Starting a thread to facilitate planning for the Forum’s 2026 MLA panel on “Psychoanalysis of the Mother.”

Starting a thread to facilitate conversation and planning for the Forum’s 2026 MLA panel on “Psychoanalysis of the Mother.”

We are hoping to recruit a scholar outside of Chinese studies to participate in this comparative panel. All three papers so far deal with temporality in the religious context, and we will probably highlight this dimension in the finalized panel description. I included below a draft that can be further tailored according to your…[Read more]

<b>Natural Time and Human Narratives: Competing Temporal Orders in the Premodern World</b><b></b>

As a comparative study of clashing temporal orders in past contexts, this panel aims to challenge the stereotyped conception of the premodern as ponderous and static. Existing papers explore early empires’ endeavors to harness cosmic time to cr…[Read more]

Dear Colleagues,

The LSL Language Change Forum is seeking papers for the following panels at the 2026 MLA Annual Conference in Toronto from January 8-11. Please see the panel information below and consider submitting an abstract. We would love to hear from you:

Pedagogy and Intergenerational Language Change

How do linguistic features passed…[Read more]

Scripting Selves: New Directions in Life Writing
Editors: P. Muralidhar Sharma & Shashibhusan Nayak

Until recently, Life Writing has emerged as a loose critical label encompassing a variety of genres, including biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, letters, and dairies. The later decades of the 20th century, in particular, have witnessed a surge…[Read more]

(Re)thinking AI on Language Pedagogy: Discourses of Resemblances & Disparities
Papers should critically address AI’s impact on language pedagogy, focusing on resemblances and disparities between AI-driven and “more traditional” approaches; i.e. AI’s role in language learning, assessment, cultural biases, and ethical implications. Send 300…[Read more]

Please consider submitting an abstract to the session The Holocaust in a Global Context at the MLA conference, taking place January 8–11, 2026 in Toronto. Submissions are due by March 15, 2025. This session is organized by the 20th- and 21st-Century German Forum.

This panel series seeks to examine Holocaust literature, broadly defined, by p…[Read more]

CFP: Limits of Narrative. 8th International Conference of the European Narratology Network (ENN)

Date: September 29 – October 2, 2025

Deadline for submissions: March 10, 2025

Location: Wuppertal, Germany

Subject Field: Narratology

Since Roland Barthes’ formula “international, transhistorical, transcultural, narration is there, like life i…[Read more]

CFP: Limits of Narrative. 8th International Conference of the European Narratology Network (ENN)

September 29 – October 2, 2025, Wuppertal, Germany

In view of the rampant use of the term ‘narrative’, which often enough lacks a precise meaning, it is time to take a critical look at its limits. The 8th ENN conference in Wuppertal (Germany) is…[Read more]

CFP: Limits of Narrative. 8th International Conference of the European Narratology Network (ENN), Wuppertal, Germany, September 29 – October 2, 2025

In view of the rampant use of the term ‘narrative’, which often enough lacks a precise meaning, it is time to take a critical look at its limits. The 8th ENN conference in Wuppertal (Germany) is ded…[Read more]

The Language and Society Forum is calling for papers for our sponsored session at the 2026 MLA Conference. We are seeking examinations of world languages and nationalisms in terms of their family resemblances across social, community, and individual domains, with special attention to their discursive and material developments. 300-word abstracts…[Read more]

<p style=”font-weight: 400;”>For this guaranteed session of the January 2026 MLA convention, the TC Religion and Literature forum invites proposals that focus on literatures of Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora, especially in their engagements with religion, interfaith encounters, justice, and liberation movements. As members of the MLA…[Read more]

<p style=”font-weight: 400;”>Episcopalian Bishop Mariann Budde’s January 2025 inauguration sermon sparked both praise and critique, shining light on the contested role of religious speech in public discourse and its relation to justice and good governance. As Elizabeth Ammons writes in Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet (2010), r…[Read more]

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The Philosophy and Literature Forum Executive Committee solicits self-nominations to join the committee for a five-year term, starting in 2026. The committee typically meets during the convention to discuss and organize roundtables and panels for the following year’s convention, as well to nominate delegates to the MLA Delegate Assembly e…[Read more]

The executive committee of TC Religion and Literature invites self-nominations for a five-year term on the executive committee beginning January 2026. Here’s a clarifying paragraph from the MLA:

<i data-olk-copy-source=”MessageBody”>Appointments</i>. Forum executive committees appoint one new member annually to their committees. Members may…[Read more]