119th Annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association Conference

Friday, November 11, 2022 to Sunday, November 13, 2022
UCLA Luskin Conference Center and Hotel in Los Angeles, California
Hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles

PAMLA’s Autobiography panel is currently accepting submissions for in-person sessions!

“Autobiography creates a self as the right instrument to seek meaning.”

-Patricia Hampl

We are open to a wide range of papers which explore auto/biographical constructions of the self across genres, geographies, and modes. We are especially interested in papers attuned to the conference theme, "Geographies of the Fantastic and the Quotidian," and welcome proposals which regard auto/biographical expression as a mode for mapping geographies within and around the self. In what ways do fantastic and quotidian places and spaces inform identity? How are place and space represented in auto/biographical texts? How might auto/biographical texts shape audience understandings of and orientations to particular places? How might auto/biographical representations of those places impact their physical geographies in material ways?

We encourage presenters to explore auto/biography through interdisciplinary approaches, such as affect studies and cognitive science, theories of the archive and archival sciences, area studies, critical race theory, digital humanities, feminist and theories of gender, genre studies, materialism, media studies, queer theory, phenomenology, post- and decolonial studies, psychology, translation and adaptation studies, and more. Possible genres and topics could include but are not limited to: autofiction and biofiction, autotheory, collective autobiography, conquest and encounter narratives, diaries, documentary film, glitch feminism, intersectional subjectivity, lyric essays, maps, memoir, pedagogical applications for life writing, photography, social media, and other techniques of self-narration and self-fashioning.

Submit an abstract directly through the Autobiography panel submission page, or search the PAMLA comprehensive Call for Papers. Contact Emily Travis (etravis@ucsc.edu) with any questions.

About PAMLA and this year’s theme:

The Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association is a scholarly association designed for those teaching or conducting research in a diverse range of literary, linguistic, and cultural interests, both ancient and modern, in the United States and abroad. PAMLA members include faculty and students in language and literature departments in colleges and universities, as well as interdisciplinary scholars from other disciplines and independent scholars.

This year’s theme, "Geographies of the Fantastic and the Quotidian," invites scholars to consider the overdetermined landscapes both of the imagination and of everyday experience. Particularly fascinating might be explorations of the extraordinary, the exemplary, the “out of this world” sorts of places, real and figurative: the spaces of the fantastic and the bizarre. Conversely, the lived and experienced environments of the banal might spark equally fertile archaeologies of the everyday. For that is the allure of the often inscrutable or illegible cities of the imagination: they open up new territories.