The Midwest Modern Language Association welcomes submissions to the Fall 2023 issue of the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association addressing the theme of its 2022 conference, Post-Now. The 2022 conference explored this theme by fostering a collective discussion of the role of humanities post-now in an emphatic call for immediate changes in the field to allow a fundamentally different future. This issue of the JMMLA seeks submissions that engage with and problematize the topic by addressing questions such as: How do we position modern languages and literatures, and humanities more broadly, in these changing times? How can we practice, both in our classrooms and in our research, socially relevant dialogues, informed by reflexive practices that promote community, rather than unilateral actions of one individual for the benefit of that individual alone? How do we move back toward developing communities that embrace difference, recognizing and stressing the importance of diversity across a wide spectrum, including gender, race, class, and ideology? How do we minimize our own political and personal biases and critically interrogate our own race, class, and gender privileges? Moreover, do we need such an emphatic call for rupture that requires new strategies to adapt to the "now" we are facing? Or perhaps, are these strategies already available and just need to be adapted post-now? Adhering to the MMLA’s mission of disseminating and furthering the exchange of knowledge, discovery, and learning in modern languages and literatures, we encourage submissions that advance criticism, research, and teaching to assess the important role our field will have after repositioning itself in this landscape to reaffirm its relevance and importance to shape the future. 

Essays in English, French, Spanish, German, or Portuguese should be submitted by July 31, 2023 for full consideration. Submission procedures and formatting guidelines are described on the journal page of the website for the Midwest Modern Language Association. Please direct all questions to the MMLA at mmla@luc.edu. Queries may also be directed to the issue editor, Michelle Medeiros (michelle.medeiros@marquette.edu). Articles should be between 7,000 and 10,000 words (including notes) and follow the MLA guidelines.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

• Feminisms and transfeminisms
• Literature and the environment
• Pop culture and visual arts
• Queer identities
• Cultural and literary studies
• Environmental and cultural sustainability
• Indigenous cultures
• Disability studies
• Postcolonial studies
• Race, gender, and subalternity
• Religious discourses
• Nationalisms
• Transatlantic Studies: Latin America/ Europe/Africa
• Travel writing and networks
• Women studies
• Interdisciplinary work and the humanities
• Language communities
• Cultures of diaspora
• Minority cultures
• Ecocritical approaches to literature and cultural studies
• Transcultural identities
• Food studies
• Art, music, and painting

 

Submission deadline: July 31, 2023

Prior to submission please review the JMMLA Style Guide and JMMLA Manuscript Manager Instructions.

The Journal of the Midwestern Modern Language Association invites submissions for a Spring 2024 special issue on the theme of “Intelligence.”

 

In 2021, as a consequence of the pandemic, schools and colleges across the country placed a temporary freeze on standardized testing, reinforcing doubts regarding the necessity and efficacy of such tests to assess intellectual potential. Soon thereafter, the November 30^th 2022 launch of ChatGPT-3 elicited responses ranging from the apocalyptic (the software is a huge step toward artificial general intelligence) to the skeptical (the software is not and cannot be intelligent).

 

The rapidity and volume of opinions surrounding both events reveal deep investments, insecurities, and frankly, gaps in our wider understandings of intelligence. This special issue of the JMMLA responds to the opportunity presented by such massive, messy cultural discourses to rethink the very notion of intelligence. In particular, we seek essays that consider what the humanities–excluded from the STEM-oriented intelligence conversation for basically the entire 20th-century–can contribute to discourses on intelligence in terms of social, cultural, historical, and critical depth.

 

To this end, we welcome contributions that explore what intelligence is, what it has been, and what it might be, particularly from a humanities perspective. Our goal is to produce an issue that reframes discussions about which mental capabilities constitute intelligence, how to measure them, and what these measurements say about an individual; that challenges the long-dominant premise that numbers (IQ scores, grades) tell empirical truths about a person’s intellectual ability and potential; and that considers literature and other cultural productions as active participants in the conceptual formation of what “intelligence” is, does, and looks like.

 

Possible topics include:

• Cultural representations of intelligence
• Narratives of intellectual development
• Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, including as pedagogical tools
• Intellectualism and anti-intellectualism as evolving cultural formations
• Intelligibility – how ideas, objects, and communities become intelligible
• Intelligence assessments and intelligence types – origins and impacts
• Education and intelligence in the arts/humanities and/or STEM
• Intelligence and marginalization
• Intellectual Property
• Animal and planetary intelligences
• Emotional intelligence
• Distributed, collective, and embodied intelligence

Submission procedures and formatting guidelines are described on the journal page of the website for the Midwest Modern Language Association. Please direct all questions to the MMLA at mmla@luc.edu or to the co- editors of this special issue, Naomi Michalowicz (nm2925@columbia.edu) and Nathan Jung (najung@wisc.edu). Articles should be between 7,000 and 10,000 words (including notes) and follow MLA guidelines.