This panel at the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), 6-9 March 2025, will focus what T. S. Eliot can do for the Humanities today and what the Humanities ought to do with T. S. Eliot.

The work of T. S. Eliot offers a compendium of Humanities material: poetry and drama chock-full of literary history, philosophy, religion, and music; literary, cultural and social criticism; political and economic theorizing; translation, and more. Eliot’s writing and ideas were enormously influential in the development of the academic Humanities in the 20th century, and he often fought for traditions and disciplines that are now threatened from every quarter. At the same time, the Humanities have also undergone a long process of reassessing the influence of Eliot and figures like him. Given this shifting terrain and the wealth of new Eliot resources available in the last decade—letters, eight volumes of prose, biographies, scholarly editions of the poems—what can we say about Eliot and the Humanities today? What did Eliot see that we need to see again? What did he miss? What is the place of Eliot in the contemporary Humanities landscape? Preference will be given to proposals that engage with those newly available Eliot materials. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words and a brief bio to https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21032 by 30 September 2024.30 September 2024.