SSAWW Calls for Papers

Send announcements and calls for papers that you'd like posted on this page to Donna Campbell at ssaww.web@gmail.com. Please send the information in the body of your message, not as an attachment. Plain text is best, and if you are sending a long list of topics, it's helpful to use a hyphen or dash instead of a list of bullets (since these must be edited one by one). Dates listed beside the links are the deadline dates.

SSAWW Triennial Conference, October 10-13, 2012; Denver, Colorado
"Citizenship and Belonging"

SSAWW Triennial Conference October 10-13, 2012; Westin Tabor Center, Denver, Colorado

Printable form for Individual and Panel Proposals

Printable form for SSAWW affiliated societies

Monday, February 6, 2012: Proposals due to ssawwconf@gmail.com; see page 2 for directions.

Note: Presenters must be members of SSAWW by the “early/discounted” date for conference registration in the fall of 2012.

Participants presenting one formal academic paper may also appear on the program in additional ways (e.g., as a respondent, on a roundtable, or in a “professionalization” session.)

For the fall 2012 Conference of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW), we are issuing a special invitation for session and paper proposals linked to the theme of “Citizenship and Belonging.” As in the past, the conference organizers will welcome proposals on any topic related to the study of American women writers, broadly conceived. However, we are also eager to capitalize on the conference opportunity to promote conversations—both “in the moment” and sustained—around a shared theme.

Historically speaking, these have been concerns of American women authors from their earliest writings, published and unpublished, and they remain concerns today. Long before the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments, women writers raised questions about how they could participate in the leadership of new American communities; similarly, contemporary women respond to the day’s political events and social trends in many forms of the written word. Just as women of all backgrounds considered the parameters of “Americanness”—its inherence or its acquisition, its stability or fluidity, its necessity or its superfluity—their contemporary counterparts are using both old-fashioned forms and cutting-edge technologies to reimagine the United States and its people for the 21 st century. Whether one thinks of Harriet Jacobs pondering her own “sale” in 19 th-century New York, Jhumpa Lahiri imagining connections across seas and generations in her short fiction, or young writers seizing the potential of the internet and social media to create their own publishing worlds, women writers have always, and perhaps always will, wrestle with what it means to belong.

Citizenship—how to claim it, how best to exercise it, and where its boundaries lie—is at the heart of much women’s writing. Citizenship can be constructed in many ways, both legally and culturally, and can be explored in terms of race, class, ethnicity, family, sexuality, economics, religion, place, and region—in short, from multiple perspectives and through multiple lenses. It can also be investigated as a question of form and genre: what kinds of writing “belong,” and to what realms or entities do they claim entry?

We hope our fall 2012 conference will provide an array of opportunities for examining these interrelated themes of “Citizenship and Belonging,” even as we continue to honor the many other topics and organizing principles that have made our field so dynamic. So, as we build a strand of theme-related sessions, we encourage SSAWW members to consider these two terms—citizenship and belonging—either together, in dialogue with each other, or individually, as productive lenses for exploring the heritage, current work, and future promise of American women writers.

Printable form for Individual and Panel Proposals

Printable form for SSAWW affiliated societies

Email your proposal (using the printable forms linked above) in a single attachment to ssawwconf@gmail.com no later than February 6, 2012. Please make sure your file name includes your last name—e.g., Smith-ssaww2012.

Questions about the conference? Contact Sarah Robbins (s.robbins@tcu.edu) or Maria Sanchez (mcsanche@uncg.edu), conference co-chairs, or Deb Clarke, SSAWW President ( Deborah.Clarke@asu.edu). We hope to see you in Denver in October, 2012.

This panel seeks to explore the powerful influence of the discourse of anti-Catholic literature in the work of nineteenth-century American women writers. In keeping with the theme of “Citizenship andBelonging,” we are interested in examining the way that anti-Catholicliterature participates in the project of mapping out a normative Protestant, American identity. In their important studies, both Susan Griffin and Jenny Franchot have identified a robust tradition of nineteenth-century anti-Catholic literature, noting the way that this work registers Protestant anxiety arising in part from the dramatic increase in Irish and German Catholic immigration, coupled with the growing heterogeneity of Protestant practices.

