[KS] [Call for Papers] 2027 MLA (Los Angeles) "Korean Literary Studies and Archival Critique as Method"

[Jinaeng Choi]

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 at georgetown.edu) & Chris Hanscom (
hanscom at 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?
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