PAMLA 2026 Seattle: “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict”

The 123rd annual PAMLA Conference will be held between November 12-15, 2026 at the Hyatt Regency in Seattle, Washington.

PAMLA welcomes special session proposals (both on and off theme) for the 2026 PAMLA conference on topics of scholarly interest that are not too close to the topics of our standing sessions (see below to find a list of PAMLA’s general/standing sessions). Special session and paper submissions are not limited to the theme of this year’s conference, “Our Ruling Classes.” But if you’d like to touch on the theme that would be most welcome.

As our PAMLA 2026 theme, “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict,” PAMLA welcomes special session proposals on a wide array of creative, scholarly, literary, filmic, or cultural topics. Submissions related to the distribution of power, birthright aristocracy in literature and culture, and revolutionary movements against traditional hierarchies are particularly welcome.

Who rules us? Who leads us? All social collectives have struggled with the question of how and when to empower and elevate individuals or subgroups within a community—a family, a tribe, a kingdom, a nation—for the purposes of adjudicating internal conflicts, inspiring collective action, and representing the community to the outside world. From folktale to epic narrative to stage-drama to realist fiction to film and television narratives, literature has historically played a vital role in identifying, legitimating, and sometimes challenging a community’s basic leadership structures.

The 2026 PAMLA Conference welcomes paper or presentation submissions on all topics for discussion in its panels, roundtables, and other PAMLA events. This year’s conference theme accommodates but does not require presentations that examine the stories people tell to venerate departed elders, to celebrate the achievements of legendary heroes, or to constitute a collective identity around narratives of shared hardship. It also invites proposals on the counter-narratives that have emerged to deplore hubris and elitism, to identify and decry tyranny.

For those who wish to propose a session in line with the 2026 conference theme, PAMLA welcomes proposals on topics such as:

The wisdom of the elders—elevation of the aged and ancestral.
Feudalism—ancient, medieval, and postmodern.
Heroes, epic and tragic.
Literary accounts of an emergent meritocracy.
Colonization, colonial hierarchies, and anti-colonial resistance.
Corporate and transnational political elites.
Class division, caste, and consciousness: aristocrats, courtiers, proletarians, and peasants.
Rival families—power and vendetta among the elites.
Gendered hierarchies of power.
The cult of celebrity and the veneration of power.
Economic vs. cultural elites.
Haves and have-nots: stories of stratification and polarization.
Many, many other topics addressing literature, political power, and our ruling classes.

However, we also encourage proposals that lie beyond this focus (please review our standing session topics so as to avoid undue overlap with our standing session topics: https://www.pamla.org/about/constitution-bylaws/).

The 2026 special session proposal deadline is March 1, 2026. To submit a session proposal, log into pamla.ballastacademic.com (you will need to create an account there if you’ve never done so before), click on the Propose Session button, and follow the directions from there.

*PAMLA encourages special session proposals with alternative formats, such as roundtables, workshops, special and creative events.While PAMLA will consider pre-planned sessions, we encourage session proposals that will welcome paper proposals from a wide variety of scholars, not just scholars from the presiding officer’s host institution.

*PAMLA hosts the following General/Standing Sessions (So please make sure that your special session proposal does not merely replicate the topic of one of these existing General/Standing Sessions):

21st-Century Literature; Adaptation Studies; African American Literature; American Literature before 1865; American Literature 1865-1945; American Literature after 1945; Ancient-Modern Relations; Anime and Manga; Architecture and Space; Asian American Literature; Asian Film and Media; Asian Literature; Austrian Studies; Autobiography; Beyond Binaries; Bible and Literature; British Literature and Culture: To 1700; British Literature and Culture: Long Eighteenth Century; British Literature and Culture: Long Nineteenth Century; British Literature and Culture: 20th and 21st Century; Canadian Literature and Culture; Children’s Literature; Classics (Greek); Classics (Latin); Comics and Graphic Narratives; Comparative American Ethnic Literature; Comparative Literature; Comparative Media; Composition and Rhetoric; Creative Writing: Brief Prose; Creative Writing: Poetry; Crime and Mystery; Critical Theory; Cultural History; Digital Humanities & Creative Praxis; Digital Studies; Disability Studies; Disney Culture; Drama and Society; East-West Literary Relations; Family and Metafamily; Fantasy and the Fantastic; Feminisms; Film and Literature; Film Studies; Folklore and Mythology; Food Representation in the Spanish-Speaking World; Food Studies; French; Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Literature; Germanic Studies; Gothic; Hip Hop Aesthetics and Spoken Word Poetics; Horror and the Supernatural; Indigenous Literatures and Cultures; Italian; Italian Cinema; Italian Ecocriticism; Jewish Literature and Culture; Language, Culture, and Linguistics; Latin American Cinema; Latina/o Literature and Culture; Literature & the Other Arts; Literature and Religion; Medieval Literature; Middle English Literature, including Chaucer; New Italians; Oceanic Literatures and Cultures; Old English Literature, including Beowulf; Poetry and Poetics; Postcolonial Literature; Prison Studies; Religion in American Literature; Rhetorical Approaches to Literature; Rhetorical Theory; Romanticism; Science Fiction; Shakespeare and the Early Moderns; Spain, Portugal, and Latin America: Jewish Culture & Literature in Trans-Iberia; Spanish and Portuguese (Latin American); Spanish and Portuguese (Peninsular); Teaching with Media and Technology; Teaching Writing Across the Disciplines; Television Studies; Travel and Literature; Un camino difícil/A difficult Journey: Cultural Products about “(Il)legal” (Im)migration; Veterans Studies; Video Game Studies; Women in Literature; Young Adult Literature and Culture.

PAMLA 2026 Conference Theme

PAMLA 2026 Seattle: “Our Ruling Classes: Culture, Power, Conflict”

Other Special Session Topics