As Griffin notes, anti-Catholic literature depicts Catholicism as a kind of “foreign infiltration,” one that is “inimical to nationhood.” Significantly, this literature tells its story of national identity by way of the family, demonizing Catholicism specifically as a threat to Protestant domesticity. Saturated with images of incestuous holy “fathers” and victimized, captive nuns, this work associates Catholicism with the Old World and the aristocratic and argues for its corrupting influence on the bourgeois, Protestant family of sentiment.

Possible texts for consideration are nativist novels like Helen Dhu’s Stanhope Burleigh, and escaped convent tales like Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosure’s at the Hotel Dieu Nunnery and Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent. We are also interested in investigations into anti-Catholicism in the work of such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martha Finley, Sarah Josepha Hale, and Augusta Evans, as well as educators like Mary Lyons and Catherine Beecher.

This panel is also interested in papers that consider the powerful influence of anti-Catholic literature’s rhetorical strategies—its tropes, plot devices, recurring images—in a variety of related genres. For example papers might explore the intersections between anti-Catholicism and:
--The gothic
--Captivity narratives
--Sentimentalism
--The domestic novel
--Abolitionist literature
--Temperance narratives
--Evangelical children’s literature

Please send abstracts of approx. 300 words along with a brief professional bio by January 23rd, 2012 to Allison Giffen (Allison.Giffen @wwu.edu)

The Society for the Study of American Women Writers Triennial Conference of 2012 will take place October 10-13, 2012 in Denver, Colorado.

SSAWW 2012: Maternal Patriotism: Motherhood and Citizenship in 19th-Century American Women's Writing

This is a call for a proposed panel for the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) Triennial Conference.

In Women of the Republic, Linda Kerber documents the origins of an American ideology of womanhood and citizenship and describes the rise of what she aptly calls republican motherhood. Kerber argues that in the days after the American Revolution "a consensus developed around the idea that a mother committed to the service of her family and to the state, might serve a political purpose."

In the industrializing nineteenth century, as the ideological separation of domestic and public spheres rigidified, feminine citizenship was, in fact, imagined as strictly bounded by the maternal role in the home. In Letters to Mothers, for example, Lydia Sigourney ponders how women's "patriotism" can "find legitimate exercise," noting that "the admixture of the female mind in the ferment of political ambition, would be neither safe, if it were permitted, nor to be desired, if it were safe." Motherhood, Sigourney concludes, is the only proper and secure mode of female citizenship, and she argues that the "true measure" of a woman's "patriotism" is "the degree of her diligence in preparing her children to be good subjects of a just government."

While the ideology of feminine civic duty in the nineteenth century was thus largely delimited by women's domestic roles, women authors of the era at times questioned the construct through their writing. Some explored how the cultural power of maternal influence might be deployed to affect radical change in the public sphere. Others overtly challenged the limits of female patriotism, imagining a citizenship for women that transcended the maternal role.

The organizer of the proposed panel seeks papers that explore the intersection of motherhood and citizenship in the work of nineteenth-century American authors. Papers that examine how women writers of the era endorsed, exploited, critiqued, challenged, or rejected the construct of maternal patriotism are welcome.

Southern Cultures, the award-winning and peer-reviewed quarterly from UNC's Center for the Study of the American South, would like to strongly encourage submissions from scholars of women and gender (and from other academicians) on topics that address the American South. We are a multidisciplinary journal, interested in all approaches and types of scholarship, and we pay our contributors.

Over 50,000 people annually read Southern Cultures in print, online, and through eBooks, including scholars and students of history, labor, American studies, literature, folklore, popular culture, political science, women & gender, music, photography & art, environment, sports, and many other subjects. To browse our essays online, please visit:

To read the latest issue and for information about submissions, please visit: www.southerncultures.org

The Research Society for American Periodicals solicits proposals for papers on American periodicals and working class cultures to be delivered at the American Literature Association's 23rd Annual Conference, 24-27 May 2012 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco in Embarcadero Center.

Consider periodicals such as _The Messenger_ (founded as the official organ for the Pullman Porter's Union) to the _Worker's Daily_ - What role have periodicals played in forming and re-forming class consciousness among the working classes in the U.S.? What unique methodological challenges do working-class periodicals pose? How do working-class periodicals expand our understanding of readership and activism, labor and literary culture? How does literature or literary criticism in _The Partisan Review_ or _The New York Review of Books_ shape our understanding of the high-brow or low-brow audiences? What brow is the _New Yorker_, anyway? What are the challenges & possibilities for teaching material that concerns working class issues from highbrow sources? Conversely, what in various working classperiodicals was designed explicitly or implicitly to teach? We seek submissions concerning any aspect of American working-class magazines,newspapers, or periodicals in any form.

