The Arthur Miller Society
http://www.ibiblio.org/miller/

Call for Paper
American Literature Association
26^th Annual Conference
http://americanliteratureassociation.org/calls/annual-conference/
Boston, Massachusetts
May 21-24, 2015

Arthur Asher Miller was born on October 17, 1915, to a prosperous Jewish family in Harlem and died 89 years later, having lived a life that was as varied and twisting in its joys, tragic sorrows, brilliant insights, foolish lapses, moral courage, and moral failure as the lives of any of the characters he created. In all its variety, Miller’s was a richly human life, lived on a grand scale, where Miller often turned his sensitivity to his own flaws and self-doubt into new understanding of the human condition for all of us.

As part of our year-long celebration of the centennial of Miller’s birth and the significance of his life and work, the Arthur Miller Society invites papers for presentation at either of two panels at the American Literature Association Conference in Boston during Memorial Day weekend 2015.

Each 75-minute session will contain three 20-minute papers or presentations and allow 15 minutes at the end for discussion.

Please email proposals, ideally of no more than 300 words, by January 9, 2015, to David Palmer, Humanities Department, Massachusetts Maritime Academy: dpalmer@maritime.edu. Decisions on proposals will be made by January 26.

Panel 1
Arthur Miller at 100: Reflections on His Life and Work.   This panel invites papers on any aspect of Miller’s life and work, from analyses of his plays, stories, essays, or interviews to comments on Miller as a public intellectual to reflections on personal experiences with Miller’s works. The panel seeks to explore a wide variety of aspects of Miller’s life and, from the perspective of the centennial, to assess Miller’s role in American culture, both the effect his work had on America’s vision of itself and the effect that American culture had on Miller.

Panel 2
Performing Arthur Miller: Insights from Productions of His Plays.  Often being involved in – or merely seeing – a production of a play provides new insights into themes the author explores and the way the play is crafted. We invite producers, directors, actors, set designers, reviewers, literary scholars, and enthusiastic audience members to share experiences from their involvement with Miller’s plays. What particular challenges and opportunities arise for actors, directors, and designers in Miller’s plays? What can be learned from reviewing production histories of specific plays? How do the writer, the text, the production company, and the audience interact to bring meaning to a play? Must plays be produced to be fully realized and understood? From a variety of perspectives, this panel explores the relationship between the writer, the text, the production, the audience, and the cultural moment in creating our understanding of Miller’s plays.