“Rooted as it is by feminism, cyberfeminism is an imperfect umbrella term,” Mindy Seu frames her archival project Cyberfeminism Index. Though it traces the same exclusions and western biases of feminist history, she writes, the Web 1.0 term “cyberfeminism” also provides a quick shorthand for the much broader expanse of art, activism, community, and scholarship of its many branches, including “Cyberfeminism 2.0, black cyberfeminism, xenofeminism, post-cyber feminism, glitch feminism, Afrofuturism, and hackfeministas, transhackfeminism, 넷페미 (netfemi), 女权之声 (feminist voices), among others" (https://cyberfeminismindex.com/about).

Please consider submitting an abstract for the NeMLA 2025 in Philadelphia.

Near the end of Jane Eyre, the title character famously says, “Reader, I married him.” It is a wedding her readers have expected and waited for, yet it comes after a rather inauspicious first meeting.

Fiction is full of first meetings. While a relationship’s apex or culmination might often be most memorable to readers, the initial encounter is also of special interest and significance to the story. Papers for this panel will explore fictional (or nonfictional) first meetings or initial encounters. Presenters may discuss a first meeting in light of the dynamics of the relationship’s development and/or ending, or presenters may choose to do a close reading that does not take into account the relationship’s future.

Sterile, tedious, vulgar: suburban stereotypes abound. H. G. Wells thought “the Modern City looks like something that has burst an intolerable envelope and splashed.” John Ruskin found “no existing terms of language … to describe the forms of filth, and modes of ruin,” of suburban development. Yet these supposedly repulsive spaces were extraordinarily attractive. What do the suburbs offer our understanding of the novel’s social horizons? The nineteenth-century novel's realism has been primarily understood as a metropolitan phenomenon. How does literature from the Victorian era to the present, within and beyond realism and the British tradition, confirm or challenge assumptions about suburban spaces?

At no time has intellectual culture been more committed to the notion of prior “authority” than in the Middle Ages.  Yet medieval adaptations of earlier works and media objects, including classical and scriptural writings, are often boldly inventive: a paradox due for serious consideration.  Existing contributions to Adaptation Studies nearly always focus on post-medieval adaptation (such as modern adaptations of medieval sources).  In contrast, for this session we invite papers that redirect the insights of Adaptation Studies to build a more coherent sense of medieval ideas and practices of adaptation, especially in cases involving radical or unintuitive changes of language, medium, genre, style, context, or audience.