The non-profit digital scholarly database The Literary Encyclopedia was founded in 1998 to provide a scholarly online resource for university-level teaching and research. 

We are in the process of expanding our offerings in the field of African American Literature and Culture.  

We’re interested in commissioning reference articles (2,000…[Read more]

Paul Megna’s paper for the Middle English Forum at MLA 2022 invoked a Public Books piece by Irina Dumitrescu in order to prompt contemporary medievalists to ponder the events of 1/6/2021. How might 1/6/2021 cause us to reconsider the scholarly lenses through which we have typically interpreted the events of Rising of 1381 and their literary ma…[Read more]

Medieval studies is in a moment in which it is re-examining the long-held categories that have traditionally defined its boundaries. As this reconceptualization of the field progresses, Trans Studies offers a number of scholarly methodologies and insights that are changing the way medievalists consider their field and, more specifically, Trans…[Read more]

This session seeks to build upon the growing appreciation for the complex and multifarious discursive engagements between late medieval English literary texts and Islamicate or Persianate culture, society, language, or literature. Recognizing that such engagements include much more than direct literary representations of the individual Islamicate…[Read more]

Passages of Water and Labor Cultures of the Coastal South and the Caribbean

In Edwidge Danticat’s short story “Without Inspection,” an undocumented Haitian immigrant, Arnold, dies from unsafe working conditions at a construction site in south Florida. In the news coverage about the event, the construction company and developer release a state…[Read more]

Disability and Public Health in the U.S. South 

A key part of colonizing in the U.S. South depended on the rhetoric of health, such as Ponce de Leon’s mythical fountain of youth and nineteenth-century boosterism claiming Florida as the “winter sanitarium of the country” (qtd in Knight 5). The semi-tropical warmth of the South invited justif…[Read more]

The Chaucer Forum warmly invites submissions for our MLA 2023 (San Francisco, January 5-8) sessions:

Chaucer’s Ornamentalism and Gimmickry

This roundtable session brings Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of ornamentalism and Sianne Ngai’s work on the gimmick into conversation with Chaucer’s work. For instance, in The Squire’s Tale, Canacee’s…[Read more]

The University of Georgia Department of Theatre and Film Studies and the Institute for African American Studies seek an assistant professor whose scholarly research focuses on African American theatre and performance. Additional areas of specialization might include African American film, performance methods based in Afrocentric…[Read more]

Thank you to everyone who came to our “Sadness” panel yesterday, featuring papers by Haiyan Lee, Anna Shields, Lisa Zunshine, and Ya Zuo! It was extremely well attended and featured a wonderful discussion. Kudos to our chair Benjamin Ridgway for bringing together “cognitive” and historicist perspective of emotion, drawing on Chinese literature.

Please join us for “Life-Writing and Cognition” (session # 645, Sunday), which will feature papers by Laura Otis, Ralph James Savarese, Ellen Spolsky, and Lisa Zunshine.