PAMLA 2025 San Francisco: “Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion”

The 122nd annual PAMLA Conference will be held between November 20-23, 2025 at the InterContinental San Francisco in San Francisco, California.

PAMLA welcomes special session proposals for the 2025 PAMLA conference in San Francisco, California on topics of scholarly interest that are not too close to the topics of our general (standing) sessions (see below to find a list of PAMLA’s general/standing sessions).

You may still submit a proposal for a special session: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/

Special session and paper submissions are not limited to the theme of this year’s conference, “Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion.” But if you’d like to touch on the theme that would be most welcome.

While we welcome special sessions on a wide range of topics, we are particularly interested in special session proposals that engage with the 2025 PAMLA Conference 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. However, we also encourage proposals that lie beyond this focus (please review our standing session topics so as to avoid undue overlap with our standing session topics: https://www.pamla.org/about/constitution-bylaws/).

The 2025 special session proposal deadline is March 2 (but please try to propose your special session sooner, if possible). To submit a session proposal, log into pamla.ballastacademic.com (you will need to create an account there if you’ve never done so before), click on the Propose Session button, and follow the directions from there.

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.

Beginning with the Ohlone, Coast Miwoks, and other Indigenous forebearers whose continuing inscriptions onto the cultural and natural landscapes of the region comprise the area’s foundational Ur-texts, San Francisco has undergone countless dramatic cultural transformations and (re)inscriptions. It is only fitting to theorize a variety of literary, artistic, cultural, filmic, and intellectual palimpsests while in San Francisco, with its rich history of migration, immigration, colonization, contact zones, war, peace, gold rushes, earthquakes, gentrifications, Indigenous, Black, Gay, Queer, and other civil rights movements, closures, crime waves, and urban renewals and re-renewals. All these waves have occurred while San Francisco has also retained a sense of nostalgia and romance as projected onto beloved films, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, art, and architecture. San Francisco is thus the ideal place to explore multivalence—and the palimpsest trope supplies a perfect vehicle for contemplating urban spaces and cultural heritages, third spaces and fourth walls, oblivion and re-imaginations

The interplay between foreground and background, past and present, remembered and (partially) forgotten, offers many prospects for this palimpsestuous theme, as might be found in topics such as:

Multivalent cityscapes and memory
Visions of the metropolis (for example– postmodernism and the city or lost cities in geography, film, and literature)
Streets, Neighborhoods, and Forgotten Spaces: Graffiti, street and mural art, underground art, prison and protest art; Jane Jacobs’ visions of neighborhoods; the Tenderloin, North Beach, the Castro, Haight-Ashbury
Public transportation and human connectivity
Flâneurs and modern flânerie
Cataclysms, scarification, and healing
Memory, forgetting, memorialization, misprision, misreading, and revision
Censorship and attempts at erasing, hiding, revising, contesting, forgetting, and reviving texts and narratives of the past
The university and the profession: erasing and remembering the histories of our professions and institutions, and attempts to change, erode, erase, or remake the liberal arts
Indigenous and aboriginal voices, narratives, and narrative retellings
Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of “contact zones” and colonial and post-colonial texts of contact, cultural hybridity, cultural appropriation, and anti-colonial narrative responses
Musical and Digital aesthetic play, including adaptation, adoption, sampling, collage, improvisation, audience involvement, and interplay
Speculative history, speculative fiction, and aesthetic anachronism
Neo-slave narratives, like Kindred or The Underground Railroad
Postmodern, transtextual or intertextual works, like Wide Sargasso Sea, Wicked, Midnight’s Children, Blazing Saddles, Reservation Dogs, Dickinson, and Transformations
Historical narratives and appropriations of memory (for example– museums, memorials, cemeteries, parks and publics spaces, theme-parks, and other sites of memory and cultural, historical revision or contestation)
Fragmentation and reconstruction; Inventions and reinventions
Enigmas and traces in detective fiction and beyond
Mentors and Disciples in writing and art
Native American lives and depictions in San Francisco and beyond
Gay revolutions and queer histories in San Francisco and beyond
Asian American Histories in San Francisco and beyond
African American Histories in the Bay Area and beyond
Latinx Histories in the Bay Area and beyond
San Francisco Beat, Hippie, Iconoclast, and Subaltern Memories and Histories
Palimpsests of horror and the Gothic: Monsters, vampires, and revenants
Fluidity, performativity, and protean concepts of the “self” or “I
Communities, sites, and cults of nostalgia
Narratives of Time, Loss, Transformation, and Haunting: Family histories, ghost stories, time travel, robotics, transhumanism, and posthumanism
Appearance and Disappearance; Magic and Reality
Medieval glosses, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose
Julia Kristeva and Gerard Genette’s theories of palimpsests and intertextuality
Experimental Poetry, replacement, erasure, and bricolage
Paleography and textual criticism: questions of literary revisions, variations & manuscripts
Shifting literary histories
Adaptation, pastiche, and literary, artistic, media form

*PAMLA encourages special session proposals with alternative formats, such as roundtables, workshops, creative conversations, etc.; PAMLA encourages session proposals that will welcome paper proposals from a wide variety of scholars, not just scholars from the presiding officer’s host institution.

*PAMLA hosts the following General/Standing Sessions (So please make sure that your special session proposal does not merely replicate the topic of one of these existing General/Standing Sessions):

21st-Century Literature; Adaptation Studies; African American Literature; American Literature before 1865; American Literature 1865-1945; American Literature after 1945; Ancient-Modern Relations; Anime and Manga; Architecture, Space, and Literature; Asian American Literature; Asian Literature; Austrian Studies; Autobiography; Bible and Literature; British Literature and Culture: To 1700; British Literature and Culture: The Long Eighteenth Century; British Literature and Culture: The Long Nineteenth Century; British Literature and Culture: 20th and 21st Century; Carceral/Prison Studies; Children’s Literature; Classics (Greek); Classics (Latin); Coalitional Feminisms; Comics and Graphic Narratives; Comparative American Ethnic Literature; Comparative Literature; Comparative Media; Composition and Rhetoric; Creative Writing; Critical Theory; Cultural History; Digital Studies; Disability Studies; Disney and Its Worlds; Drama and Society; East-West Literary Relations; Film and Literature; Film Studies; Folklore and Mythology; Food Studies; French; Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Literature; Germanic Studies; Gothic; Hip Hop Poetics; Indigenous Literatures and Cultures; Italian; Italian Cinema; Italian Ecocriticism; Jewish Literature and Culture; Latina/o Literature and Culture; Linguistics; Literature & the Other Arts; Literature and Religion; Medieval Literature; Middle English Literature, including Chaucer; New Italians; Oceanic Literatures and Cultures; Old English Literature, including Beowulf; Poetry and Poetics; Post-Colonial Literature; Religion in American Literature; Rhetorical Approaches to Literature; Romanticism; Science Fiction; Shakespeare and Related Topics; Spain, Portugal, and Latin America: Jewish Culture & Literature in Trans-Iberia, Spanish and Portuguese (Latin American); Spanish and Portuguese (Peninsular); Teaching with Media and Technology; Teaching Writing Across the Disciplines; Television Studies; Travel and Literature; Veterans Studies; Video Game Studies; Western American Literature; Women in Literature; Young Adult Literature and Culture.

PAMLA 2025 Conference Theme

PAMLA 2025 San Francisco: “Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion”

Other Special Session Topics