The MLA Old English Forum is now accepting paper proposals for the 2027 annual meeting, to be held from 7-10 January. We’re currently accepting 300-word proposals for the two guaranteed sessions listed below until March 15, 2026 for 15-20 minute papers. Please share widely!! And don’t hesitate to get in touch with any questions.
Speaking One Way, Meaning Another
This session invites papers on techniques and theories of allegory, capaciously understood to include ways of speaking on multiple levels, double entendre, dissimulation, riddles, modes of integumentum, etc. Open to papers that engage with Old English materials, but also those that engage materials in other languages and literary traditions. Send a 300-word proposal and CV to saltzman@chicago.edu and Heather.Maring@asu.edu by 15 March, 2026.
Please note that all accepted presenters must be members of MLA by 7 April, 2026.
Agency and Subjection in Early Medieval England
This session invites papers on agency and subjection in early English literature. Scholarship in the last 15 years has reconceived how we understand medieval subjectivity and affect, enabling new interrogations of how medieval writers understood and represented the exercise of agency. Papers might address issues in early English texts regarding the exercise of the will, representations of gender, concepts and clichés of medieval communal identities, ideas of political and legal agency, non-human agency, and more. Send a 300-word proposal and CV to saltzman@chicago.edu and Heather.Maring@asu.edu by 15 March, 2026.
Please note that all accepted presenters must be members of MLA by 7 April, 2026.
Jennifer A. Lorden 