Call For Papers: Melville Society Panels at MLA 2026
The Melville Society is submitting two panels to the 2027 Modern Language Association annual convention, which will be held in Los Angeles, January 7-10, 2027.
See CFPs below for submission details and deadlines.
Melville and McCarthyism
(Guaranteed Panel)
This panel invites papers reflecting on the value of Melville’s work for our authoritarian present. A pivotal revival of Melville during the nineteen-fifties by C.L.R. James and F.O. Matthiessen (both victims of McCarthyist surveillance and fear tactics) catapults Moby-Dick to attain the status of an American “classic” emblematic of a more, free democratic ethos. Moreover, Melville remains the author of the longest poem, Clarel, on Palestine in American literary history. Recent literary scholars of Melville also mobilize his writings to analyze the limits and possibilities of U.S. constitutionalism, including the First Amendment.
How might we mobilize Melville and his consummate commitment to the literary again to critique the genocide in Gaza and the new McCarthyism in academic life today?
Please submit abstracts of 200 words to Munia Bhaumik at munia@ucla.college.edu by March 8.
Melville and Hawthorne Revisited
(non-guaranteed panel)
The relationship between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne has received significant attention from scholars over many decades. Their extant letters have been part of critical conversations about their friendship and their writing. Creative projects have engaged with the gaps in that archive, lingering over and drawing out what cannot be known with certainty. Scholars have considered Melville and Hawthorne’s influence on one another, through Melville’s marginalia, for example. Their writings are often put in conversation, of course. And there is the dedication to Moby-Dick. There is “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” This is familiar territory. Yet scholars and creative practitioners alike continue to return to this relationship and to put Melville and Hawthorne’s writings in relation.
Nearly twenty years after the publication of Jana Argersinger and Leland Person’s edited collection Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship (2008), this panel invites reflections on the continued draw of thinking about Melville and Hawthorne together, as well as fresh approaches to the study of this pair and their writing. Papers might, for example, revisit the work of Melville and Hawthorne in light of recent scholarship on ecocriticism, affect studies, new materialist thought, oceanic studies, settler colonial studies, or nineteenth-century queer literature. Papers that take up less well-known texts or that situate these authors in other constellations of contemporaries are also welcome.
Please submit a 250-word abstract and a c.v. to Melissa Gniadek (m.gniadek@utoronto.ca) by March 9.
For more details on the 2027 MLA convention, visit the MLA Website
