Call for Papers for a proposed special session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention, Jan. 3-6, 2019, in Chicago, IL. This collaborative panel is jointly sponsored by the Comics and Graphic Narratives Forum and the Medical Humanities and Health Studies Forum.

The 2019 MLA Presidential Theme calls us to look at “textual transactions,” or “the mutually constitutive engagements of human beings, texts, and their contexts.” Critical scholarship in the field of Graphic Medicine has been flourishing, but, as evidenced by the pivotal text in the field, The Graphic Medicine Manifesto, the contextfor Graphic Medicine is predominantly health professions education. In what other contexts do graphic medicine’s textual transactions happen? For example:

• How might graphic medicine narratives be shaping patients’ and informal caregivers’ experiences with professional caregivers and the medical establishment?
• How might they be shaping the embodied experiences of individuals facing illness and/or disability?
• How have graphic narratives transformed the creation and consumption of pathographies, or illness narratives?

Send 250-word abstracts and 2-page CV by 15 March 2018 to Erin Lamb (lambeg@hiram.edu) and Lan Dong (ldong4@uis.edu). Submitters will receive notification of results by April 1.

Please note, this is a proposed, not a guaranteed, session at MLA 2019. It is contingent on approval by the MLA Program Committee. All prospective presenters must be current MLA members by April 2018.