PAMLA 2013 Conference Information

Our next PAMLA Conference will be held on Friday November 1-Sunday November 3, 2013 at the Bahia Resort Hotel in San Diego, California. The conference site is lovely, and San Diego usually has great weather at that time. We are right on Mission Bay–you can walk out of your hotel room and be on the beach–and we are a five minute walk from the ocean. Plus, we are just a short taxi or car ride from downtown San Diego. I hope you will consider proposing either a special session or paper for the conference.

To propose a special session (these sessions are open to submissions, not fully formed beforehand), you need to email PAMLA’s 1st VP, Cheryl Edelson, by December 15. Send her your proposed session title, a brief abstract about the session’s focus and/or purpose (under 50 words), your name, affiliation, and email of choice (you would become the presiding officer for the session, if it is approved, working with me to make sure a great session occurs; typically, presiding officers can’t deliver papers as a part of their own session). Email your proposal to Cheryl Edelson at [email protected].

Special sessions may be on a range of topics related to the humanities, including literature, linguistics, film, media, culture, or an interdisciplinary topic.  Special sessions should be on a topic sufficiently different from PAMLA’s standing session topics, specific enough to create an exciting discussion, but general enough to be of wide interest.  Look to the end of this post for a list of all general/standing sessions. If your proposal is approved, potential panelists will have until March 31, 2013 to propose a paper to your special session via PAMLA’s online submission system. Then, you would work with Craig Svonkin, PAMLA Executive Director, on forming your session.  PAMLA does not usually approve special session proposals for pre-formed sessions.

The special theme for the 2013 PAMLA conference is “Stages of Life: Age, Identity, and Culture.”  The theme is intended to allow special sessions dealing with all aspects of the intersection of Age, Identity, and Culture, from Childhood Studies to Aging Studies.  Sessions might explore such issues as the analysis of “age” as depicted in literary and cultural products; children’s literature, film, and culture; childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age as constructed or performed identities; the ways that literature and media depict and construct concepts of age, in much the same way that ethnic, Marxist, and gender studies explore ethnicity, class, sexuality, and gender formation.  We’d love to receive special session proposals on this theme, but sessions may cover various fields of interest.  If your special session proposal is accepted, it will be included on PAMLA’s call for papers, and you will receive submissions, decide which proposers get invited, and then preside over the formed session at the conference.

Should your proposed session be approved, we can only guarantee you one session at the conference (should you receive a sufficient number of strong proposals to justify a session).  PAMLA’s ninety minute sessions tend to have either three or four panelists.  Splitting your session into two might be possible, depending upon space issues.  Should you receive so many fine submissions as to justify the split, you must ask PAMLA Executive Director, Craig Svonkin ([email protected] ), to approve your request to split your session into two sessions.  In other words, you must request a split before inviting more than four panelists to join your session.  Normally, presiding officers cannot present a paper in their own session, but they may propose a paper to other sessions.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact Cheryl Edelson, First Vice President of PAMLA and Professor of English at Chaminade University: [email protected].  For technical questions about PAMLA’s conference, please contact PAMLA Executive Director, Craig Svonkin ([email protected] ).

UPDATE: The deadline for proposing papers to the approved sessions will be on April 15, 2013. The online submission form will go live in mid-February.

I hope to see all of you in San Diego. Let me know if you have any questions: [email protected]

All my best, Craig Svonkin, PAMLA Exeuctive Director

The following General Sessions present programs at PAMLA’s annual conference: African American Literature, American Literature before 1865, American Literature after 1865, Ancient-Modern Relations, Asian Literature, Asian American Literature, Autobiography, Beowulf and Related Topics, Chaucer and Related Topics, Children’s Literature, Classics (Greek), Classics (Latin), Comparative Literature, Comparative Media, Composition and Rhetoric, Critical Theory, East-West Literary Relations, English (to 1700), English (1700 to present), Film and Literature, Film Studies, Folklore and Mythology, French, Gay and Lesbian Literature, Germanics, Graphic Novels, Indigenous Literature, Italian, Italian Cinema, Jewish Literature and Culture, Latina/o Literature and Culture, Linguistics, Literature & the Other Arts, Literature & Religion, Medieval Literature, Modern Austrian Literature, Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, Oceanic Literatures and Cultures, Poetry and Poetics, Postcolonial Literature, Postcolonial Women’s Writing, Rhetorical Approaches to Literature, Romanticism, Scandinavian Literature, Science Fiction, Shakespeare and Related Topics, Spanish and Portuguese (Latin American), Spanish and Portuguese (Peninsular), Teaching with the Internet and Technology, Travel and Literature, Women in Literature.