The Association for Documentary Editing invites submissions for our upcoming guaranteed ADE-MLA session at MLA 2023:

New Evidence for Recovering Histories and Texts

Considering texts broadly as documentary, artistic, visual, aural, textile, performed, or inhabited, what new kinds and uses of evidence are recovering histories through texts? We especially invite underrepresented or interdisciplinary scholarship.

The panel will seek to develop our concept of editing for new kinds of evidence and build bridges between the ADE and MLA communities. Our aim is to foster conversation between people interested in traditional and non-traditional forms of editing and researchers who are making use of new or innovative editions and collections.

As G. T. Tanselle writes, in “The Textual Criticism of Visual and Aural Works”: “the medium employed in each art determines the nature of the evidence available for reconstructing textual history.” In addition to questions about how to criticize, document, and reproduce texts in “tangible” and “intangible” media, as Tanselle terms them, this panel further seeks to explore how new textual histories can be used to recover lost or understudied elements of cultures and societies. For example, Caroline Wigginton writes in “An Indigenous Pipe Bibliography” that “Indigenous pipe illustrations provide a rich test case … that helps produce new ideas about where books have been and are, and thereby shift our sense of the relationships between colonization, Indigenous agencies, and print technologies.” We seek presentations that speak to such shifts in historical understanding propelled by new or recovered textual evidence in any medium or language and from any period. Feel free to reach out to the organizers with questions.

• To submit, email a 250 word abstract and 2-page CV to J.P. Ascher, U of Virginia (jpa4q@virginia.edu), and Nikolaus Wasmoen, SUNY, University at Buffalo (nlwasmoe@buffalo.edu).
• Deadline for submissions: Friday, 25 March 2022.