[UPDATE] Call for Papers

full name / name of organization: 
Southern Lit Discussion Group/Assoc for Computers and the Humanities
contact email: 

[UPDATE] Call for Papers
MLA 2012: Seattle, January 5-8, 2012

Digital South, Digital Futures

(A collaborative session co-sponsored by the MLA's Southern Literature Discussion Group and the Association for Computers and the Humanities)

Given Alan Liu's contention that the digital humanities "are poised to make the jump from a niche field to a field-of-fields," what are the implications for the theory and practice of southern studies, "New" or "Old"? This panel seeks presentations (even "papers") that embrace the digital humanities as the condition of possibility for future scholarship on the U.S./Global South. Topics of interest might include reconsiderations of previously persuasive text/culture relationships; data mining/distant readings of southern texts; digital archival concerns; class, racial, geographic, and /or hemispheric digital issues; e-reading and learning; cognitive development and the digital; the role of the digital humanities in the Republican U.S. South; and the interaction between American and Southern studies. Will accelerating digital exchanges interrupt persistent cultural narratives of "the South"? Can a digital southern studies refresh the Southern Living/Oxford American axis of popular representations of "the South"?

Proposals that explore pedagogical innovation, summon external funding, or involve collaboration are as welcome as those that undertake the literary and cultural historiography of the U.S./Global South with new tools and methods.

Please email 300 word abstracts as attachments (along with specific A/V requests) by March 10, 2011, to Vince Brewton, vjbrewton@una.edu. All panel participants must be members of MLA before April 1, 2011.