Welcome to MAS
The Margaret Atwood Society is an international association of scholars, teachers, and students who share an interest in Atwood’s work. The main goal of the Society is to promote scholarly exchange of Atwood’s works and cultural contributions by providing opportunities for scholars to exchange information. To reach this goal, we publish a journal, Margaret Atwood Studies, for which we invite submissions year round, and we host several panels each year on Atwood at various academic conferences, including at the Modern Language Association Convention (MLA), Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE), and the Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA). (See the Calls for Papers tab to learn more). To let us know about current Atwood-scholarship-related news or events, please email us the appropriate information. We will include your news on this site and/or our Facebook page and Twitter feed. We welcome your friendship and comments on Facebook and Twitter, whether or not you join the Society. We also welcome you to interact with us on LinkedIn.
If you’d like to join the society, please see the Membership page.
Note: For contact information for Margaret Atwood, see the contact listings on her official website. (You might also have luck @ replying her on Twitter). We do not forward messages or materials to Ms. Atwood.
The 2025 Society Awards Winners!
Best Edited Collection: Lauren Rule Maxwell, Ed. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Margaret Atwood (MLA)
Best Dissertation: Şaziye Çikrikci, “Literary Translation and Adaptation in the Context of Post-Translation Studies: The Circulation of (Post) Feminist Elements in Margaret Atwood’s Novels”
Best Undergraduate Essay: Melina Mahinpoor, “How the Dystopian worlds in The Marrow Thieves and The Handmaid’s Tale Reflect Reality”
MLA 2027 CFPs
Guaranteed Panel MLA 2027: “Negotiating with the Dead”: Religion, Spirituality, and the Supernatural in
Atwood’s Works
The Margaret Atwood Society invites paper proposals for an online panel focusing on how Atwood’s
writing engages religious and spiritual practices and the supernatural. We welcome proposals that
consider how Atwood’s works mobilize the sacred, the ritual, the metaphysical, and/or the ghostly as
vehicles for meaning-making, ethical reflection, and narrative strategy. Possible topics include but are not
limited to:
Religion as ideology
Spirituality and folk belief outside institutional frameworks
Myth, ritual, and cosmology
Scriptural and prophetic discursive modes
Haunting, spectrality, and divided subjectivity
Eco-spirituality and religious environmental ethics
The relationship between storytelling, testimony, and the sacred
Please submit a 250-word abstract and brief biographical note to leefrew@yorku.ca by 15 March 2026.
Online Panel MLA 2027: “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum”: Testimony and Resistance in Atwood’s
Works
The Margaret Atwood Society invites paper proposals for an online panel on testimony and resistance in
Margaret Atwood’s work. In keeping with the MLA 2027 presidential theme, this panel welcomes papers
that examine how Atwood’s narratives represent coercion and constraint while also tracing the risk and
agency at stake in claiming liberatory space. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
• Testimony, witnessing, and the politics of voice
• Surveillance, secrecy, confession, and the archive
• Gendered power, reproductive politics, and bodily autonomy
• Critical reception and adaptation
Please submit a 250-word abstract and brief biographical note to leefrew@yorku.ca by 15 March 2026.
Atwood wins the Freedom to Publish Award
The British Book Awards honored her. Read more about it here.
Atwood awarded Lifetime Recognition by the Griffin Poetry Awards!
Congratulations to Margaret Atwood on the Griffin Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award! Read more about it here.
PAMLA CFP
The PAMLA 2025 Conference will be held at the elegant InterContinental San Francisco in San Francisco, California. The conference will begin on Thursday, November 20, and continue through November 23, 2025.
This session, Adaptations of Atwood (co-sponsored by the Margaret Atwood Society), seeks papers on adaptations of Margaret Atwood’s work, including television, film, graphic novels, song, opera, theatre, and ballet. We welcome proposals both related to the conference theme, “Palimpsests: Memory and Oblivion,” and those not related.
Send abstracts and a short bio to Karma Waltonen, kjwaltonen@ucdavis.edu, by 30 April 2025.
https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19463
MMLA 2025 CFP
MMLA Nov 14 – 16, 2025
Marquette University
Milwaukee, WI
40 Years of The Handmaid’s Tale
In 1985, Margaret Atwood’s sixth novel was published. The Handmaid’s Tale was a finalist for the Booker Prize and won the inaugural Arthur C. Clarke Prize. Impressive, yes, but the novel would not reach the height of its cultural relevance until decades later. The Handmaid’s Tale has been reimagined in numerous ways, including a 1990 film (with Natasha Richardson and Elizabeth McGovern), as an opera, a stage play, a streaming series (a format unimaginable at the time of the novel’s release), a ballet choreographed by Lila York, art and immersive exhibits, and a graphic novel adapted by Renée Nault. And it compelled Atwood to write its sequel, published 34 years later.
This panel invites papers that explore the rich and varied imprints The Handmaid’s Tale has made on the humanities: how audiences interact with it, how it inspires conversation and protest, and what parts of its legacy have yet to be written.
Please submit your 250-word abstract and brief biography to Denise Du Vernay, dduvernay@luc.edu, by April 15.
MLA 2026 CFP
MLA 2026: Toronto, 8–11 January 2026, CFP:
The circle game
We invite proposals on Atwood’s work and impact engaging with the theme of Families—broadly defined, including lineage, kinship, inheritance, found families, cross-species bonds, intertextuality and literary genealogies. 250-word abstract and CV due 3/23.
Deadline for submissions: Sunday, 23 March 2025
Lee Frew, York U (leefrew@yorku.ca)