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MLA 2026 in Toronto

January 8-11, 2026

 

Call for Proposals sponsored by the Korean Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (LLC) Forum

 

“If I had Your Body”: Resemblance and Decolonizing Bodies in Korean Visual Media

 

This panel gathers scholars of visual media who aim to disrupt the hegemonic process of enforcing and managing “ideal bodies” in contemporary South Korea — a process that violently silences the socially vulnerable. The normalization of physically able, young, and beautiful bodies — bodies that can produce and reproduce — often manifests across gender, age, and class as a form of epistemic violence. To decolonize bodies trapped in this hegemonic culture of normalcy, this panel rethinks “resemblance” not as an internal structure of similarity but as a dynamic network of relations — visual, social, and otherwise. Engaging with films and visual art, the panel examines how “other” forms of resemblance emerge between radically heterogeneous bodies, challenging the very definition and categorization of “ideal bodies.” 

 

Please submit a 250-word abstract and one-page C.V. to Jooyeon Rhee (jxr5820@psu.edu) and Hyun Seon Park (hpark63@gmu.edu) by March 15, 2025.

 

Im/Mobility in Korean Language, Literature, Culture, and Media

 

This panel brings together papers that explore the diverse ways in which perceptions, experiences, and imaginations of time, people, objects—including texts and ideas—and languages have shaped boundary-establishing, boundary-crossing, borderlands, and borderlessness in Korean language, literature, culture, and media. Centering on im/mobility as a key concept, the panel examines how notions related to movement—such as departure and arrival, inside and outside, en route and off track, progress and stagnation, uprooting and replanting, traversing and staying put, directionality and speed, fit and misfit, and past and future—have generated new perspectives, reconfigured knowledge, fostered social networks, and inspired literary and artistic experiments as well as intertextual and media practices. The panel welcomes scholars interested in identifying new research sites and reexamining well-established areas to advance innovative conceptual and methodological approaches to the study of change, continuity, and the expansive scope of Korean language, literature, culture, and media.

 

Please submit a title, 250-word abstract, and one-page C.V. to Si Nae Park (sinaepark@fas.harvard.edu) by March 15, 2025. 

 

 

Animals and More-than-Human Relationality in Korean Literature and Culture

 

Ecocritical approaches to the “Anthropocene” are increasingly being recalibrated to decenter the human and to foreground multispecies networks. This panel explores more-than-human animals and their relationality with other species, including the human, in Korean literature, culture, and media. Possible topics include: How have Korean authors articulated the significance of multispecies relationships, both in the pre-20th century context and increasingly in a time of accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss? How has kinship with more-than-human animals been imagined and contested in Korean narratives? How have humans labored with, and for, the more-than-human, and vice versa? The period for this panel is open. Transtemporal and transpacific approaches are welcome.

 

Please submit a 250-word abstract and one-page C.V. to Ivanna Yi (isy4@cornell.edu) by March 15, 2025.