NeMLA 2025 -- Not Even Past: Personal Encounters with the Pre-Industrial Past
Although writers like Sappho and Shakespeare died hundreds of years ago, the works they left behind are still vibrantly alive. When we read them, we recognize something fundamental about ourselves. In this roundtable, literature scholars, creative essayists, and poets reflect on deeply personal encounters with “old” books, texts, and images from the pre-Industrial past. Covering a range of topics—Shakespeare and divorce, Dante and gender, Hippocrates and the modern health-care system, St. Agatha and embodiment, studying the Middle Ages while Black—these essays show how conversations with the past continues to animate our twenty-first century lives.
We are especially interested in essays that engage the 17th and 18th centuries.