theme for the conference is “After the Archive”; accordingly, the Permanent Section encourages presentations that focus on the notion of the archive. Some questions to be considered in context of American literature after 1870 are:
• The bureaucratic, legal, and institutional challenges in creating, curating, and maintaining literary archives
• Counter-archives and archival refusal
• Archival silence, loss, and censorship
• The representation of the archive
• Conventional and/or unconventional methodologies of archival
• Histories of archives
Presentations that engage with works and aspects of American literature after 1870 that do not pertain to archival and archives are equally welcome. Please send a 200-300 word abstract and a short biographical statement (c. 50 words) to Alp Eren Pirli at [email protected] no later than April 25, 2026. NB: MMLA will not be supplying presenters with AV equipment at its 2026 convention.
Sea Creatures, Then and Now
“When the abyss stares back, it demands recognition.” Stacy Alaimo’s newest book—The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters With Deep-Sea Life—challenges us to explore encounters with marine life, intimacies partly enabled by science but offering opportunities for literature and art. This panel seeks papers on any aspect of creaturely marine life and its myriad relationships with human existence. Although traditional AV will not be available for this panel, participants are both allowed and encouraged to share a QR code through which audience members may access their presentations. Please submit a 250-300 word abstract to Lucinda Cole ([email protected]) by April 10, 2026.
Archives are not neutral: they tell stories about who counts, whose experiences are remembered, and whose are erased. For centuries, racial hierarchies have shaped the preservation of knowledge, leaving silences where Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized voices should be. The Antiracism Permanent Section of the MMLA invites submissions that move beyond critique, asking how we can reimagine, rebuild, and transform the archive to reflect justice, equity, and shared humanity.
We are especially interested in work that explores:
This section seeks proposals that not only analyze inequities in archives but actively propose or model alternatives: new forms of documentation, preservation, storytelling, and cultural memory that resist erasure and center justice. Presentations may include research papers, creative projects, teaching innovations, or community-engaged initiatives that envision archives as sites of empowerment, repair, and possibility.
Submission Guidelines: Proposals should be 250–300 words. Include the author’s name and institutional affiliation (if any). Submit proposals to [email protected] by April 24, 2026.
Landscapes of Data and Debt
Deadline: April 20, 2026
Submission Requirements: Please email a 250-word abstract and brief bio-note to [email protected].
Presentation Format: In-person only
What histories, epistemologies, and systems of power shape the social, spatial, and environmental dimensions of financialization and datafication in the globalized present? And what role does literature, art, and storytelling play in representing life—datafied, indebted, and in climate crisis? Exploring debt and data reveals systems of collection and control, as well as ecological harm. This panel welcomes a range of disciplinary, theoretical, and pedagogical approaches exploring the socioenvironmental impacts of data and debt. We welcome topical engagements with fiction, creative nonfiction, film, journalism, documentary, testimony, and multimedia storytelling and scholarship, among other forms and genres.
Some areas to explore may include the environment and:
Please submit a paper proposal of 250-words and a brief bio-note to Tierney Powell ([email protected]) by 20 April 2026.
Central America’s Republics after the Archive: Creative Responses to Archival Histories
Central America’s histories of colonialism, armed conflict, human rights violations, and U.S. intervention are richly documented in both national archives and international institutions, ranging from the U.S. National Security Archive to physical and digital collections maintained by academic libraries and nonprofits. This panel invites presentations that investigate creative responses to the content and control of the body of archived materials that collectively narrate the Central American experience. How have the creation, curation and control of access to these repositories shaped cultural production in the seven countries that make up this culturally and geographically diverse region?
Examples might include:
• poems addressed to former dictators and military figures in the wake of declassification
• Indigenous and Black self-representation and resistance in works of fiction, poetry and theatre
• testimonial novels that challenge or supplement official narratives
• films that document oral histories of civil wars, dictatorships, and their legacies of violence and economic injustice
If you are interested in participating in this in-person panel, please send an abstract (roughly 250 words) and a short biography to [email protected] by April 25, 2026.
Stay tuned for more information!
Stay tuned for more information!
“Stories beyond and against the Archive”
In her lecture on writing her novel Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood probes the weaknesses and the possibilities of the archive. In the case of her novel, the archive provided a few historical guiderails: city maps, a cast of characters, birth dates, rough timelines for the events in a historic true crime. Yet, the archive itself was also vexing. It was riddled with gaps and aporias, It fomented discord, while giving rise to a hotbed of conflicting ideologies, agendas, and theories. The archive itself is never genuinely neutral; it is a record of who controls the story, how the narrative was constructed, and whose voices are valued.