Eleanor Hodgman Porter’s Pollyanna at 100 1/10/2012
Roxanne Harde and Lydia Kokkola
Contact: rharde@augustana.caand lydia.kokkala@utu.fi

In honor of the 100th anniversary of Eleanor Hodgman Porter’s Pollyanna, we are soliciting essays for a proposed volume in the Children’s Literature Association’s Centennial Series. The series seeks to re-examine children’s classics from a contemporary perspective. All critical and theoretical approaches are welcome, as are analyses of the cultural productions connected to the novel, including sequels, translations, films, and television series. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

--Optimism
- Disability/disability studies
-- Sympathy
-- Christianity
-- Girlhood studies
-- Ideologies of class
-- Ideologies of nationhood
-- Constructions of motherhood/mothers and their replacements
-- Constructions of the elderly
-- Constructions of masculinity
-- “Queerness” and other sexualities
-- Sentimentality (and/or reality) and constructions of the child
-- Nature (and/or eco-critical perspectives)
-- The novel in the context of its sequels, “The Glad Books”
-- The novel in the context of Porter’s other novels for children
-- The novel in the context of Porter’s writing for adults
--The novel in the context of stage, film, and televisionadaptations
-- The novel in the context of board and video game adaptations
-- The reception of Pollyanna around the world

Abstracts of 250-500 words are due to both editors 10 January 2012; please put “Pollyanna-author last name” in the subject line. Completed articles of around 6000 words will be due 1 May 2012.

Glasgow Scholarship will be represented at the American Literature Association’s 2012 meeting in San Francisco, May 24-27, 2012, in two ways:

The Ellen Glasgow Society will sponsor one panel on the relationships Ellen Glasgow forged with other writers during her lifetime with an emphasis on how such relationships influenced Glagow’s writing and thematic parallels among the literary works of Glasgow and her cohort. Papers may focus on personal and professional relationships with other writers.

We hope to gather three to five scholars to present work on different writers with whom Glasgow corresponded to reveal the ways in which Glasgow was influenced by other writers. Proposals of 300-500 words for 20-minute papers should be sent electronically to Ashley Lear, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ashley.lear@erau.edu) by Friday, January 6, 2012.

-- comparative analyses of literary works by Glasgow and an author with whom she corresponded;
-- comparative historical analysis of Glasgow’s relationship with another writer through textual artifacts;
-- comparative analyses of the Glasgow and another writer in their portrayals of gender, sexuality, regionalism, race, etc.

The Ellen Glasgow Society will sponsor one general panel of papers on Ellen Glasgow and her work. Topics and approaches are open. We seek innovative work in Glasgow scholarship.

Please send 300-500 word proposals for 20-minute papers electronically to Ashley Lear, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ashley.lear@erau.edu) by Friday, January 6, 2012.

SSAWW 2012: Mothering Narratives in Contemporary American Women's Writing (Proposals Due 12/10/11; Conf. Oct 2012 in Denver)

Call For Papers: I am looking for paper proposals for a panel titled:"Mothering Narratives in Contemporary American Women's Writing."

Motherhood is the target of many recent scholarly publications concerning women’s writing. Andrea O’Reilly (founder and director of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement and editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering) and Liz Podniek’s 2010 collection of essays, entitled Textual Mothers/ Maternal Texts:
Motherhood in Contemporary Women’s Literature, analyzes “matrifocal narratives” that “articulate and theorize . . . becoming and being a mother from the perspective and subjectivity of mothers themselves” (2-3). The two editors argue that many authors have written about mothers through time, but very few have taken the mother as the central character.
What O’Reilly and Podnieks term “daughter-centric” stories are responsible in large part for “launch[ing] the recovery of maternal literary traditions” in the 1990s; however, in these stories, mothers are more often than not absent, lost, or represented as “infantilized,” “dependent and confused,” or “repressed, depressed, or obsessed” (12-13). Scholars have discovered that the mother’s voice has been overly simplified, modified to fit particular social/political agendas, and/or absent from textual/visual sources throughout literary history.

