Full Title: Modern Language Association 2025 Convention: Visibility
Short Title: 2025 MLA Convention

Date: 09-Jan-2025 - 12-Jan-2025
Location: New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Contact Person: Anne Furlong
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: https://www.mla.org/Events/2025-MLA-Convention

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis; Ling & Literature; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics; Translation
Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Call Deadline: 22-Mar-2024

Meeting Description:

The annual convention of the Modern Language Associationwill take place in New Orleans this coming January. In-person and online sessions give faculty members and graduate students different options for attending.

The convention is open to anyone in the humanities. It brings together scholars, teachers, and writers from a variety of humanities fields to share their work; pursue professional development opportunities; and learn about the latest research in language, literature, cultural studies, and writing studies. Attendees benefit from workshops designed to help them grow as scholars, writers, departmental leaders, external reviewers, and humanities advocates. They may be invited to provide or receive mentorship, to network with other scholars, and to hone their pedagogical skills. Attendees can discover the latest publications in their fields and engage with scholarly press editors, and may find what they learn will help strengthen their department and institution.

The convention is also the MLA’s annual governance meeting, where members participate in the Delegate Assembly, decide policy, and gather to hear the Presidential Address and Presidential Plenaries on topics of urgent importance to the profession.

The convention can be a rewarding experience for scholars at every stage of their careers. Research sessions inform attendees about the latest work in their fields, as well as in fields adjacent to or even far from their own—that aspect of the convention, along with all the professional development training, makes this convention different from smaller, specialized gatherings. Professional development sessions offer help to graduate students and department chairs and guidance to those looking for grants or publishers.

Panel I: Visibility, Language, Style: Authorship as Resistance

Literary works reflect and reflect on the dominant culture. A feature of contemporary literature is the growing visibility of previously “invisible” populations, as subjects or audiences. Authors may represent a submerged group in mainstream literature in their own voices; audiences may clamour to see themselves made visible. Multiple English literatures in post-colonial parts of the world have flourished as authors produce texts in the English of that region; and literary works represent excluded populations (such as trans people) or subjugated majorities (such as women, or the working classes) so that audiences see themselves in the pages of these works.

How do authors exploit linguistic or stylistic devices and strategies to amplify the visibility of minority or subjugated populations from production through reception? Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief bio by 22 March 2024 to https://forms.gle/RJhcTN3kSE1c7Wbq9

Panel II: Translation, visibility, and style: accommodating audiences

Audiences often expect translations to be "invisible" as differences between source and translation are "smoothed over" and may expect translators to be invisible as well. However, the act of translating literary works from one language to another involves judgments about visibility at every point. Some of these are stylistic, some linguistic (such as differences in grammatical gender). More troubling are adjustments which perpetuate social and cultural inequities by diminishing the visibility of minority or subjugated communities in order to accommodate the preferences of majority or dominant cultures.

How do translations of literary works navigate judgments of visibility (of author, translator, or audience) at any point, from production through to reception? Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief bio by 22 March 2024 to https://forms.gle/tJ7nJuSxCyob1dHu6