The ANS panel at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention #mla26
8-11 January 2026, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
ONOMASTIC RHETORIC: ACTS OF NAMING IN REAL AND/OR IMAGINED WORLDS
Acts of naming people, places, and things are acts of power, whether for good or ill and whether in the real world or in imagined worlds. Sometimes names change, through other acts of power. Does it necessarily follow that accepting a given name is an act of weakness? What acts of naming occur in the liminal space between the real and the imagined? In this panel, we will consider acts of naming people (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 (https://ans-names.pitt.edu/ans/issue/archive), the
ANS list of terminology (https://ans-names.pitt.edu/ans/keywords), 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:
1. Email Dr. Anne W. Anderson (awanderson.editing@gmail.com) as follows:
a. Subject Line: Use “MLA 2026 proposal” in the subject line.
b. Email body: In the email body 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).
c. Proposal: Attach a PDF file that includes the proposal title, an abstract of up to
350 words, and a list of works cited. Do NOT include author identification in the
PDF.
2. DEADLINE: Proposals must be received by 11:59 pm EST on Monday, 17 March 2025.
Authors will be notified about the results of the blind review on or by 27 March 2025.
3. Contributors selected for the thematic panel must be members of both MLA and ANS in order to present their papers; MLA membership must be obtained by 7 April 2024.
4. Questions? Please contact Dr. Anne W. Anderson (awanderson.editing@gmail.com).