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Dear All,

Please find below a call for papers for a proposed special session at the 2027 MLA convention. 

Call for Papers: 2027 MLA convention (Los Angeles)

Korean Literary Studies and Archival Critique as Method

Taking critical thinking about the archive as a point of departure, this session considers both the  power of the archive to fix or immobilize—to set the terms of intelligibility—and the challenge that mobility or circulation poses to its authority.  If the archive is a mechanism through which literary history, cultural networks, and regimes of visibility are made but also contested, we aim to examine periodicals and serial media as sites where collectivities and communities may take shape and become legible across national or linguistic boundaries. We invite work that questions what counts as “archival,” how archival boundaries are drawn and contested, and how archival infrastructures and practices condition circulation, visibility, and value.  What happens to the idea or practice of Korean literary history when we treat magazines, newspapers, journals, and other serial publications not simply as sources but as archives or counter-archives that actively produce—and continually question—what becomes legible as “literature”?

Please send a 250–300 word abstract and a brief bio by March 27, 2026, to Jinaeng Choi (jinaeng.choi@georgetown.edu) & Chris Hanscom (hanscom@humnet.ucla.edu). 

We especially encourage proposals that engage questions including but not limited to:

- Archival protocols and power: What gets preserved, indexed, and made searchable—and what is rendered invisible in that process? What cataloging, classification, and access regimes determine what is preserved, searchable, and citable? How do editorial labor, paratexts, advertisements, distribution routes, and subscription economies shape what “counts” as literary?

- Materials and methods: How do advertisements, classifieds, editorials, reader letters, photographs, layout, typography, and marginal columns participate in literary history? What happens when we treat these as primary objects of analysis rather than background context? What methodological practices help us work responsibly with serial, fragmentary, unevenly preserved records—and what does it mean to make arguments at the scale of issues, runs, platforms, or networks rather than individual texts?

- Seriality as archival form: How does serial publication (installments, revisions, reprints, excerpts) complicate concepts like “work,” “author,” “period,” and “canon”? What methodological tools help us read across discontinuity without flattening it?

- Archival poetics and literary practice: How do literary texts (or periodical-based writing practices) formally represent the archive—visually, structurally, or thematically? When does the archive function as a metaphor for how literary value and community belonging are negotiated—through shared reading practices, interpretive frames, affiliations, intergenerational transmission, and collective repair—and when does it register their fractures through violence and trauma?

- Rewriting literary history through archival critique: How do archival conditions reorganize periodization, canon formation, or genre boundaries? What kinds of networks (editorial, institutional, diasporic, colonial, national, transregional) become visible when circulation—rather than authorship alone—anchors the analysis?

- Global and comparative perspectives on “the archive”: How might periodical research in Korean studies complicate assumptions about the “modern archive”? What alternative record-keeping practices, memory traditions, and colonial power dynamics need to be foregrounded to theorize the archive globally?