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 other, the session is interested in, for example, genealogies that shed light on new or underappreciated discursive engagements, Middle English works that take Islamicate politics or culture as a model, examinations of England\’s self-fashioning in light of its understandings of these \”Eastern\” cultures, or reconsiderations of established literary arenas for such engagements, such as Middle English popular romance or travel writing. It is also interested in papers that examine the relations between such medieval engagements and those that characterize the assumptions and methods of contemporary scholarship, pop-cultural depictions, or twenty-first-century world systems. 250-word abstracts should be sent to Bobby Meyer-Lee (meyerlee@aya.yale.edu) and Claire Waters (cmwaters@ucdavis.edu) no later than March 18, 2022
