The exco is currently in the process of planning panels for next year’s MLA.  We have some ideas but are eager to hear suggestions and proposals from you.  If you would like to organize a panel, or to suggest a topic for one, please contact me.

Next year’s MLA will be in San Francisco, Jan. 5-8, 2023.  The Presidential Theme is described here, bu…[Read more]

As most of you know, forum executive committee members serve five-year terms; each year one new member joins the exco as one leaves.  Historically, new members have been elected by the forum membership.  However, beginning this cycle MLA is experimenting with a new policy.

Here’s MLA’s explanation:

The Program Committee has implemented a change t…

[Read more]

Diversity, equity and inclusion are and for the foreseeable future should be high priority concerns for all manner of organizations, institutions and associations, including and perhaps especially those in the academic sphere, a space from which we believe, as humanists, meaningful changes in understanding and purposeful can emanate. Recognition…[Read more]

I am pleased to stand for election as a forum representative. My work centers on Japan, but for me, this means Japan embedded in larger regional, intellectual, and cultural networks. In particular, preoccupations with classical China and Chinese haunt many of the texts that draw me. My recent monograph, Reflecting the Past: Place, Language, and…[Read more]

We’ve just posted the following call for papers for a panel for MLA 2022:

Title:  The Translation’s Semivisibility: Interlingual, Intralingual, and Other Kinds of Translation in Premodern Japan

Description:  We invite papers exploring translation in premodern Japan, with particular emphasis on types of linguistic rendering that challenge or bro…[Read more]

Perhaps someone is interested (hopefully many are) in continuing the conversation on the directions of our field? There is so much to say. I share Paul’s concern about the shrinking of premodern, which is why I was stressing the importance of history and studying the past as past. But that’s just one angle. Anyway, just creating a space to…[Read more]

Saturday, 9 January 10:15AM-11:30AM EST (Session #382)

Scholars at various career stages from the United States, Europe, and Japan think together with the audience about strategies for ensuring the vitality of pre-1900 Japanese literary studies given the field’s distinctive history and configuration and the challenges of teaching and conducting r…[Read more]

The next election for this forum’s Delegate Assembly representative will be held in the fall of 2021, and the forum’s executive committee will take up the matter of nominations for this election when it meets in January 2021. Though the executive committee is responsible for making nominations, it is required to nominate at least one candidate who…[Read more]

Thursday, 7 January 1:45 PM-3:00 PM EST
Abstract: The paratext, a supplement to the supposed original body of a literary work, has proven a useful rubric for examining processes of mediation that comprise both discursive (e.g. interpretive traditions) and material (e.g. formatting and binding) aspects. This panel considers how paratextual…[Read more]

Call for Papers | Women & Language
Editor: Leland G. Spencer, PhD | Miami University

Women & Language, an international, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal publishes original scholarly articles and creative work covering all aspects of communication, language, and gender. Contributions to Women & Language may be empirical,…[Read more]

We invite proposals for the following, non-guaranteed session of the LLC Japanese to 1900 Forum @ MLA 2021:

Session title: The Location of Culture: Places and Spaces of the East Asian Imaginary

As either unmovable physical locations or portable culturally-mediated psychological spaces, places are an essential feature of our world. Throughout…[Read more]

The MLA International Bibliography is an online database that covers literature, language and linguistics, folklore, film, literary theory and criticism, dramatic arts, as well as the historical aspects of printing and publishing. Listings on rhetoric and composition and the history, theory and practice of teaching language and literature are also…[Read more]

We invite papers exploring relationships between text and image (broadly defined) in premodern Japan.  Scholars from a variety of disciplines welcome.  250-word abstracts to Glynne Walley (glynne@uoregon.edu) by February 29, 2020.

The Japan to 1900 forum’s executive committee seeks nominations (self-nominations are welcome!) for alternate candidates to stand for election for the 2021-2026 term on the committee. Please contact Naomi Fukumori (fukumori.1@osu.edu) by January 24. The election will be held at the end of 2020, with results announced in December.

The Japanese to 1900 forum will hold an open business meeting on Saturday, Jan. 11, 10:15-11, at the Greenwood, in the Sheraton. All members of the forum are cordially invited.

Hi all,

Forgive this non-MLA post (cross-posting on top of it!) but I was thinking of proposing something for SHARP 2019 in Amherst, MA. If anyone has interest in doing a panel on Japanese book history, I’d love to hear from you. Here is the very broad CFP, entitled Indigeneity, Nationhood, and Migrations of the…[Read more]