If you want to search the MLA-exclusive list of calls, you need to be a member. Student membership is just $25, and you get a free copy of the MLA Style Manual, a year-long subscription to PMLA, and some other nice perks. MLA members who are organizing a session sometimes post copies of their calls to UPENN’s “Call for Papers.”
Guaranteed vs Not Guaranteed Sessions
As you scan calls for great topics, you might notice that some sessions are “guaranteed,” but others are not.
- A guaranteed session is guaranteed to be in the MLA convention. If you submit a proposal to a guaranteed session, and then your proposal is selected as an entry to the session, you are guaranteed presentation time at the conference.
- Non-guaranteed sessions, also known as special sessions, must be reviewed by the MLA Program Committee, judged on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being the highest.
- Out of approximately four hundred special sessions submitted every year, a special session has about 50% chance of being selected as a MLA session, based on numbers of guaranteed sessions and time availability.
From UPENN’s call for papers website, here’s a call for proposals regarding the Romanian playwright Matei Visniec’s work:
This call is very informative, and I highly recommend consulting the UPENN’s calls, even if you are an MLA member with access to MLA calls. The MLA calls are a mere 35-words, meant to be easy to glance over quickly.
If you want to propose your own special session, there are FAQs, helpful Proposal Forms for your Special-Session Proposal, and examples of bios, all found on the MLA website, of course. Lastly, whether you are working on creating a robust and innovative session, or an exciting proposal for a similarly invigorating session, I recommend taking a look at the Program Committee’s scoring guidelines for special sessions. Your session organizer might not give you any more information than a 35-word call, and the rest is up to you.
While the next MLA isn’t until January of 2019, the last call for calls is 28 February 2018. All session proposals, guaranteed and non-guaranteed, must be submitted to MLA by 1 April 2018. The Program Committee meets in May to review proposals, and then notifies special session organizers of the results of judging by early June. If you submitted a proposal to a special session, you should hear back by early June from your session organizer. If you submitted a proposal to a guaranteed session, you should hear the results by 1 April 2018.
Knowing that a “5” is the highest possible score given to special-sessions is helpful. (Five is also a good number for the amount of proposals to submit, in my personal experience.) Even more helpful, I leave you with the definition of a “5”:
“The highest score indicates that the session proposal is well thought out, the rationale is convincing and properly documented, the panelists are shown to be well qualified to undertake the topic, and the session will be attractive to an audience. A score of 5 is reserved for the best proposals, the ones that are appealing, fresh, and exciting” (MLA, “Scoring Guidelines for MLA Special Sessions and Competitive Sessions”).
