SAMLA 2026 Panel: Adapting Alice: Alice in Wonderland in the 21st Century Imagination 

SAMLA 98 (Thursday, November 5 - Saturday, November 7, 2026): Call for Abstracts

Link for Submissions: https://samla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19713 

Over a century and a half after its initial publication, Lewis Carrol’s (Charles Dodgson’s) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and, to a lesser extent, its sequel Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) remains a powerful force in the contemporary imagination. While the 20th century saw the emergence of a number of influential and innovative film adaptations, the 21st century has seen a continuance of film adaptations alongside other forms of media, including video games, graphic novels, Netflix series, and popular music/music videos, that adapt or intersect one or both Alice texts. This panel invites abstracts engaging with one or more adaptations of Alice in Wonderland since the year 2000, with particular interest going toward adaptations that have been published or released within the last ten years.

Despite often being branded as children’s stories, Lewis Carroll’s Alice texts have had a profound impact on various sectors, both children and adult, of the popular imagination. While even in Carroll’s day, the texts were considered odd or even violent, representations of Alice became increasingly dark and mature throughout the twentieth century in the wake of films like Bud Townsend’s erotic musical Alice in Wonderland (1976) and Jan Svankmajer’s surreal stop-motion Alice (1988). In 2012, Catherine Siemann published a much-needed investigation on the persistence of this trend through into the 21st century in her article “‘But I’m grown up now’:Alice in the Twenty-First Century” (Neo-Victorian Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, Jan. 2012, pp. 175 – 201, https://doi.org/10.5281/qs2tqc34).

While Siemann's article examines many Alice adaptations that have appeared across newer forms of media, including American McGee’s two Alice video games (2000, 2011), Raven Gregory’s horror-violent graphic novel series Return to Wonderland (2007), and Disney/Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010), many additional works that are either direct adaptations or intertextual works have appeared in the fourteen years since Siemann’s article was published. Furthermore, while Siemann’s article focuses primarily on Western adaptations, the past fourteen years have shown the influence of the Alice texts to be a global phenomenon. More recent adaptations or intertexts include, for example, films like James Bobin’s Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016); series like the hit Netflix show Alice in Borderland (2020 - 2025); and popular music ranging from Taylor Swift’s “Wonderland” to the EP Alice in Wonderland (2021) by the now-disbanded K-Pop girl group Pink Fantasy. These and other examples demonstrate that Alice in Wonderland remains a powerful culture text with the potential to shape, and reshape, the contemporary imagination, both locally and globally.

Deadline for Submission: Please submit a short abstract (250 - 500 words) and bio through the link above (first-time users will need to create a Ballast account), or to colin.bishoff@uga.edu.