poetry

This panel seeks to explore the category of disability as something that is perceived and performed in the visual sphere. Papers might include discussions of voyeurism, spectacles and spectatorship, self-fashioning, visual art, undetectable or ambiguous disability, the body as evidence, erasure and exposure, sensory impairment, perception and interpretation, and questions of legibility and truth. Open to scholars working in any geographical region or period.

Please submit abstracts up to 300 words with a short (1-2 sentence) bio. DO NOT EMAIL YOUR ABSTRACT. You must go through the NeMLA site:

Recent innovations in narrative medicine, cognitive science, and theories of the body's experience of pain have opened up new paths of inquiry into literary work from the Middle Ages to our own postmodern moment. In an attempt to update and expand upon the early work of George G. Fox on John Gower's relation to and knowledge of the medieval sciences, Accessus seeks essays that focus on one or more of Gower's works in conjunction with medieval treatises, herbals, lapidaries, encyclopedias, health books, and other relevant materials.

RETHINKING THE HUMANITIES IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AFRICA

This seminar will explore the uses and limits of dialectical thinking as a critical tool for contemporary humanistic inquiry. Engaging with a literary and philosophical tradition that is nothing else if not comparative, we argue for the persistent value in understanding textual oppositions, contradictions, and self-negations not as conceptual limitations, but as sites of productive restlessness.

Queer Intimacies, Queer Spaces, & Scales of Desire

This panel is searching for papers that address how LGBTQ* texts of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries construct varieties of queer intimacy and attempt to anatomize the epistemological, formal, and affective structures that make such intimacies possible—whether in public or private. We are looking for papers that discuss the ways queerness operates in a variety of spaces: city streets, forest clearings, parks, gardens, restrooms, bedrooms, manor homes, and apartment buildings.