The American Name Society is welcoming paper proposals for its virtual panel for the Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention [#mla27].  The Convention will take place from the 7th to the 10th of January 2027. 

Panel Description

Espionage novels and allegories often use names to conceal motives, design plot twists, reveal  characters, or create caricature. How have authors, poets, playwrights, screenwriters, lyricists and other wordsmiths used names of characters, places, corporations, institutions, movements, etc., to effect onomastic sleight of hand? And why? In this panel, we will consider names that reveal and names that conceal people groups (anthroponyms), characters (charactonyms), places (toponyms), theonyms (divine beings), events, and more in the real world and/or in imagined worlds from any era, from any place, as recorded or found in any media. Useful resources include, the archives of NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics, the ANS list of terminology, Dorothy Dodge Robbins’ edited collection Literary Onomastics (2023), Star Medzerian Vanguri’s edited collection Rhetorics of Names and Naming (2016), and the Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming (2018).

 Proposal Submission Process
All interested authors are requested to send a PDF file that includes the proposal title, an abstract of up to 350-500 words, and a list of works cited. Please do not include author identification in the PDF.  Please send your submission as an email attachment to Dr. Anne W. Anderson (awanderson.editing@gmail.com).  In the email subject line, please use  “MLA 2027 proposal”.  In the body of your email, please include the title and first line of the abstract, the full name(s) of the author(s), their affiliation(s), and their email address(es). The deadline for receipt of abstract submissions is  11:59 pm EST on Monday, 16 March 2026.

Authors will be notified about the results of the blind review on or by 27 March 2026. Contributors selected for the thematic panel must be members of both MLA and ANS in order to present their papers; both memberships must be obtained by 7 April 2026.  Please direct questions to  Dr. Anne W. Anderson (awanderson.editing@gmail.com).  The ANS looks forward to receiving your submission.