Crossings may mark the dislocation of the migrant or the dissonance of translation. From the exhausted intersectionality discourse drawn from the metaphor of crossroads to the renewed risk of border crossings, the notion of crossing has always been a dynamic space that has only become more urgent in the present. They may expose the constructedness of categories such as gender, genre, or even the human. Literature has long been a site where such boundaries are not only represented but made unstable—where hybrid forms, contradictory affects, or political fault lines animate new modes of relation.

What does it mean to cross a threshold—not only to move from one place to another, but to encounter a limit that reshapes what one is, or exposes what a form can hold? This panel takes crossings as a provocation to think with texts that trace, trouble, or transgress boundaries. Whether geographic, linguistic, ontological, or formal, crossings are moments where distinctions break down and something else—unresolved, excessive, improvised—emerges.

We invite papers that take up crossings in capacious ways. How do texts register these moments—not just thematically, but formally and affectively? By attending to how texts cross—and are crossed by—different boundaries, we hope to open up a conversation about movement, refusal, and what it means to dwell in the in-between.

We welcome proposals that consider (but are not limited to) the following keywords and concepts:

• Geographic: migration, diaspora, exile, refugee, displacement, borders, postcolonial, transnational movement
• Linguistic: translation, code-switching, untranslatability, multilingualism, voice
• Temporal: historical ruptures, anachronism, returns, speculative futures
• Ontological: human/non-human, animate/inanimate, the divine, spectral, AI or posthuman
• Genre/formal: art/literature, archive/fiction, mixed media, intertextuality, prose/poetry/theory blends
• Epistemological: reason/emotion, secular/sacred, myth/knowledge,
• Embodied : gender fluidity, trans experience, disability, racial passing Affective: shame/desire, sentiment/rationality, trauma/pleasure

Submit abstract (deadline: 9/7/2025): 

https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22019

Contact chairs:

Ayoung.kim@emory.edu 

eunjij@alumni.cmu.edu

 https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22019

 eunjij@alumni.cmu.edu

 Eunji Jo