CALL FOR PAPERS
MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION CONVENTION
Los Angeles
JANUARY 7-10, 2027
The Ernest Hemingway Society will sponsor a panel at the upcoming MLA Conference:
Hemingway and Disability
Early generations of critics often focused on the wounded protagonists of Hemingway’s fiction: Nick Adams, Jake Barnes, Frederic Henry, Harry Morgan, Richard Cantwell, and others. Over the last two decades, the critical frameworks of disability studies have helped readers to reinterpret these fictions in ways that switch focus from wound to disability, from the individual to the structural, from narratives of cure to explorations of different ways of being in the world. This panel will focus on disability, broadly understood, as it manifests in Hemingway’s work at the levels of character, narrative, and style. We hope to shift discussion from questions of how, for example, Frederic Henry is limited by his injury to explorations of how A Farewell to Arms thematizes immobility, how the novel’s slips into stream-of-consciousness narration coincide with episodes of immobility, etc. Papers may focus on specific texts, trace an aspect of disability across the career, or treat Hemingway in comparison with other modernist writers along the axis of disability.
Please direct your 250-word proposal and a short professional bio to Michael Thurston (mthursto@smith.edu). The deadline for proposals is 15 March 2026. Papers will be limited to 15-20 minutes.