As Atwood points out, the archive imposes only one limit—verifiable facts. Everything else is left to the writer to explore and navigate through voice, characterization, narrative structure, genre, and so on. As such, writers of fiction and creative nonfiction have long turned the archive against itself. Creative writers have co-opted the failures and oversights of the archive to speak back against dominant discourses, often crafting resilient and powerful counter-narratives in the process. In this way, form and genre themselves become tools for probing and critiquing the archive: historical fiction, ghost stories, speculative fiction, hybrid-form creative nonfiction, collages, and other projects allow creative writers to complicate and challenge the archive’s hold.
The Creative Writing I: Prose permanent section of the MMLA seeks creative presentations, craft presentations, storytelling projects, and presentations that explore the ways in which creative writers work against, through, and beyond the genre. We are especially interested in creative presentations from fiction writers, essayists, and memoirists who can share their own original work or present from their own creative practice. Presentations may focus on any genre or form of creative prose.
Please submit a proposal of 250–300 words, including a tentative title for your presentation. Please include a short bio (up to 100 words) and, if applicable, your institutional affiliation. Submit your proposal to [email protected] by April 25.
The Creative Writing II: Poetry permanent section of the Midwest Modern Language Association invites creative, critical, and hybrid proposals that engage with this year’s convention theme: “After the Archive.”
What does it mean to write after the archive—after its violences, its silences, its excesses, its authority? How might poetry inhabit, resist, or reconfigure archival logics? We welcome work from poets and poet-scholars who explore the archive not only as a site of preservation, but also as a structure of power, omission, memory, and imagination.
This panel is interested in poetry and poetics that move through, against, or beyond the archive—whether historical, institutional, digital, personal, linguistic, or embodied. We are particularly drawn to work that considers how poetic practice intervenes in archival gaps, reconstructs fragmented histories, or generates alternative modes of record-keeping and transmission.
Possible lines of inquiry may include: How does poetry respond to what has been excluded, erased, or misrepresented in archives? What forms emerge when poets write from the margins of official histories or invent counter-archives of feeling, memory, and language? How might translation, multilingualism, and diasporic writing complicate archival authority? In what ways do digital poetics and new media reshape our understanding of what an archive is—or could be? What remains after the archive, and what does poetry make possible in that aftermath?
We welcome poetry readings, critical-creative papers, and hybrid or experimental projects. Submissions that engage interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities—including literature, translation studies, visual culture, digital humanities, and performance—are especially encouraged.
Presentations should be approximately 15 minutes in length and must be delivered in person. To submit your work for consideration, please send a 200–300 word abstract and a brief bio to the section chair, Ola ElWassify ([email protected]), by April 15, 2026. Proposals of creative projects should include a brief sample of creative work (3–5 pages of poetry) alongside the abstract. Please include your name, professional affiliation, email address, and paper title in your submission.
The short story has proven to be fertile ground for writers seeking to interrogate what the act of recording lives and the search for meaning entails, often through imagined renderings of the machineries of archive. In works such as Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” Danilo Kis’s “The Encyclopedia of the Dead,” and Ivan Vladislavic’s “The Loss Library,” for example, writers engage with “the forces that govern preservation and erasure” in line with this year’s MMLA convention theme.
This panel seeks papers that consider how these and other concerns find expression through the short story form.
Panelists might consider the legacies of Borges’s and others’ archival fictions, short story writers’ engagements with past and contemporary documentary impulses, or the diverse approaches short story writers take to ensuring valued elements of lived and historical experience endure.
Questions for consideration may include but are not limited to the following:
Do symbolic modes of representation counter or feed into the desire for endurance that underlies the documentary impulse, and what role does the short story form play in facilitating such acts of representation?
To what extent are reparative futures dependent on archaeological approaches being taken to representation?
Is historical accumulation necessary or desirable? How does the short story form facilitate historical reconstruction and/or renewal?
Is the short story form particularly responsive to the vicissitudes of change that challenge the archive and its cultural legacies?
Is the short story a site that can facilitate the imaginative remaking of the archive or movement beyond the archive, reinscribing power and/or repairing that which has been damaged or lost?
To what extent do individual stories and story collections themselves manifest as iterations of archives or their afterlives, allowing their implications to be probed?
Do specific representational strategies associated with the short story form (e.g., condensation, etc.) pave the way for conceiving of alternate forms of remembrance and/or persistence?
Please submit abstracts of 300 words and a brief bio to Dr. Heather Joyce at [email protected] by April 25, 2026.
(1) The MMLA permanent section on Disability Studies invites paper proposals that focus on “Approaches to Teaching about Disability in the Undergraduate Classroom” for the 2026 conference of the Midwest Modern Language Association to be held in Chicago on November 12-14, 2026. This will be an in-person panel. Please send abstracts of approximately 250 words and a brief bio to John Allen at [email protected] by April 25, 2026.
