The Old English Literature session is open to any and all papers that explore some aspect of Old English poetry, prose, and/or Beowulf studies. We welcome proposals both related to the conference theme, "Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion," and those not related.

Please submit an abstract here: 

 https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19648

////////

PAMLA 2025 Theme:

Our theme will be “Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion.” PAMLA welcomes special session proposals on a wide array of creative, scholarly, literary, filmic, or cultural topics. Palimpsest-focused submissions related to thematics of remembering, forgetting, erasure, and lingering presences from the past are particularly welcome. 

A palimpsest is a manuscript whose inscriptions have been scraped away and replaced with new writing; but vestiges of the old characters remain, creating a layered or stratified effect. The palimpsest form has inspired many disciplines and disciplinary gestures beyond paleography, with the term, concept, or metaphor “palimpsest” being used to indicate the traces, specters, echoes, or presences of the past that remain even as many past narrative elements, structures, or tropes are forgotten or erased. To note an example from far afield—in the world of planetary astronomy, the term palimpsest refers to a “ghost crater” or impact site of a meteor that has been partially obscured or deformed over time. This example suggests how spectrality attends the palimpsest trope; traces of the early inscriptions continue to “haunt” successive iterations.