“Seen and Unseen,” the theme of SAMLA 96, which will meet from 15 through 17 November in Jacksonville, Florida, focuses on the tasks of discovering, uncovering, and recovering material that may have escaped earlier notice. The study of adaptation sharpens this duality further. Cinematic and theatrical adaptations famously present visuals that audiences for literary texts have previously had to visualize for themselves. Adaptations that censor the texts they adapt seek to replace old ways of seeing with new by concealing matters they think better unseen. Reparative adaptations seek to heal cultural traumas by shining new light on old assumptions about power and status. Cross-lingual and cross-cultural adaptations allow members of one linguistic or cultural community to attempt to see into another. Adaptations that depend on AI-generated words or images extend the boundaries that limit what adaptations can help us see.

This series of panels, sponsored by the Association of Adaptation Studies, welcomes submissions on any aspect of adaptation studies. We are especially interested in presentations that complicate or challenge the duality of seen and unseen, emphasizing the power of adaptations to allow audiences to see (broadly speaking) the hitherto unseen or unseeable, to avoid seeing things someone thinks they shouldn’t see, or to recast the duality in even more provocative terms. Please send queries, suggestions, or abstracts of 250–500 words, along with A/V requirements, scheduling requests, and brief bios, to Thomas Leitch at tleitch@udel.edu and/or Beth Coggeshall at ecoggeshall@fsu.edu by 15 July 2024. For more information on SAMLA, please see https://southatlanticmla.org/.