(2) The MMLA permanent section on Disability Studies is offering an Open Call for papers on any aspect of Disability Studies for the 2026 conference of the Midwest Modern Language Association to be held in Chicago on November 12-14, 2026. This will be an in-person panel. Please send abstracts of approximately 250 words and a brief bio to John Allen at [email protected] by April 25, 2026.
The Legacy of the Archive in Premodern Studies
One of the fundamental limitations of English literature before 1800 is that in order to study this literature it must have survived to us in some form: it must have been preserved, intentionally or accidentally, in whole or in part, and usually in some form of archive. This call seeks papers that reflect on or account for the impact of this archival presence in premodern studies. How has or does the need for our texts to have been archived impact the field, whether broadly or through its effect on the understanding of a particular text, author, or genre? How does reading “after the archive” in this subfield differ from similar readings in other subfields, or from readings that do not consider the significance of the archive? This might include papers centering the archival history of a particular text or texts or a particular archive; papers that consider lost or unarchived texts; papers that analyze non-archival processes of preservation and transmission; or papers focused on archival impacts on premodern studies in the present or future. The goal of this panel is to consider how the legacy of the archive affects our study of the premodern today and in the future.
Please email abstracts and CVs to [email protected] by April 25, 2026.
Victorian Record-Keeping: Revisiting the Archive in 19th Century British Literature
British literature of the 1800s has a close relationship to archival forms and practices. With a boom in bureaucratic record-keeping, extensive imperial documentation, meticulous medical and legal case histories, and the development of libraries and institutional archives, Victorian literary texts frequently include, copy, or contest letters, ledgers, case files, diaries, and serialized records. By engaging with and appropriating formal aspects of “the archive,” Victorian literature often blurred the boundaries between history and literature, fact and fiction, what is real and what is constructed. But who was keeping records? And of whom? This permanent section “English II: English Literature 1800-1900” seeks 12-15 minute papers that explore how archives and archivists shape our understanding of nineteenth-century British literature. We welcome work that engages with physical archives, digital archives, archival theory, or representations of the archive within literary texts.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
We welcome papers on authors across the long nineteenth century, including canonical and lesser known authors and texts. Please submit a 250–300 word abstract and brief bio (50-100 words) to Katie Brandt [email protected] by April 25th, 2026. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by May 1st, 2026. *Note: This conference does not support virtual attendance or audio/visual components. Please plan accordingly.
Stay tuned for more information!
“50 Shades” of Noir – The Many Manifestations of the Noir Aesthetic
[In-Person Session]
For some time, film scholars have explored and argued over the nature of film noir, a Hollywood genre whose name was never invented in Hollywood itself but came from French film critics in the 1940s. Questions such as what constitutes noir, what was the first “real” film noir, what allows film to achieve this status, and many more have provided the grist for books and articles for decades. This session invites contemporary film scholars and students to examine the genre as broadly as possible, reflecting on its development, its major period of filmmaking, its evolution over time, and its blending with other forms and genres. Additionally, the session invites explorations of how other forms of cultural expression (e.g., visual art and photography) have influenced and/or been influenced by the noir ethos and aesthetic. Of course, the many satires or parodies of noir films are also open for exploration. This session invites proposals for papers concerning film noir in all its possible forms, from the 1930s through the 1950s, and even into the present (with neo-noir films). Send 250-word proposals to Vincent Casaregola at [email protected] by April 24, 2026.
We welcome proposals that explore how representation is forged in connection with collective acts in contemporary film. How, for example, are cultures created by the gathering together of human subjects? What modes of collectivity, be they formal or informal, arise from culture or have arisen historically? How have directors represented the salient political and social challenges of our time through notions of collective response and collaboration? How does this impact the aesthetic of the film? We seek proposals that wrestle with these (or related) transhistorical questions. Proposals that explore innovative pedagogical methods when teaching contemporary films or documentaries are welcomed. In this session, we also seek to explore how teaching across disciplines can lead to new dialogues or teaching methods/instruction. How does film pedagogy intersect with the work of colleagues in other disciplines? How does it take shape and come to fruition in the classroom?
Topics could include, but are not limited to:
• Close analysis of film
• Film theory
• Film criticism
• Film history
• Modes of film studies
• Methods of film production
• World film studies
• Collaborative pedagogy and team-teaching
• Collaborations in the classroom (i.e. group assignments, collective grading, etc.)
• Cultures of collectivity
• Collective communities in film
• Language, translation, bilingualism
• History and duality
• Indigenous cultures
• Religious discourses
• Feminisms
• Border studies
• African American studies
• Afro-Latinx studies
• Queer studies
• Performance studies
• Postcolonial studies
• Cultural studies
Please send proposals of 250 words maximum by April 25, 2026 to Co-Chairs Dr. José M. Medrano [email protected] and Dr. Judit Palencia Gutierrez[email protected]. Participants are welcome to propose papers either in English or Spanish.
