interdisciplinary

A few months into his second term, President Trump announced he would order a new census that excludes non-citizens. This unprecedented move in U.S. history threatened to erase millions of people from the map. It would reshape electoral outcomes, going against the 14th Amendment that requires counting all persons in each state to determine representation, and it could impact public policymaking by removing crucial data for infrastructure, health, or education.

Following the lead of activist and disabled writer Alice Wong, this panel “creates a

dialogue” and is, of itself, “an intimate act bringing us together across space and time”

(Disability Intimacy xx). It therefore invites papers engaged in the long genealogy of literary,

visual, and historical representations of a frequently overlooked, or gainsayed, symbiosis: that is,

between intimacy, broadly defined, and the disabled or “defective” bodymind in the early

modern archive. This might include considering how disability sparks desire, enhances pleasure,

Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association (MAPACA) 2026 Annual Conference, November 5-7, 2026 in Baltimore, MD

On January 19, 2022, Sheila Heti published the first of ten weekly installments of “A Diary in Alphabetical Order” in The New York Times. Each installment included an author’s note explaining that Heti had “loaded all 500,000 words of [her] journals into Excel to order the sentences alphabetically,” hoping to “see the self in a new way.” Over time, the project “grew into something more novelistic,” and the note concludes that “the self’s report on itself is surely a great fiction.” Heti is hardly the first author to challenge or destabilize autobiographical conventions.

As we meet in Newport, an island at the edge of the Atlantic, this panel invites papers about ocean-based horror media. Oceans, seas, and other waterways have been central to human culture throughout history, offering both opportunities to build communities across the waves and the threat of lonely, painful death through drowning or isolation through shipwrecks.

Panel Proposal for the NeMLA Convention, Newport, RI, March 6–9, 2027

Planetary crises—climate change, toxic pollution, biodiversity loss, and energy transition—are profoundly uneven in their distribution. Their material consequences are shaped by infrastructures of class, race, colonial histories, state power, and global capitalism. Increasingly, literary, artistic, and cultural texts across the world foreground these asymmetries, framing ecological crisis not only as environmental catastrophe but as a question of justice: Who breathes polluted air? Who profits from green transformation? Who consumes melting ice? Who bears the social and environmental costs of planetary change?

The erotic is a point of infinite signification, a navel in humanity’s symbolic circuit. However, despite its resistance to formalization, it is always in the process of not being written. As Octavio Paz insists, the erotic is a metaphor indelible to the human. As such, it is unsurprising that the manifestations of the erotic in subjective embodied experience are variable and correspond to equally plural treatments of it across the academic panorama. This diverse archive is bound by certain distinguishable threads, in terms of the potentiality of the erotic, its singular relation to language, and to the sphere of sexuality.

In Africa and the African diaspora, knowledge is often produced, circulated, and critiqued in “minor forms”—small-scale oral, visual, material, and digital ephemera such as proverbs, folktales, rites, images, social media, and other non-canonical modes of expression that structure everyday cultural life but are frequently marginalized within dominant academic and cultural hierarchies. While “major forms” such as the literary canon, the national archive, and peer-reviewed scholarship obscure the complexity and vitality of African cultural production, minor forms interact with, resist, coexist alongside, and reshape those dominant modes.

This special issue will explore current attacks on scholarship and scholars, and the multiple ways in which law, broadly conceived, is understood and deployed in these attacks with implications for who is allowed to shape and engage in the public sphere. 

Historically, researching and teaching the different art forms took place in a well-sealed vacuum: for example, using literary theory to decipher one of the great texts, visual and compositional analysis to examine a sublime painting, or montage splicing to perceive the nuances of film. However, it is becoming more difficult to recognize the borders that separate cinema, literature, and the visual arts. Factors including the rise of globalized societies and the emergence of new technology have forced us to reconsider medium specificity and our relationship with creative expressions and works of art.

“I must be mad!” cries Elizabeth Costello at the close of J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999). An author and animal advocate, Costello cannot reconcile how the atrocities of factory farming that keep her awake at night do not likewise haunt her peers. When picking up the character again over two decades later in The Pole and Other Stories (2023), Coetzee presents Costello in the grips of early dementia, which has brought her into even greater communion with the suffering of animals. As she discloses to her son, “I can’t put the image out of my mind, John.

About the Book

Indian Cultural Heritage: Perspectives is an edited volume that invites interdisciplinary scholarship on the diverse and dynamic dimensions of India's cultural heritage. The volume welcomes original contributions exploring tangible and intangible heritage, indigenous knowledge systems, languages, literature, folklore, performing arts, architecture, material culture, cultural memory, museums, heritage conservation, digital heritage, and contemporary issues of identity, sustainability, and cultural preservation. By bringing together diverse academic perspectives, the volume seeks to advance critical understanding of India's rich cultural traditions and their continuing significance in a rapidly changing world.

Nineteenth-century British literature frequently interrogates the boundaries of community dynamics, examining not only what the individual contributes to a collective and what it means to belong, but how communal engagement fundamentally reshapes the individual. 

Consistent with the NeMLA 2027 theme, "Empowering Communities," this panel explores a vital dual imperative within the nineteenth-century British novel: the structural tension between individuals whose actions serve to empower their communities, and communities that conversely function to shield and empower otherwise fragile individuals.

International Conference at Le Mans University, France

in association with The Philip Roth Society

and The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

April 7-8, 2027

Roth Unbound: Transcultural signposts from Goodbye Columbus to Nemesis 

Roots and Routes in Philip Roth’s Works