The aim of this panel is to “create a space for the articulation of maternal voices, ‘to edge toward speech’ the discursive and literary narratives of textual mothers and maternal texts” (367). To this end, I am seeking papers that examine contemporary American women’s narratives of “mothering”--“an oppositional discourse of motherhood, one that seeks to challenge the dominant ideology of motherhood and change the various ways that the lived experience of patriarchal motherhood is limiting or oppressive to women”-- that interrupt, complicate, or challenge idealized versions of the mother figure (17-18). We will seek answers to the following questions: What does it mean to mother in the 21st century? How is mothering empowering? How do the author’s constructions of mothering differ from/complicate typical literary depictions of motherhood? How do issues of race and class shape contemporary American literary constructions of motherhood?

Send 200-word proposals, along with a one-page CV, and a 1-paragraph professional bio by Dec. 10th to Katie Arosteguy at karosteguy@ucdavis.edu.
---
Katie Arosteguy, Ph.D.
Lecturer in English and University Writing Program UC Davis One Shields Ave.
Davis, CA 95616

The Society for the Study of Rebecca Harding Davis and Her World will organize one session at the annual conference of the American Literature Association. The conference will be held May 24-27, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency (Embarcadero Center) in San Francisco, California. For further information about the conference, please consult the ALA website at www.americanliterature.org.

To encourage scholarship on a wide range of issues on Davis’s work and her world, we are planning an “Open Topic” session. We are interested in proposals that touch on any topic in Davis’s work and especially welcome proposals that draw attention to her lesser-known texts. Presentations will be limited to 15-20 minutes to accommodate 3 or 4 presenters. Presenters must be members of the Society for the Study of Rebecca Harding Davis and Her World. For information about joining the society, please visit our website at http://scotus.francis.edu/rebeccahardingdavis/

ALA 2012: Emily Dickinson International Society
ALA will hold its twenty-third annual meeting in San Francisco, May 24-27, 2012. EDIS will sponsor two panels. One panel is open to papers on any aspect of Dickinson's life or literary work. The topic for the second panel is Dickinson's Development.

Please send proposals and academic affiliation/bio information to Vivian Pollak (vrpollak@wustl.edu) by January 10, 2012.

This proposed roundtable discussion, organized by Sharon Harris and Anne Boyd Rioux, will consider issues confronting those who are writing or have already written biographies of American women writers. We wish to address a wide variety of issues from a wide variety of perspectives. Some of the topics we have already considered include the following, but we welcome additional ideas.

Interested participants should send a short statement (max. 300 words) about their biographical work and the issues they would be interested in discussing in this proposed roundtable. Please also include a brief professional biography (max. 150 words). Send these two items to both Sharon Harris (sharon.harris@uconn.edu) and Anne Boyd Rioux (aeboyd@uno.edu) by January 6, 2013.

SSAWW 2012: To Belong or Not: Belonging in African American Women’s Writings of the 19th & 20th Centuries

In her 1861 slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs juxtaposes her experience of being a formerly enslaved woman living and working in the Northeast United States against the time she spent in Britain, where she was working for an American family. Jacobs writes that, in the Northeast, she is constantly reminded that her position as an African American woman makes her a second-class citizen in the eyes of most white Americans. From her struggle to find employment, to being forced to ride in segregated railway cars, to her interactions with people in the streets, Jacobs tells her readers that she was constantly subject to racism, something she had naively thought she would escape when she fled the South. In contrast, during her ten months abroad, she reveals that she knows, “for the first time . . . pure, unadulterated freedom.” She further tells her readers that “I never saw the slightest symptom of prejudice against color. Indeed, I entirely forgot it, till the time came for [me] to return to America.” With this statement, Jacobs implicitly argues that she felt more accepted and, indeed, more welcomed abroad than in the country of her birth. In Britain, perhaps for the first time since realizing she was enslaved, Jacobs experienced a sense of belonging, while she consistently struggled to feel as though she belonged in the United States.