Global Film Panel I: Global Film as Archive: Tales of War, Conflict, and Protest from China, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, US, etc...
Proposals invited on how some 21st century international feature and documentary films from war torn and conflict-ridden parts of the globe like Iran, Palestine, Ukraine, China, etc. function as archives of untold stories of the human experience and how people learn to survive while living under threat. They document as well as celebrate individual and communal resilience and heroism during international conflicts, wars, and protests which force impossible choices upon ordinary human beings. Papers can explore how these films, by addressing and recording not only cataclysmic events leading to the loss of life, land, and love, also function as an archival record to inspire us and future generations to build a better peaceful world. Proposals can focus on a single film or address a few select films thematically. Papers can also focus on the pedagogical value and use of these films in high school and college classrooms.
Some very recent films are listed below, several of which have already won numerous awards:
It was Just an Accident, 2025 (dir. Jafar Panahi)
The Seed of the Sacred Fig, 2024 (dir. Mohammad Rasoulof)
Children of Fire, 2025 (dir. Evgeny Afineevsky)
20 Days in Mariupol, 2023 (dir. Mstyslav Chernov)
The Voice of Hind Rajab, 2025/2026 (dir. Kaouther Ben Hania)
No Other Land, 2024 (dir. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, & Rachel Szor)
All That's Left of You, 2025/2026 (dir. Cherien Dabis
Palestine '36, 2026 (dir. Anne Marie Jacir)
The Sea (Hayam), 2025 (dir Shai Carmeli-Pollak)
The Encampments, 2025 (dir. Michael T. Workman & Kel; Pritsker)
Please send 300-to-350-word abstracts, and a 5-line bio with email and phone contact information to Khani Begum ([email protected]) by April 10, 2026.
Global Film Panel II: Representations of Migration, Immigration, and Citizenship in Contemporary Global Film
Proposals for papers about films relating to any aspect and/or perspective on issues of migration, immigration, and citizenship that explore how individual lives are affected by these issues positively or negatively. Papers can address at a variety of films from different countries or focus on one to two films. Please send 300-to-350-word abstracts, and a 5- line bio with email and phone contact information to Khani Begum ([email protected]) by April 10, 2026.
Stay tuned for more information!
Canonization, Marginalization and the Archive in Post-Ancien Régime French and Francophone Literature and Culture
This panel will explore the relationships between the archive and canonization or marginalization in post-Ancien Régime French and francophone literature and culture. Possible questions include: how have libraries, universities, journals, and word of mouth contributed to canonization and marginalization of literary works and of their authors? How have canonization and marginalization contributed to archiving? How have these archival influences caused some authors, such as Arthur Rimbaud, to become well-established parts of the canon – and in the case of Rimbaud, also icons admired by famous popular culture figures -- after being disliked? How have off-the cuff remarks at major literary banquets and scathing or laudatory remarks in petites revues influenced popular opinion and reception of an author, and how has this influenced literary or cultural history if it has? Does it matter if a secondary source on a work of literature is recent? How do secondary sources about literature evolve? Are they influenced by the social, political and cultural climate of the time in which they are written? In general, do secondary sources about literature become more sophisticated, detailed, encyclopedic, true over time? If so, why? Do some secondary sources about literature – such as the petites revues of 19th-century France – become themselves artefacts and how are they studied; do some secondary sources even become primary sources? Why are some works and authors written about more than others? If books are pulled from a library because of low circulation, does this decrease even more the readership about this topic or of this author; does this influence the canon – that is, what happens when these works disappear from the archive? What causes works or authors to remain in the canon for centuries? What is the relationship of the canonized status certain authors, such as Baudelaire and Flaubert, with the fact that some of their works were banned or prosecuted? How have any dissident voices that use noncanonical forms of discourse risen, expressed themselves and become read and known? Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words by April 25, 2026 to Tanya Mushinsky at [email protected].
The French III: Cultural Issues Permanent Section invites abstracts for the 2026 MMLA in Chicago. In accordance with this year’s theme, the French III panel is accepting proposals related to “French and Francophone Culture After the Archive.” We welcome submissions describing projects that employ archival practices and/or engage critically with archival impulses.
The conference organizers suggest a wide range of possible topics, which include:
- Counter-archives and archival refusal, including strategies of restitution, reconstruction, and the ethics of remembering
- Literary, cinematographic, and visual engagements with archival silence and loss
- Digital archives, metadata, and the politics of social visibility
- Indigenous, decolonial, and diasporic archival practices across linguistic, literary, and cultural traditions, as well as archival afterlives in literature, film, music, and hybrid media
- Archives under threat, whether from political censorship and oppression, climate change, or environmental degradation
- The role of artificial intelligence in reshaping memory and documentation.
