The nature of free speech has been a flashpoint in the past decade of contemporary Anglo-American and Western politics. Depending on who you ask, free speech is imperiled by politically correct language and the silencing of right-leaning voices among the elite, or by political administrations, corporations, and other institutions that remove books from libraries and syllabi from classrooms. As these principles collide, the dialectic between freedom of expression and institutional censorship reaches a crucible—a volatile tension that distills our understanding of these core principles.  

We seek proposals concerned with the politics and processes of censorship in early modern English literature for a panel at the 2027 MLA. How do early modern authors, texts, or other cultural objects wrestle with what free speech is over and against regimes of censorship (of the self, of others, and of the larger body politic)?We invite contributors to explore the "moral injury" sustained by subjects caught in these regimes. If censorship creates "zones of denial," how did early modern writers navigate the ethical trauma of silencing themselves or others? What did censorship look like: who wielded it, who was silenced by it, and by what means did it manifest? Is freedom of expression the opposite of censorship? Or could free speech be understood as possible only in and through censoring regimes? What did it mean to express one’s self freely—was it a right, a state of mind, or a condition? Finally, how might early modern understandings of the psychological and somatic costs of censorship interrogate, inform, and encourage us in the present day?

Send abstracts to Ashley Sarpong, asarpong@csustan.edu by March 15, 2026.