In keeping with the theme of the 2012 SSAWW conference, this proposed panel seeks papers that explore the theme of belonging in works by 19th- and 20th-century African American women writers. By focusing on this time period, we hope to consider how African American women writers came to both see themselves as Americans while struggling to be seen as American citizens by the larger, predominantly white American population. The panel is equally interested in papers that consider belonging in a broad sense—as Elizabeth Keckley seems to consider how she, as an African American woman working in Washington, D.C. before, during, and after the Civil War, belongs to American society—as well as papers that consider belonging in a more intimate sense—as Jarena Lee seemingly does when she examines the ways an African American woman can belong to God in a culture that justified slavery through religion. Works of fiction and non-fiction will be considered. Possible topics may include but are not limited to:

-Marital/familial relationships, i.e., belonging to a family, a spouse, or a parent;

-Independence/individuality/subjectivity, i.e., how can one become a subject when she legally belongs to someone else?;

-Space and place, i.e., can one belong if she doesn’t have a space of her own?

Please send abstracts of 300 words along with a brief C.V. by Jan. 1, 2012 to Miranda Green-Barteet (mgreenb6@uwo.ca).

The Society for the Study of American Women Writers Triennial Conference of 2012 will take place October 10-13, 2012 in Denver, Colorado.

Call for Proposals, Edith Wharton Society, ALA 2012

1. Teaching Wharton’s Late Fiction

Recent Wharton scholarship has focused attention on her later fiction, particularly the post-1920s novels and their modernist contexts. Participants in this roundtable session will share strategies for teaching Wharton’s late fiction (novels, novellas, and short stories). Ideally, we seek proposals across a range of undergraduate and graduate courses (from surveys to special topics courses to graduate seminars) and from different institutions (private liberal arts colleges, research universities, smaller regional universities, etc.). Participants will have 7-10 minutes to share their approach, allowing for discussion among the participants and audience members.

Please send a brief CV and proposals of 250 words (electronic submissions preferred) to Gary Totten by January 16, 2012: gary.totten@ndsu.edu. NDSU English, Dept. 2320, P. O. Box 6050, Fargo, ND 58108-6050

2. Edith Wharton and the Age of (TM)Information: Edith Wharton Society at the ALA, May 2012
If Wharton’s late nineteenth century could ironically be termed “the age of innocence,” our own era might unironically be dubbed the age of “too much information,” marked by increasingly frayed boundaries between public and private life, the rise of gossip in nearly all media venues, and compromising revelations--political, financial, sexual--about powerful men emerging with alarming frequency. We seek papers considering how Wharton’s fiction might illuminate such matters. Topics for exploration could include:
*Hacking Lily’s cell phone: gossip and eavesdropping in Wharton’s writing
*Wharton’s social media: Town Topics and other intersections of gossip and the media in Wharton’s fiction
*Wharton’s celebrities, or Wharton as celebrity
*public exposure (of “outlines,” décolleté, infidelity, fraud, for example) in Wharton’s writing: self-display, overshares, shame, and shamelessness
*Wharton in the age of Facebook: friending, defriending, and getting complicated
*What would Wharton tweet?: The politics of (self)-revelation
Please send abstracts and short c.v.’s to Meredith Goldsmith, mgoldsmith@ursinus.edu, by Jan 20, 2012.

This proposed roundtable session—organized by Carolyn Sorisio and Cari Carpenter – is intended to share newly discovered archives and literary works by and about US women writers. We will suggest, as well, how newly discovered archives or literary works by or about US women writers contributes to scholarly narratives regarding US women’s literary representation or cultural history or both. We seek submissions from scholars in all stages of archival or literary recovery, ranging from those in the initial phases of archival exploration to those currently editing collections of archives or republishing literary works by US women writers (print or digital). We are interested in a diverse range of recovered materials, and therefore we encourage submissions from scholars in all historical periods.

Presenters will be given ten minutes each, and they will be asked to share a small sample of their archival research with the participants and to suggest how this sample has informed some aspect of their understanding of the woman writer or US women’s literary or cultural history. Our goal is to involve the attendees in analysis of the archives.

Interested panelists should submit the following to Carolyn Sorisio at csorisio@wcupa.edu (as a Word attachment in email) by January 9, 2012:

1. A paragraph describing your recovery work, specifying what stage the project is in, indicating the archival selection(s) you might share with the roundtable, and suggesting how the selection you share connects to US women’s literary or cultural history;

3. A statement regarding your A/V equipment requirements (keeping in mind that SSAWW has asked for participants to use handouts instead of requesting A/V due to costs).