And we add:
- The anarchive
- Oral histories
- Historical fiction
- Collective memory, consciousness, experience, attitude
- Psychoanalytic approaches to memory
- Conspiracy and outsider theories.
Please submit your abstract to [email protected] by April 15.
“Gender Archive: Beyond the Evidence”
"The ease with which people can scan a database, or source can impact the research process. At times, users of digitally archived sources may overlook authentic artifacts unavailable electronically. Although not done deliberately, this practice can weaken the validity of historical research." —Naif Albishri “The Future of History: How Digital Archives Provides Another Path for Research” The State Press, 2024.
Archives document historical evidence. History records interpretation. However, as information and data are continuously generated, stored, and referenced back and forth across time, the lines between the two are blurred as access to materials are heightened with technology. More materials are made accessible, and the easier it becomes to research, they are also more prone to be disregarded, overlooked, and forgotten. The Gender Studies panel asks presenters to share their research and voice their opinions on what needs to be remembered on gender, after the archive. What has happened that allows us to continue research and voice our rights today? How do records of gender impact our roles in society and what needs to be remembered going forward?
This permanent panel welcomes discussions on queer voices and pedagogy on such topics below but not limited to:
• Activism and political movements
• Collective Ecologies
• Discrimination and segregation
• Drag and Crossdressing
• Erotica and Pornography
• Feminist collectives and Transfeminisms
• Gender characterization in literature
• Gender in linguistics and its implications
• Gendered writing and genres
• Material ownership and publishing
• Nationality and citizenship
• Natural science and ethics of care
• Politics of Representation
• Popular culture and subgenres
• Race and ethnicity
• Sexuality, sensuality, pain, pleasure, and desire
• Transcultural Literary Negotiation
Please send an abstract of 250 words with a presentation title, a bio including your name, and institution to Hye Hyon Kim via [email protected] by Sunday, April 19, 2026.
The Permanent Section for German Literature and Culture is seeking proposals exploring any aspect of German Studies; topics aligning with the 2026 convention theme, “After the Archive,” are especially welcome. Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to [email protected] by April 20th.
The MMLA is in search for a new chair for this permanent section! If you are interested in serving in this capacity, please email your CV and a statement of interest to [email protected].
The International T.S. Eliot Society is accepting proposals for a panel at the 2026 Midwest MLA conference in Chicago, IL to be held November 12-14, 2026. Any proposal on a subject reasonably related to Eliot studies will be considered. Papers on Eliot and religion, or those drawing from the Hale correspondence, The Complete Prose, or Letters would be especially welcome. If you are interested in participating, please send abstract proposals (250-300 words) to Professor Edward Upton ([email protected]). Submissions must be received no later than April 25, 2026. For more information on MMLA 2026, please see https://www.midwest-mla.org/convention. Please note: the Society does not provide funds for travel to and from the conference.
From Scriptoria to Servers: Irish Literature and the Changing Archive
Papers are invited on any aspect of Irish literature, culture, or history that engages archives, memory, or the preservation and reconstruction of the past.
Across Irish history, the archive has been shaped as much by loss as by preservation. Taking the Midwest Modern Language Association theme, “After the Archive,” as its starting point, this panel examines how Irish literature and culture engage the changing forms of the archive. As Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault variously argued, archives are not neutral records of the past but systems shaped by authority and exclusion.
Few contexts make these dynamics more visible than the history of Ireland. From medieval manuscripts and bardic traditions to colonial records, Ireland’s historical archive bears the marks of preservation, displacement, and disappearance. The destruction of the Public Record Office in 1922, the silences surrounding the Great Famine, and the contested documentation of the Troubles all show how the Irish archive is defined not only by what survives but also by what has been lost. Irish writers have long grappled with these conditions, using literature to recover forgotten lives and preserve cultural memory where official records fall silent.
Today the archive is taking new forms. Digital projects such as the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, CELT, and Irish Script on Screen make manuscripts widely accessible, while the National Library of Ireland now preserves websites and other born-digital materials. Community initiatives such as the Irish Community Archive Network further expand the archive by foregrounding local history, diaspora memory, and voices long absent from institutional collections.
Papers addressing any period—from medieval literature to contemporary writing and digital humanities—are welcome.
Please include the following information in your submission:
Please email your submission to Dr. Desmond Harding ([email protected]) by April 24, 2026.
This newly established permanent section invites proposals exploring Korean literary studies, language pedagogy, film and media, translation studies, diaspora studies, and cultural production across historical and contemporary contexts. For the 2026 MMLA Convention, we especially invite proposals that engage with the conference theme, “After the Archive.”
