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.