CFP: Society Panel at ALA 2012 (May 24-27, San Francisco, CA)

“Family Life & the Fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe.”

Papers are sought on any aspect of family life in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Proposals are welcomed for studies that approach Stowe’s fiction using rubrics such as motherhood, fatherhood, siblings, the figure of the child, slave families, faith and the family, citizenship and the home, family and nation, or politics and family life.

While you need not be a Stowe Society member to submit a proposal, you must become a member to present on the Stowe panel at ALA.

Please submit a one page abstract and a one page CV to Mary Wearn (mary.wearn@maconstate.edu) by January 9, 2012.

The theme for this year’s SSAWW conference, “Citizenship and Belonging,” could have been designed with Charlotte Perkins Gilman in mind. (The conference theme information is posted in the “Calls for Papers” section of the website, under “SSAWW Tri-annual Conference.” http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/ssaww/call.htm#ssaww2012 ) Gilman was certainly interested in nationalism, citizenship, and belonging, and her work posed a number of related questions, such as: Who are citizens? Who should be citizens? What kind of citizenry makes for a healthy and productive nation? What contribution can women make to the nation? What constitutes the ideal citizen? What does political agency look like for women, and how can women exercise it?
The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society invites proposals on Gilman’s engagement with nationalism and citizenship – broadly interpreted – for the Gilman Society’s sponsored session at the SSAWW 2012 Conference, Oct. 10-13 in Denver, CO. Send abstracts and a brief CV to Jill Bergman (jill.bergman@mso.umt.edu) by January 23, 2012.

The Constance Fenimore Woolson Society invites paper proposals for a panel at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Tri-Annual Conference in Denver, Co, Oct. 10-13, 2012.Papers relating Woolson to the SSAWW “Citizenship & Belonging” conference theme are encouraged, but all topics will be considered, especially those connecting Woolson to other 19^th-c women writers or forging new directions in Woolson studies.

Essay Collection: Teaching Tainted Lit: Popular American Fiction and the Perils and Pleasures of the Classroom,

Essay contributions are sought for a volume entitled Teaching Tainted Lit: Popular American Fiction and the Perils and Pleasures of the Classroom, to be edited by Janet G. Casey. Taking as its premise the idea that popular fiction has secured a solid position in higher education classrooms, this collection seeks to explore its pedagogical implications. Possible topics may include: unusual or insightful uses of the popular in the context of college English; historical or contemporary struggles over the teaching of popular texts; the politics and intersections of popularity and canonicity as they pertain to the classroom; anxieties and pleasures (on the parts of students and/or teachers) located in reading the popular; differences in attitudes about studying historical and contemporary popular texts; relations between teaching the popular and the perceived crisis in the humanities; teaching the American popular outside the U.S.; issues of publication and dissemination that affect teaching (e.g., working with magazines; problems associated with out-of-print materials). Essays that focus on a particular text and its pedagogical ramifications are also welcome, especially if they put broader questions into play. Personal/anecdotal postures invited. Please send a 300-word abstract and cv to jcasey@skidmore.edu by 15 Jan. 2012. Invited essays will be due in late 2012.

Society for the Study of American Women Writers contact email: kristinjjacobson@gmail.com

Call for Papers: Society for the Study of American Women Writers (ALA 2012, San Francisco, CA, May 24-27)

The Society for the Study of American Women Writers will host two panels at the American Literature Association Conference (May 24-27, San Francisco, CA). The panel themes anticipate our fall 2012 conference in Denver, "Citizenship and Belonging." Historically speaking, these have been concerns of American women authors from their earliest writings, published and unpublished, and they remain concerns today. Both panels are open to scholarship focused on American women writers from any time period and writing in any genre.

Panel 1: American Women Writers and Citizenship Citizenship--how to claim it, how best to exercise it, and where its boundaries lie--is at the heart of much American women's writing. Citizenship can be constructed in many ways, both legally and culturally, and can be explored in terms of race, class, ethnicity, family sexuality, economics, religion, place, and region--in short, from multiple perspectives and through multiple lenses. It can also be investigated as a question of form and genre: what kinds of writing "belong," and to what realms or entities do they claim entry?

