The 122nd annual conference of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA 2025) will be held at InterContinental San Francisco in San Francisco, California. The conference will begin on Thursday, November 20, and continue through November 23, 2025.

As part of PAMLA 2025, this session seeks papers broadly related to the intersection of literature or media and animal studies, in any genres, time periods, or national literatures, with a special—but not exclusive—interest in proposals that engage with the 2025 PAMLA conference theme, “Palimpsest: Memory and Oblivion.” This session has a two-pronged goal: to enliven the conversation surrounding the conference theme through animal studies and literature; and to host a broad enough conversation appropriate for an elevation to a standing session status in the immediate future; for these purposes, continued support for and participation in this session would be much appreciated. Previous incarnations of this session were successfully held at PAMLA 2022, PAMLA 2023, and PAMLA 2024.

As the series preface of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature states, various academic disciplines, including literary and cultural studies, can be found in the process of taking an “animal turn,” questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of human exceptionalism by engaging seriously with nonhuman animal presences. This line of inquiry has become increasingly more important today. If the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed anything, it is the limits of human-centered thinking: our society exists in a delicate balance with the nonhuman world, where an encroachment into the wild can unleash infectious diseases into the human population and companion animals can offer comfort and healing to people in times of need.

Below are a few sample questions that can potentially be asked in this session; other relevant inquiries will be welcomed. How has literature or film functioned as an enterprise to imagine and understand nonhuman animals? How has the literary imagination contributed to the changes in our perspectives on the responsible and constructive ways of dialoguing with nonhuman animals? As examples such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” and Haruki Murakami’s “Abandoning a Cat” suggest, our sense of ethics surrounding the treatment of animals is in some ways transhistorical and in other ways unsettled. How critical have literary representations of animals been in translating their interiority to us, especially if we regard literature as one of the critical components in how people learn moral sentiments? What kind of translatability exists between animal-standpoint criticism and other standpoint theory movements, such as feminism and antiracism? If to rethink the animal were to rethink the human—such as it happens in Margaret Atwood’s “February”—what can we learn from our real or imagined conversation with nonhuman animals?

Areas of inquiry may encompass, but are not limited to, the following:

• theories and practices relevant to animal studies and literature:  e.g., animal ethics, animal rights, animal psychology, environmental humanities, cultural studies, law and literature, posthumanism, etc. 
• memory, forgetting, memorialization, palimpsests, intertextuality, literary history, and other topics related to the PAMLA 2025 theme (https://www.pamla.org/conference/2025-conference-theme/)
• translation theories
• empathy studies
• human-animal relationship
• ethics of representation
• moral philosophy and literature     
• comparative literature – comparison across time periods, genres, cultures, etc.                                                            

More information about the conference can be found at PAMLA's conference website:

https://www.pamla.org/pamla2025/

Paper proposals can be submitted via PAMLA's online system:

https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/

From the list of sessions, choose session number 19499, "Animal Studies."

The initial abstract proposal deadline is currently set on May 15, 2025.