Three Society Panels for MLA 2027, Los Angeles

The Samuel Beckett Society is delighted to announce that it will provide three panels to the Modern Language Association 2027 Convention which will take place in Los Angeles in January. The Society is guaranteed one panel every year so it is an achievement to have two additional sessions accepted for inclusion as it provides increased opportunities for members to take part in this significant event.

In keeping with the Society’s commitment to engaging as widely as possible and to hearing from as diverse a range of voices, the Society’s guaranteed panel, titled Global Beckett, will consist of papers from Amjad Alshalan (King Saud University, Saudi Arabia): Beckett and the Saudi Imagination: Aesthetic Resonance and the Space of Form; Hania A.M. Nashef (American University of Sharjah, UAE): Palestine and the Impossible Arrival of Godot; and Maria Ristani (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece) Theodoros Terzopoulos’s Aspettando Godot (2023): Waiting for the Other. In order to facilitate all members wishing to take part in selection but who may have ultimately fallen foul of current United States visa policies, it was decided to conduct this session online.

We also have a panel titled ‘The Origins of Samuel Beckett’s Creativity: The School and University Years’, which was submitted by incoming Society president José Francisco Fernández (University of Almería) and will include contributions from Hugh Deasy (Concordia University), Lidan Lin (Purdue University), Stefano Rosignoli (Independent Scholar) and Virginie Podvin (Université de Bretagne Occidentale). Finally, Society committee member Katherine Weiss (Cal State LA) has assembled a very strong Roundtable to discuss ‘Beckett and Pedagogy’ in S. E. Gontarski (Florida State University), Patrick Bixby (Arizona State University), Colleen Jaurretche (UCLA), Virginie Podvin (Université de Bretagne Occidentale), Anwita Ghosh (Georgia Tech) and Muhammad Saeed Nasir (Emerson University, Multan). Both of these sessions will be conducted in person.