122nd Annual Conference (San Francisco) – Nov. 20-23, 2025

If your department or university wishes to become a 2025 Conference co-sponsor, please contact Craig Svonkin: director@pamla.org

The 122nd Annual PAMLA Conference

InterContinental San Francisco

888 Howard St.

San Francisco, California, 94103

415-616-6500

The PAMLA 2025 Conference will be held at the luxurious, elegant InterContinental San Francisco in San Francisco, California. The conference will begin on Thursday morning, November 20, and continue through Sunday late afternoon, November 23, 2025.

Hotel Reservation Note: The PAMLA 2025 Conference is being held entirely at the 4-star InterContinental San Francisco Hotel. PAMLA conference attendees who book their hotel room reservation through our PAMLA link will receive a significant discount. For more information, see our hotel page!

The 2025 PAMLA Conference is being held entirely in-person. There will be no virtual or hybrid sessions or papers–the entire conference is being held in-person. No papers may be read in absentia.

Still Time to Submit: PAMLA’s Extended Deadline Sessions Are Open!

Many PAMLA sessions (currently 150+) are still seeking strong proposals and have been added to our Extended Deadline List. These sessions will remain open until they fill or until June 30, whichever comes first—so don’t delay!

Explore the open sessions and submit your abstract today:
🔗 https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/CFP

PAMLA 2025 Dates and Deadlines

• Paper Proposal Extended Deadline: June 30 or when sessions fill (whichever comes first)
• PAMLA Membership Payment Deadline: June 25 (presiding officers must pay earlier)
• Regular Conference Registration: May 29 – July 20
• Conference Registration with Minor Late Fee Added: July 21 – September 15
  
• Conference Registration with Urgent Late Fee Added: September 16 – October 1

After August 1, those who have not paid PAMLA Membership Dues will be removed from the program.

After September 15, those who have not paid PAMLA Conference Fee will be removed from the program.

Those who cancel after September 15 will not receive a full conference fee reimbursement.

PAMLA 2025 Basic Rules and Practices

• Presiding Officers or Chairs may not propose papers to or invite themselves to their own sessions.
• We do not accept scheduling requests, except for religious reasons (please send religious scheduling requests to PAMLA Executive Director Craig Svonkin by August 10 at the latest). This means that panels might be scheduled for any time on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or on Sunday until approximately 3 pm.
• PAMLA 2025 will be held entirely in-person. Chairs, Presiding Officers, and panelists must physically attend the conference. Zoom, remote, or papers read in absentia are not allowed. Should you not be able to attend, please let your presiding officer/chair and Executive Director Craig Svonkin know right away.
• Conference participants may typically present twice, at most, at the conference. They may present once in a traditional panel and once in a roundtable or creative format session.
• Participants may not present the same paper, or a largely similar paper, at two different panel sessions. This policy applies as well for participants presenting at one panel and on one roundtable.
• Participants should not give a paper already presented at another conference or a previous PAMLA conference.
• One may only chair two sessions total, or present one traditional paper and chair one session. Presiding Officers with more than one session who are also presenting will work with Craig Svonkin to find chairs for their additional sessions.
• PAMLA does not publish conference proceedings. We do, however, encourage conference presenters to revise their presentations so as to submit them for consideration by PAMLA’s scholarly, peer-reviewed journal, Pacific Coast Philology.
• While PAMLA does provide some limited scholarships that graduate students, international scholars, and scholars of German literature may apply for, it is important to note that PAMLA, given its lack of any institutional support, lacks the funds necessary to support academic hotel and travel expenses.
• You may not present generative AI output or work by another author (human or otherwise) as your own scholarly work. Nor may you use AI output for the abstracts or descriptions of your work, or as your own work at the conference.
• PAMLA’s Board wishes to restate and re-emphasize our commitment to academic freedom, civil discourse, and free speech in our association and at our annual PAMLA conference. Please see our PAMLA Code of Conduct and PAMLA Commitment to Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity for more information.
  

Thank you for helping us make PAMLA 2025 a respectful, dynamic, and well-organized conference experience for all participants. We look forward to seeing you all in San Francisco for an event that celebrates a collaborative space for original scholarship, polite dialogue and free discourse. For more questions, head on over to our FAQ page, or reach out to director@pamla.org.

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; Animal Studies; 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; Continental Romanticism; 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; Early Modern Italian Studies; 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 and Francophone Literature and Culture; 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.

At this year’s PAMLA conference, the following sessions co-sponsored by allied associations will be held: Adaptations of Atwood (co-sponsored by the Margaret Atwood Society); Haunted Wests (co-sponsored by the Western Literature Association); Reactualizing the Golden Age in the Work of Robert Graves (co-sponsored by the Robert Graves Society); Gendered French and Francophone Contact Zones (co-sponsored by Women in French); 20th and 21st Century Poetry (co-sponsored by the Robert Lowell Society); Ecocriticism (co-sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature & Environment); Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Narratives (co-sponsored by the International Association for Robin Hood Studies); After the Frontier: Rewriting the West (co-sponsored by the Robinson Jeffers Association);  Screening French Diasporic and Marginalized Narratives (co-sponsored by Women in French); California Gothic (co-sponsored by Society for the Study of the American Gothic); Edith Wharton: A Backward Glance (co-sponsored by the Edith Wharton Society); Steinbeck’s West (co-sponsored by the International Steinbeck Society); Woman’s Place in the Contemporary French/Francophone Novel (co-sponsored by Women in French)