Organizer: Rhema Hokama (University of Washington) and Yangyou Fang (Princeton)

This is a call for submissions for a guaranteed session in English Literature sponsored by the Renaissance Society of America for the 2026 RSA conference in San Francisco (February 19–21, 2026).

This panel invites panel papers of 15 to 20 minutes on the role of the Asia-Pacific world—broadly defined as South, Central, East, and Southeast Asia, as well as the Pacific islands—in shaping English and global literary history. We welcome contributions that explore how literary and cultural encounters with and in the Asia-Pacific have informed the development of European literary genres and rhetoric, ideas about religion, politics, and discourses across linguistic, temporal, and geographic boundaries.

Rather than emphasizing comparative poetics or reception studies, this panel focuses on the material, intellectual, and political dynamics of historical exchange. How have English and European literary and historical texts registered or participated in encounters with Asian and Pacific religions, cultures, technologies, and practices? How did ideas about early modern Asian literatures, religions, and cultures circulate through transnational networks?

Topics may include:

• Literary representations of Asia and the Pacific in English and global texts
• Modes of religious exchange and encounter—including conversion, toleration, coexistence, assimilation, absorption, and accommodation
• Collecting—whether art, seeds, plants, books, or maps—as European knowledge formation
• Networks of manuscript, print, and reading circulation across Europe and the Asia-Pacific
• Literary reactions to trade, diplomacy, religious missions, or imperial aims in Asia and the Pacific, such as galleon trade exchange across the Philippines, Micronesia, and Mexico
• European ethnographic accounts of Asian sexual practices and ideas about gender
• Sex and marriage between European and Asian or Pacific peoples across interracial and interfaith contexts
• Renaissance literary responses to medieval accounts of Asia from Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone, or John Mandeville
• The Pacific islands in the Western imaginary, spanning Magellan’s and Drake’s arrivals in Micronesia to Cook’s arrival in Hawai‘i and beyond

Please submit the following materials to Rhema Hokama at rhema@uw.edu by July 15, 2025:

• Paper title (15-word maximum)
• Paper abstract (200-word maximum)
• CV
• PhD or other terminal degree completion year (past or expected)
• Full name, current affiliation, and email address

Accepted presenters will be notified by July 30, 2025.