Panel 2: American Women Writers and Belonging Long before the 1848 Declarations of Sentiments, women writers raised questions about how they could participate in the leadership of new American communities; similarly, contemporary women respond to the day's political events and social trends in many forms of the written word. Just as women of all backgrounds considered the parameters of "Americanness"--its inherence or its acquisition, its stability or fluidity, its necessity or its superfluity--their contemporary counterparts are using both old-fashioned forms and cutting-edge technologies to reimagine the United States and its people for the 21st century. Whether one thinks of Harriet Jacobs pondering her own "sale" in 19th-century New York, Jhumpa Lahiri imagining connections across seas and generations in her short fiction, or young writers seizing the potential of the internet and social media to create their own publishing worlds, women writers have always, and perhaps always will, wrestle with what it means to belong.

Please submit to Kristin Jacobson (kristinjjacobson@gmail.com) by Jan. 3, 2012, a 250-500 word abstract (note which panel your proposal best fits) and a brief CV (no more than 2-pages) that includes rank/status (e.g. ABD or Associate Professor, etc.), institutional affiliation (independent scholars are welcome to submit proposals), publications, and conference presentations. Confirmation of receipt of your proposal will be sent to you within two business days.

All proposals should be both pasted into the text of the email and included as attachments (preferably as a single PDF document). While you do not need to be a SSAWW member to apply for the panel, presenters must be or become SSAWW members to participate in a SSAWW sponsored panel.

The Louisa May Alcott Society is sponsoring a panel on literary theory for the 2012 American Literature Association Conference (San Francisco, May 24-27, 2012).

This session seeks proposals that bring together work in theory with interpretation of Alcott's career and writings. Marxist, psychoanalytic, hermeneutical, feminist, and formalist papers are welcome, as are Deleuzian, queer theoretical, post-humanist, and other recent theoretical perspectives. The panel is open to a diverse range of approaches:

Please send 200-300-word abstracts electronically to Gregory Eiselein at eiselei@ksu.edu . The deadline for proposals is Friday, January 20, 2012. Early submissions welcome.

I will be chairing a panel "Crossing and Mixing Fields: Expositions and Connections" at the conference, Performing Transformations, Tangier 2012. Please send me proposals by December 1: (margiekanter@gmail.com) For information on the conference please go to: http://icpsmorocco.org.

Transformation is all about re-creation; when a thing disappears and bursts into something else. The transformation from a work of art into an event, according to Erika FischerLichte, has become a fundamental aspect of the performative turn since the 1960s along with the bodily co-presence of actors

and audiences in a performance space. That is the core element of Fischer-Lichte‟s concept of performativity. Such interactivity between equal subjects is fundamental to the emergence of performance as an ephemeral yet contingent event. As a follow up to the debates raised in our previous international encounters – specifically “Interweaving Performance Cultures Between The Two Mediterranean Shores” (2009), “Site-Specific Performance in Arabo-Islamic Contexts” (2010), and “Intermediality and Theatre” (2011), Performing Transformations (2012) moves transversally across artistic and ideological boundaries tointerrogate the multifold transformative powers of performance with a particular focus on the post avant-garde theatres that seem

to break all the rules of drama. Our primary objective is to further explore two extremely influential yet different theoretical perspectives on the European performative changes of the 1960s through the late 1990s.

Is it not time to investigate the paradigm shift in contemporary Arabic theatres? The tendency to privilege the turbulent reflection of liminal experience, where we are invited to become co-artists rather than passive consumers becomes so apparent in the theatre of Bousselham Daif and Youssef Rayhani from Morocco, Lina Saneh and Rabie Mroue from Lebanon… (To state just a few from a long list that is growing every day). While the legitimating of non-European performance cultures in relation to the European canon has been a major concern for the international theatre research community in the last decades, Arabo-Islamic artists and scholars

are faced with a different task, namely that of negotiating the passage of modernity, as well as postmodernity, while paying particular attention to the complexities of the current postcolonial situation. Our objective is to

investigate the performative aspects of transformations as manifested in the protests for democracy that are sweeping across the Arab world today. The conference also seeks new discourses to explore the complex

interrelationship within and across the 3 boundaries of contemporary Arabo-Islamic theatre forms, and invites dialog and public contemplation on changing Arabo-Islamic identities. This is a call for more critical attention to an observable theatre movement in the making that has become so visible in Arabo-Islamic contexts. Concerning this theoretical discourse, we wish to invite scholars and artists from around the world to join the debate and offer elements of reflection on the various problematics related to the following proposed panels:

Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers is soliciting papers for a special issue devoted to the intersection of women, women writers, and disability. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson observes that many parallels exist between the “social meanings attributed to female bodies and those assigned to disabled bodies.” To this extent it would be hard to imagine early twentieth-century psychoanalysis without “women’s diseases” like hysteria or nervous disorders. Female sexuality and reproduction have, historically, been monitored by a male medical and psychoanalytic profession. Building design, fashion, and juridical definitions of identity have reinforced the idea that, as Iris Marion Young says, “women in sexist society are physically handicapped.” Concepts of aesthetic perfection and beauty are often figured around idealized (often naked) female bodies for which marked or disabled bodies are considered aberrant.
Much western literature is formed around the volatile bodies of the Medusa, the madwoman in the attic, and the consumptive heroine. Feminist and Queer theory have been at the forefront in recognizing the ways that gender and sexual difference have been articulated through the non-traditional, excessive, or abnormal body, making gender /sexuality visible by positing an idealized norm of physical and mental perfection.

This special issue of Legacy will feature scholarship on American women writers dealing with issues of embodiment, illness, cognitive disability, deafness, blindness, mobility, dependency, and other related issues. Our hope is to find essays that cover the full range of American cultural production, from the colonial period to WWII and across the Americas broadly defined. “Writing Disability” implies both the representation of disability by women writers as well as the role that disability plays in an author’s writing. Topics might include intersections between women and disability through any of the following categories:

• The body of the aesthetic
• Women’s work and workplace design
• Reproduction rights and disability
• Eugenics and reform
• Dependency work
• Women and d/Deaf education
• Manifest Destiny and mobility
• The Republican body
• Visibility, staring, stigma
• Immigration, race, and disease
• Communities of disability
• Slavery and structural violence
• Suffragism and disability
• Disability and the family

Deadline: Completed Papers must be submitted by 1 January 2012. Historical focus may cover all periods prior to 1940; Page limit, 10,000 words (including endnotes and list of works cited) using MLA format. Send hard-copy of papers to Michael Davidson, Literature Department 0410, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0410. Questions pertaining to the issue may be addressed to mdavidson@ucsd.edu.

Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice http://www.cpcc.edu/taltp is looking for articles for its Fall 2011 issue. The deadline is November 31. We are also looking for manuscript reviewers. Please send inquiries and articles to Patricia.Bostian@cpcc.edu.

Patricia Bostian
English, Reading, and Humanities
Central Piedmont Community College
Levine Campus
P.O. Box 35009
Charlotte, NC 28235-5009
704-330-4397

Submissions are invited for an online periodical, WOMEN IN JUDAISM: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL, http://www.womeninjudaism.org

The journal is published exclusively on the Internet as a forum for scholarly debate on gender-related issues in Judaism. The ultimate aim of the journal is to promote the reconceptualization of the study of Judaism, by acknowledging and incorporating the roles played by women, and by encouraging the development of alternative research paradigms. It is particularly intended to advance critical analysis of gender inequalities within Jewish religion, history, culture and society, both ancient and modern. The journal does not promote a fixed ideology, and welcomes a variety of approaches. The material may be cross-methodological or interdisciplinary.

Articles, essays, book reviews, short notes and bibliographies from all disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences are welcome. Submissions for the fall and spring issues are concurrently accepted and should be made by e-mail or by regular mail to:

Dr. Dina Ripsman Eylon, Editor-in-Chief
Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal
1136-3 Centre St., Ste.246
Thornhill, ON L4J 3M8 Canada
E-mail: dina.eylon@utoronto.ca

We are also seeking book reviewers. A complete list of books is available in our Review Books Received section, which is updated periodically. For further information and guidelines for contributors, please consult our web site or write to the Editor-in-Chief.

SSAWW Triennial Conference, October 10-13, 2012; Denver, Colorado "Citizenship and Belonging"

Printable form for Individual and Panel Proposals

Printable form for SSAWW affiliated societies

Printable form for Individual and Panel Proposals

Printable form for SSAWW affiliated societies

SSAWW Triennial Conference, October 10-13, 2012; Denver, Colorado
"Citizenship and Belonging"