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• Colonial and postcolonial archives and knowledge production, and historical memory in Korea and the Korean diaspora
• Gendered silences in literary and institutional archives
• Counter-archives, protest media, and alternative documentation practices such as activist print culture and community archives
• Literary and cultural engagements with archival absence, trauma, and historical silences
• Korean literature and film as sites of archival reconstruction or critique
• Translation as an archival practice and the global circulation of Korean literature
• Digital archives and the preservation of Korean cultural heritage
• Diaspora memory, migration narratives, and transnational archives
• Linguistic archives and the history of Korean language preservation
• K-pop, film, and popular media as archives of contemporary cultural memory
• Artificial intelligence and the future of cultural documentation in Korean literature, language, and culture
• Archives of repression and the politics of cultural preservation
• Literary and cultural resistance to censorship
Please send a proposal of 250-300 words and a short biography to the Section Chair, Dr. Heejoung Shin ([email protected]) by April 24, 2026. Proposals should include the author’s name, email address, and institutional affiliation. Graduate students, early-career scholars, and interdisciplinary researchers are encouraged to submit.
Beyond the Interdisciplinary Archive
Early writing systems often reflected the vestigial presence of imagery. Scandinavian runes from the 2nd century forward belong to a system at once alphabetic and ideographic. Medieval Japan elevated the practice of shodo, or the zen way of writing, into a form of spirituality. The student translated a traditional ideogram into free-flowing personal calligraphy. Repeating the practice brought a state of mindfulness through which Buddhist truths could be revealed.
The ekphrasis of Greek and Roman literature likewise stressed the importance of the visual imagination to writing. Verbal narrative is necessarily embedded in history painting, with its complex framing of the prime epic or biblical turn. Then from the Renaissance forward poets and painters superimposed the rhetorical triad of invention, design, and elocution (or coloring) on the analogy of the arts. They called their shared practice the sister arts. Enlightenment empiricism soon began sorting out sibling difference and opposed the ideal beauty of the academy to sublime sensation and realist depiction.
Whether linguistic or formal, these developments left behind an interdisciplinary archive comprised of runestones, glyphs, images meant to speak volumes, and texts that make us see. More recently, digital culture has introduced new forms of mediation. Technology and the algorithm now tend to drive what we see or hear. As Martin Jay puts it, “anything that could imprint itself on the retina” might now be considered “fair game” for the new paradigm. This standing session invites papers that explore how literature, the visual and plastic arts, and the cinema continue to inform, supplement, and complete one another in an age of media. Panelists might consider the materiality of book illustration, the dynamics of the gaze vis-à-vis what Nicholas Mirzoeff has called “the right to look,” or other ways in which emerging media are shaping the contemporary encounter of word and image.
We encourage submissions from colleagues who want to:
Please email abstracts and CVs to Timothy Erwin, [email protected], University of Nevada, Las Vegas (Emeritus) by April 25, 2026. The MMLA is in search for a new chair for this permanent section! If you are interested in serving in this capacity, please email your CV and a statement of interest to [email protected].
Stay tuned for more information!
Stay tuned for more information!
Anishinaabe scholar Lawrence Gross writes that Natives are constantly “in the process of building new worlds—worlds that are true to our history but cognizant of present realities” (Gross 2002, p 449). This process of re-worlding cannot be void of the histories of extraction and settler infrastructure, but it also builds on Native archives that have been passed down since time immemorial. After the Archive can refer to what it might look like to finally break free from colonial control, but it can also manifest as daily refusal by engaging with community archival lineages.
We are particularly interested in papers that investigate how Native literature:
Proposals should be sent to [email protected] by Friday, April 24, 2026.
The theme of beyond archives is an interesting one for a discipline that relies heavily on existing sometimes still only physical collections. This panel invites papers that explore any aspect of the archive in Old and Middle English literature.
Archives re-imagined or re-created might include exploring medieval archives being created, either in history or fantasy/fiction. Representation or records of archives in Old and Middle English, as well as modern literature set in the relevant eras might provide paths of exploration. More options include considering archives damaged or lost in fires, such as the Cotton fire and the Beowulf manuscript, or digital ones erased such as the British Library cyber attack a few years ago. Questions of what survives and does not, what has been recreated, or finding opportunity in such losses are possible approaches.
Further areas of relevance could address other kinds of archives beyond the library or collection, such as memory or institutional or cultural knowledge. Particularly for diaspora communities (ancient, medieval or later) this possibility might prove of interest. Similarly, the emergence of new technology, including but not limited to AI, cameras, scanners, etc. and their roles in physical and digital preservation, archive creation or restructuring, or enabling new discoveries or ways to learn about the texts and their physical circumstances might provide interesting avenues. Questions of preservation as well as what to keep and what to leave behind, both medieval and modern, would also be suitable.
Questions of access might also be relevant, including funding, environmental impacts of collecting or visiting an archive, general accessibility, and so on. Relatedly, the teaching of archival work is at a cross-roads in terms of methods past and present, including the future of paleography, codicology, and beyond would fit into this panel’s theme and time frame as well.
