Fusion or Fracture in the Hundred Acre Woods: Community in Adaptations of Winnie-the-Pooh (Virtual)
Co-organizers Michael A. Torregrossa and Carl B. Sell
Sponsored by Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association
Call for Papers - Please Submit Proposals by 30 September 2026
58th Annual Convention of Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
Salve Regina University (Newport, RI)/Online.
Hybrid event: 6-9 March 2027
This session’s modality is Virtual Only, meaning all presentations will be delivered via Zoom regardless of whether the presenters are in-person.
Rationale
Communities are at the heart of many literary texts, including the Winnie-the-Pooh series by writer A. A. Milne and artist Ernest H. Shepard.For over one hundred years, readers have experienced the adventures of Pooh and his companions within the Hundred Acre Woods through Milne and Shepard’s books and their various adaptations.
In this session, we’d like to focus on the ways the stories of Pooh and his friends have been adapted. Scholarship on these works remains limited despite their increasing growth over time, especially since Milne and Shepard’s works have entered the public domain.
We believe these new texts offer valuable insight into how readers have received the original tales through their representation (for good or ill) of the relationship between characters, maintaining the fellowship or breaking it through extraordinary means.
News of Winnie-the-Pooh (and adaptations) will be shared by the organizers on our blog, Silly Old Bear? Adaptations, Appropriations, and Transformations of Winnie-The-Pooh: https://silly-old-bear.blogspot.com/. We also encourage you to make use of the resource guide provided at https://tinyurl.com/SillyOldBearRG in formulating your approach.
Submission Instructions
All proposals must be submitted into the CFPList system at https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22573 by 30 September 2026. You will be prompted to create an account with NeMLA (if you do not already have one) and, then, to complete sections on Title, Abstract, Brief Bio, Media Needs, and Modality. This session’s modality is Virtual Only, meaning all presentations will be delivered via Zoom regardless of whether the presenters are in-person.
Notification on the status of your submission will be made by 16 October 2026. If accepted, NeMLA asks you to confirm your participation with the session chairs by accepting their invitation and by registering for the event. The deadline for Registration/Membership is 9 December 2026. For the 2027 Convention, registration will be the same for in-person and remote attendance. (See NeMLA’s Membership and Registration page, at https://www.nemla.org/about/members.html, for full details.)
Be advised of the following policies for the Convention: All participants must be members of NeMLA for the year of the conference. Participants may present on up to two sessions of any type. Registrants at NeMLA may not present the same abstract/paper on two different sessions. (See NeMLA’s Presenter Policies page, at https://www.nemla.org/convention/policies.html, for further details. Information on Session Types can be found at https://www.nemla.org/convention/sessions.html.)
NeMLA offers limited funding for travel to graduate students and to contingent faculty, adjunct instructors, independent scholars, and two-year college faculty. Details can be found at NeMLA’s Travel Awards page at https://www.nemla.org/awards/travel.html.
Thank you for your interest in our session. Please address questions and/or concerns to the organizers at popular.preternaturaliana@gmail.com.
For more information on the Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association, please visit our blog, Popular Preternaturaliana: Studying the Monstrous in Popular Culture, at https://popularpreternaturaliana.blogspot.com/.
