MMLA - African American Literature Permanent Section
Call for Papers: MMLA – African American Literature Permanent Section
Please Note: MMLA 2024 will be fully in person. No virtual or hybrid panels will be scheduled.
14-16 November 2024
Hilton Chicago
720 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60605
The African American Literature Permanent Section of the Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA) is requesting abstracts from potential panelists for this year’s in-person conference in Chicago, Illinois. As the conference’s theme is “Health in/of the Humanities,” this section is seeking scholarly work that connects literature written by Black authors of the Western Hemisphere to physical, mental, spiritual, individual, and/or communal health. Some questions your work could potentially address are the following: How have literary representations of individual and/or communal trauma changed in the last four centuries? What has differentiated literary depictions of various illnesses in Black literature from health narratives written by authors from other diasporas? How does gender affect discourses of health, normativity, and pathology in the Black literatures of the Americas? What role do infrastructure and policy play in the representations of community and individual health? Other possible topics might include:
- Narratives of health, sickness and/or recovery
- Health subcultures
- Disability studies
- Food studies
- Religion and health
- Women’s studies and health
- Medical Humanities, Narrative Medicine, Health Humanities
- Health Science Writing
- Representations of Public, Private, and Global Health
- Environmental Health
- Mental/psychological health
- Psychoanalysis
- Digital Humanities/modeling approaches to health
- Privacy and confidentiality
- Medical technologies
- Health professions/institutions/workplaces
Please send a 200–300 word abstract to Noemi Fernandez Labarga at nfernan5@nd.edu no later than April 25th, 2024.