MLA 2025 CFP Australian Literature at the Crossroads

deadline for submissions: 
February 12, 2024
full name / name of organization: 
American Association of Australasian Literary Studies

Call for Papers 

MLA 2025 New Orleans, LA, 9–12 January

American Association of Australasian Literary Studies 

An Allied Organization of MLA – Guaranteed Session

 

Australasian Literature at the Crossroads 

 

Official MLA 35-word CFP: 

Consideration of any aspect of the literature, film, and/or culture of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, including Indigenous writing, particularly changes to the field, content, and milieu of literary studies. Full CFP aaals.org. 250-word abstracts.

 

Full CFP: 

Australasian literature and culture, like many fields of literary studies, stands at a series of crossroads: new trends in scholarly and theoretical work, changes to institutions of higher education, emergence of new interdisciplinary fields, expansion of the canon, and more. As we consider the past of literary studies in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, we also must look to the future: how can the field become more inclusive? How can Australasian cultural production grapple with its history and the history of the continent? How does literature address the many crises of the world today? What can we do in the face of continued cutbacks to Australasian literary studies specifically, but also to the humanities more generally?

Topics to consider regarding the literature of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand at the crossroads include, but are not limited to:

  • Globalism

  • Fragmentation, rupture, and continuity

  • Nostalgia

  • Empire, Imperialism and their lasting effects

  • The modern university

  • Support for literary and cultural production (or lack thereof)

  • War, violence, and trauma

  • Pedagogy and the future of the humanities

  • Collaboration and interdisciplinary practice

  • New medias

  • Ecofiction and ecocriticism

  • Indigenous writing and representation

  • Canon formation and redefinition

The American Association of Australasian Literary Studies welcomes 250-word abstracts for papers that rigorously engage with these or related topics through art, culture, media, and literature (generously considered).

Submit 250-word abstracts by February 12, 2024, to aaals.antipodes@gmail.com with the subject line MLA 2025 Proposal.