This session calls for papers that explore ways to incorporate the Brut—Layamon’s Brut and its analogues—into interdisciplinary studies, seeking to situate the Brut in a broader academic and pedagogical context.

This panel holds space for depictions of embodied practices/practices of agency in bodies of women of color, queer, nonbinary, trans, and other subjectivities in postcolonial literature and literatures of the Global South. What is the relation between the body and exercising agency? How might we think of these practices as embodied and embodying: as practices done in/through/by the body, as well as practices that reify the body? What are the limitations of these projects, and to what degree are they successful? How might these practices be adopted by readers outside of the text?

In keeping with the symposium theme of "Rebirth Renewal Renaissance," this panel proposes a new look at the works of William Gay.  A search of the MLA International Bibliography shows little work on Gay, and that which does exist locuses more on his first two novels (The Long Home and Provinces of Night) and his short fiction.  This panel welcomes papers on Gay's later published work, and especially on his work--The Lost Country, Little Sister Death, and Stoneburner--published posthoumously.  

Newton and modern science, especially Mathematics and Physics, have completely changed the concepts of space and movement. Unlike other thinkers of that century, among whom Immanuel Kant stands for his remarkable thought, the new concepts of space and movement don’t seem to have influenced Diderot’s thinking effectively.