Dear All,

The Seminar on the Mahābhārata and Classical Hinduism is excited to announce that AAR’s Call for Proposals is now open.

Year Four of the seminar includes this theme:  Structure(s) of the Mahābhārata

This session is dedicated to exploration of structural features of the text, including narrative and linguistic configurations that shed light on its meanings.  The many commentaries, appendices, and adaptations of the text are included in this call for papers.

In addition, we seek papers responsive to the Presidential Theme for the 2024 Annual Meetings: “Violence, Nonviolence, and the Margin.”  The President's theme is an opportunity to reflect upon one of the Mahābhārata's consuming preoccupations: violence and nonviolence. Papers might address questions of practicality and philosophy, narrative and history, ethics and aesthetics, centre and margin. We invite papers from a broad range of source materials and methodologies.

The Seminar on the Mahābhārata and Classical Hinduism will be participating in the Online June sessions on June 25–27, 2024. We encourage you to apply, specifying whether your proposal is for the online or in-person event.  Please note that AAR does not allow you to submit the same proposal for both June and November. For this and other questions about the new June meeting, check out the FAQ.

All proposals must be submitted through AAR’s PAPERS system. The deadline is Thursday, February 29, 2024, 5:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. Detailed instructions are provided here; please consult them carefully for information about word count, procedures, and the limits on the number of appearances (you can only appear on the program two times in any capacity). 

In an effort to encourage diversity in seminar participants, those who presented papers in our 2023 meeting are unlikely to have proposals accepted for the 2024 sessions.  We seek to include the best proposals we receive, whether or not they conform to the themes of the call for proposals, and we seek publication opportunities for them. 

Since we operate as a seminar in AAR, proposals that we accept are to be presented as completed papers and are due October 1.  These papers will be circulated on our Listserv so that those interested in attending can read them before the meeting, and each paper will receive about half an hour of discussion at the meeting with the aim to offer suggestions for improving and extending the papers for possible publication.

Best,

Brian