CALL FOR PAPERS: MCLLM
Conference Date: April 7-8, 2017
Deadline for Proposals: January 27, 2017
Theme: “Altered States, Times, Perspectives”

The 25th annual Midwestern Conference on Literature, Language and Media (MCLLM) at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, IL, is currently accepting proposals for 15-minute papers from individuals and panels. We are particularly interested in papers that explore this year’s theme: Altered States, Times, Perspectives. Purposefully broad in scope, this theme offers researchers a chance to present argument-driven papers on topics such as (but not limited to):
• Utopia/Dystopia
• Time Travel
• Space Travel
• Travel Narratives (“road” movies, novels, etc.)
• Historical change
• Political change
• Changes in an author’s work (or changes in the notions of authorship)
• Changes in critical framework
• Minority approaches/voices
• Changing conceptions (of gender, race, identity, class, time, etc.)
• Loss, displacement, destruction
• Gain, (re)placement, (re)construction

This conference encourages proposals from a wide range of research in the humanities. Possible research areas include (but again, not limited to): literature and poetry, creative writing, linguistics, written and visual rhetoric, journalism, narrative and documentary film, music, games/video games, anime, television, radio, new and social media, history, and pedagogy in these fields.

This year’s distinguished keynote speaker will be Anne Lake Prescott, emerita professor of English and Comparative Literature at Barnard College, Columbia University. Professor Prescott’s wide array of publications include: The Norton Critical Edition of Edmund Spenser’s Poetry; French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation; and Imagining Rabelais in the English Renaissance. In addition, she is also the editor or co-editor of several essay collections, including: Renaissance Historicisms; Female and Male Voices in Early Modern England; and Approaches to Teaching Shorter Elizabethan Poetry. Professor Prescott is also a founder and co-editor of the journal Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual.

If interested in presenting at the conference, please submit 200-500 word proposals by January 27, 2017, to mcllm@niu.edu, including name, institutional affiliation, email, and phone number of each author. Panel proposals should include a brief overview of the panel’s theme and purpose, along with a 200-500 word abstract for each paper.

For more information, please visit: http://www.niu.edu/clasep/conferences/mcllm/index.shtml.