CALL FOR PAPERS | ACLA 2027 Virtual Seminar

Seminar Title: Comparative Literature and Commodity Worlds of Mainland Southeast Asia
Co-organizers: Nanthanoot Udomlamun (Kasetsart University) & Chi P. Pham (Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences)
Dates: May 15–16, 2027 (Virtual Sessions)
Co-organizers Nanthanoot Udomlamun and Chi P. Pham invite paper proposals for their seminar at the ACLA 2027 Annual Meeting.

About the Seminar:
Mainland Southeast Asia—Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar—has long been shaped by shifting commodity regimes: from colonial teak and tin to rubber, opium, durian, hydropower, and rare minerals. Yet, the region remains semiperipheral to world-literary studies and environmental humanities.
This seminar explores how the region’s literatures, cinemas, and cultural texts register, resist, and reimagine these traversing commodity frontiers.

The co-organizers welcome comparative work spanning a wide range of fields, including:
▪️ World-ecology, Capitalocene, and Plantationocene debates
▪️ Postcolonial and decolonial ecocriticism
▪️ Multispecies and more-than-human studies
▪️ Feminist political ecology & Zomia/highland scholarship
▪️ Extraction, infrastructure, and riverine/deltaic ecologies (including the Mekong Basin)
▪️ Vernacular-language texts, screen cultures, and Buddhist/animist cosmologies

Key Dates & Deadlines:
• Abstract Submissions Open: August 4 – September 22, 2026
• Decisions Announced: December 1, 2026
• Seminar Dates: May 15–16, 2027

Submit paper abstracts via the ACLA paper portal: https://www.acla.org/seminar/c68c7d1d-5d26-4427-ab76-a5e8993b2a1e