Please send abstracts of approximately 350 words, along with a cv or brief biographical statement, to Dr. Kathleen Burt at [email protected] by no later than April 24, 2026.
Stay tuned for more information!
Theme: After the Archive: Archival Recovery, BIPOC Pedagogical Labor, and Lived Resistance
We are in a moment when the archive is no longer just paper; it is the hashtag, the body, the arts, and the classroom. Today, we work “After the Archive” to examine how Black, Indigenous, and other people of color’s lives are preserved when the state attempts to erase them. The Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies Permanent Section invites proposals for the 2026 MMLA convention that focus on BIPOC experiences within and “after the archive.” For marginalized communities, the archive has been a tool of state surveillance and historical erasure. This section aims to highlight the work of researchers, educators, writers, and activists who are reclaiming our narratives, documenting our present, and navigating the racialized labor of academia. We invite submissions that demonstrate collective efforts to tell our own stories, especially when our voices are suppressed.
We seek presentations that address:
· Decolonizing the Record: Strategies and testimonies for recovering BIPOC voices from archives of state surveillance and administrative removal.
· BIPOC Pedagogical Labor in the Academy: How BIPOC scholar-activists navigate the white performativity of institutional archives, DEI curricula, and the embodied labor involved in teaching resistance within predominantly white spaces.
· Digital Resistance as Counter-Narrative: social media’s role as a living archive for BIPOC social movements and the ethics surrounding digital vulnerability.
· Embodied Healing: using literature and personal narratives as counter-archives that emphasize marginalized healing and self-care.
· Cultural sites, independent museums, and art as archives: how cultural institutions, BIPOC-owned museums, and the arts (film, music, art, literature, etc.) uncover and tell life stories that have been censored, hidden, or silenced.
As a Permanent Section, we are dedicated to building a lasting space for BIPOC voices and decolonial scholarship within the MMLA.
Submission Guidelines: Proposals should be 250 words maximum. Include the author’s name and institutional affiliation (if any). AV projection of slide presentations will not be supported. Submit proposals and a short biographical statement (50 words) to Holly Burgess at [email protected] by April 20, 2026.
This section invites papers that examine the production, teaching, study, and performance of literature in historical and contemporary carceral institutions. In the past we have hosted panels on a wide range of topics, such as:
These are merely suggestions and not intended as limits. We also welcome studies of fictional accounts of imprisonment and encourage proposals that engage this year’s convention theme “After the Archive.” Please send abstracts and questions to William Andrews at [email protected] by April 25, 2026.
This panel has been filled for 2026. Check back next year!
This year’s convention theme, “After the Archive,” lends itself well to the study of Religion and Literature. The cultural importance of folklore and sacred stories means that keeping an archive of them for posterity through written and oral storytelling is imperative. However, the nature of that archive is unique in that these stories are ever-changing as they are retold and adapted over the generations. In keeping with this section’s robust view of religion to include any sacred stories, ritual, belief and/or faith, institutional or otherwise, we invite all proposals that that explore the intersection of religion and literature. Priority will be given to proposals that engage with the convention’s theme.
Topics may address, but are not limited to:
• literary reimagining of sacred texts, stories, practices, rituals etc.
• literary reinterpretations of sacred stories and/or folktales
• examinations of power dynamics, supremacy, exclusion, distortion and marginalization within systems and institutions of belief and faith
• loss/destruction (through colonialism, conquest, societal collapse, war etc) and reclamation of sacred story archives
Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words, a title for your paper, and a 50-word bio to Dr. Seth Johnson at [email protected], no later than April 25, 2026.
Scientific Archives: After the Third Nature
In her introduction to Science in the Archives (2017), Lorraine Daston explores the way that scientific archives function as “repository” of scientific empiricism (10), a process through which scientists preserve scientific findings. What is occluded in this understanding, Daston explains, is that, when scientists ‘convert’ the natural world into its ‘second nature’—i.e. data—the conditions for that translation are controlled, selective, entangled, slowed, sped up, and digitized (10). Daston’s research helps us to consider how science arbitrarily constructs archivable data at an increasing rate: “more people are manipulating more information in more ways, and all at a tempo that baffles ‘what next?’ predictions” (10). One of the fundamental assumptions of Daston’s argument is that archives both evolve over time and localize important considerations of how research is conducted and maintained: “New hypotheses create new archives” (16). In line with this year’s MMLA After the Archive theme, the Science and Fiction permanent panel seeks presentations exploring the archive as a ‘temporal repository,’ a concept that connects to the past, present, and future research and into the world around us. As Daston rightly assumes, the archive’s temporality helps us to (re)consider how the archive relates to the past, present, and future while also encouraging a scrutiny of the “acquisition, retrieval, reconfiguration, and transcription” (18) of data. For this year’s panel, we’re interested in the ways that science, scientific cultures, and science fiction relate to the archive’s temporality, including its discursive representations and real-world implications. As inspired by Datson’s research, we’re inclusive in our understanding of this call. We welcome research interested in exploring how archives exist as a concept, relate to time, involve the preservation of data, and help us understand the fidelity and verisimilitude of history/reality. Other considerations could include the use of fictional narratives to scrutinize scientific empiricism and its arrival work (e.g. the Library in Matheson’s I am Legend), exploring environmental activism and ecological archives (e.g. Carson’s Silent Spring and Earth as Archive), the potential for when an archive is lost (the many-century destruction of the Library of Alexandria), or the way that future scientific advancement may impact archive permanence (e.g. digitization projects, data storage access, data permanence problems, and the role of virtual/automated curators).
