UPDATE: Owing to international travel complications, the organizers--Jake Abell and Michael Overstreet--have decided to open up our roundtable to both virtual and in-person presenters. Please also note that we have been encouraged by the editor of one of Bloomsbury Academic's series to publish an edited volume based on the fruits of this roundtable. While acceptance to the roundtable does not guarantee inclusion in the volume, all participants will be warmly invited to submit a chapter proposal for review before the deadline of June 1st, 2026. Please find the details for our hybrid roundtable below, set to take place at the 2026 NeMLA Convention on (Re)generation, March 5-8, 2026 in Pittsburgh, PA. Écocritique Agricole: Tracing the Furrows of Farming in French and Francophone Literatures - A NeMLA Roundtable Proposal
 Tilling through the writings of Rousseau, Derrida reminds us in his Of Grammatology that writing and agriculture share a common origin. It is agriculture and the resulting sedentarization of our societies, he argues, that first opened nature to culture and to our writing upon it. Derrida goes so far as to compare writing to cultivation in the agricultural sense: “it is a matter of writing by furrows. The furrow is the line, as the ploughman traces it.” It makes sense, then, that the French “délirer,” meaning to babble, takes root in the Latin delirare, to veer from a furrow. How has agricultural practice influenced the development of human/nonhuman relations and how can looking at French and Francophone literature across the ages help us better understand these influences?  How can literature help us at once understand and decompose what Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway have described as the “plantationocene” and Timothy Morton as “agrilogistics,” or, the civilizational forms which characterize the exploitative strategies by which humans relate to non-human others? Can literature also help us recompose and ratify more regenerative forms of this civilization-defining practice? Can literature articulate visions of agriculture that escape the modern association of farming with degradation?This roundtable seeks to explore these questions from a diverse range of global geographical contexts and historical periods, from the earliest literary sources of the Middle Ages to the present. In this way, participants might also discuss how periodization in both literary studies and agricultural history might enrich our understanding of the entangled diachronicity of writing and farming. Please submit your abstracts using the NeMLA portal before Sept. 30, 2025.  *The organizers have been encouraged by the editor of one of Bloomsbury Academic's series to publish an edited volume based on the fruits of this roundtable. While acceptance to the roundtable does not guarantee inclusion in the volume, all participants will be warmly invited to submit a chapter proposal for review before the deadline of June 1st, 2026. Feel free to contact the roundtable conveners at the emails below: Michael Overstreet - mo8ye@virginia.edu / Jake Abell - jake_abell@baylor.edu