Please consider the following potential topics as inspirational and generative:
Discourse as Archive: Technical Writing and Writing as a Memory Tool
Science Fiction’s Lost Archives The Dark Forest, and Advanced Civilizations
The Body as DNA Archive in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus
The Future of Archival Research: Augmented and Virtual Reality in Ready Player One
The Halo Story Bible as Archive
Insuring the Future: The Millennium Seed Bank as Apocalyptic Archive
Limiting the Past: EEBO and the Digitizing of Early Modern Texts
Right of Access: PubMed, the Archive, and Citizen Science
The Future of an Archive: Cloud Storage and the Problems of Privatization
Please email abstracts and CVs to [email protected] and [email protected] by April 25, 2026.
"Drama, Poetry, and Fiction: The Power of Midwestern Archives and the Shaping of Scholarly Perspective”
How has a Midwestern archive changed your reading of a literary text? Which archive? Which text? Please send a 1-2 page abstract and CV to Marilyn Atlas [email protected] by April 25, 2026.
Presentation Length: 15 Minutes (7-8 Double-Spaced Pages)
Submission Materials: 250-Word Abstract and CV
Submission Deadline: April 25, 2026
The Shakespeare and Shakespearean Criticism permanent section of the MMLA seeks abstracts of 250 words that offer a fresh, critical perspective on Shakespeare’s poetry or drama. Abstracts that speak to or explore the Convention theme, “After the Archive,” in relation to Shakespeare are especially welcome but are not required. Potential topics include (but are certainly not limited to): literary, cinematic, and/or theatrical adaptations; textual variance among the quartos/folios; Shakespeare in translation; connections with or to fellow playwrights; pedagogical approaches in higher education; Shakespeare and the so-called “Canon;” meaningful rhetoric and/or metaphors; connections to the socio-political milieu of early modern England; witchcraft and magic; representations of disability, race, or sex, on the page and/or on the stage, etc.
Please Note: Due to excessive costs, the MMLA will be unable to supply AV equipment needed to support PowerPoints or slide projections at the 2026 Convention. All presenters may supplement presentations with visual aids in the form of pre-printed handouts, QR codes that direct audience members to an online slideshow or set of images, etc.
The requisite materials may be submitted to Krislyn Zhorne ([email protected]) before the aforementioned deadline.
The MMLA is in search for a new chair for this permanent section! If you are interested in serving in this capacity, please email your CV and a statement of interest to [email protected].
Stay tuned for more information!
Stay tuned for more information!
The MMLA is in search for a new chair for this permanent section! If you are interested in serving in this capacity, please email your CV and a statement of interest to [email protected].
The Body as Counter-Archive in Contemporary French Literature
This panel examines how contemporary women or queer-identified writers of French expression—such as Nina Bouraoui, Fatima Daas, Neige Sinno, Emmanuelle Salasc, Pauline Delabroy-Allard, Constance Debré, and Loulou Robert, to name just a few—mobilize the body as a counter-archive when institutional, legal, and historical archives fail to register marginalized lives and traumatic experience. Across autofiction, testimonial writing, and formally fragmented narratives, these texts treat embodiment as a site of trace, affect, symptom, and ecological inscription, producing forms of memory and authority that exceed documentary evidence. At a moment of renewed attention to gendered violence, queer subjectivity, and environmental precarity, the panel asks how literature transforms bodily vulnerability into epistemology: what can be known, transmitted, or survived when the body becomes the primary medium of record? We welcome feminist, queer, ecocritical, decolonial, and affect-based approaches that interrogate counter-archival form, embodiment, and literary transmission in contemporary French and Francophone writing. Please send 250-word proposals (in English or French) as well as 100-word bio-bibliographical note to Adrienne Angelo ([email protected]) by April 10.
The MMLA is in search for a new chair for this permanent section! If you are interested in serving in this capacity, please email your CV and a statement of interest to [email protected].
The MMLA is in search for a new chair for this permanent section! If you are interested in serving in this capacity, please email your CV and a statement of interest to [email protected].
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