Calls for Papers

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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.

Paper calls are removed from the header (the table below) after the deadline date has passed, and the full cfp is removed a week or so after that. If you want to extend the deadline, please let me know before the original deadline has passed or resend me the call. No archives of this page are kept, but most of the calls for papers are available in the SSAWW-L listserv archives.

CFP Archive at the University of Pennsylvania
SSAWW-L listserv (must be a subscriber to access archives)

Calls for Papers Journals, Essay Collections, and Newsletters
AIZEN (Naturalism) 8.15.2013 Emily Dickinson Journal Special Issue: Networking Dickinson (7.1.13)
American Women Writers of Color (8.2.13) updated American Periodicals
Intercontinental Cross-Currents: Women’s (Net-)Works across Europe and the Americas Reconsidering Sigourney: Essays on Lydia Sigourney (8.1.13)
   
Society for the Study of Southern Literature (12.15.13)  
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Call for Proposals
The Society for the Study of Southern Literature Biennial Conference
March 27-29, 2014
Arlington, Virginia

OTHER SOUTHS: APPROACHES, ALLIANCES, ANTAGONISMS
In her keynote address at the 2012 SSSL conference, Barbara Ladd discussed numerous recent sea changes in the field of southern literary studies. These shifts include a decentering of the Southern renascence and a heightened interest in earlier texts; in coastal, middle, and upper Souths; in previously overlooked intercultural relationships and tensions; in new ways of thinking about race and racism; in still-nascent understandings of class and classism; and in texts that illuminate “southern” without themselves being “southern.”

These turns to swamps, Indians, eugenics, early Souths, poor whites, trans-Appalachian migrations, the extrasouthern, queer Souths, digital Souths, undead Souths, and Souths we can’t even imagine are exciting both in their own right and as starting points for important new lines of inquiry. We would like to use the opportunity of the next SSSL meeting to push these questions further, and to propose, describe, define, and debate an even broader, more expansive constellation of “Other Souths.” How might we productively re-envision southern literatures, cultures, spaces, and histories? What else needs to be done? And what scholarly, pedagogical, and institutional challenges bedevil these sea changes?

Thinking in terms of southern studies as a field, how might “we”—as self-identified “southernists” or scholars working in fields that bump up against the South—position ourselves professionally, and how we might organize, collaborate, and work across disciplines? How might we learn better to be both southernists and Americanists, for example, or both southernists and comparatists? In other words, who are (and who might be) our allies? What are (and what might be) our most productive alliances? And how do we go about forming these alliances? How does a southernist become more—or differently—interdisciplinary and/or multicultural? And, importantly, as we shape and continue to build the field of southern literary studies, how do we both honor those who have come before us and develop 21st-century pedagogies, mentorships, academic programs, and institutional influence?

Finally, what are the antagonisms—the counterforces, struggles, foils, obstacles, strains, tensions, insurgences, etc.—that attend this work? Is there a value in strategic antagonism?

We’ll gather in Arlington, Virginia, a longstanding yet ever-changing site of transatlantic, multiethnic, colonial, urban, and cosmopolitan alliances and antagonisms. The Washington, DC, metropolitan area is of course replete with iconic, monumental fashionings of U.S. national identity and cultural memory. But northern Virginia is also, now more than ever before, an “Other South” in its own right, a region of tremendous fluidity, full of surprises and crisscrossed by routes—of trade, labor, government, law, media, languages, cultures—that continue to be negotiated, constructed, mapped, traveled, toured, enforced, and contested. SSSL 2014 offers us an opportunity to consider how these and other networks provoke both alliances and antagonisms, both connections and disconnections, both memory and amnesia, among the local, the federal, the regional, the national, the hemispheric, and the global.

The SSSL 2014 program committee—Michael Bibler, Lisa Hinrichsen, Kirstin Squint, and Eric Gary Anderson—invites paper and panel proposals on “Other Souths: Approaches, Alliances, Antagonisms.” All approaches are welcome, including papers that explore alliances and antagonisms in broader cultural and theoretical contexts, including circum-Atlantic, circum-Mississippian, and diasporic connections; literary canons, intertextualities, and networks or anxieties of influence; diverse approaches to power and knowledge; evolving notions of race, gender, sexuality, and/or the body; historical, social, cultural, or political tensions within and/or about “the South”; constructions and deployments of southern cultures through “non-literary” forms of film, music, visual art, popular culture, and performance; and work more specifically focused on particular writers and/or texts.

Please e-mail session or individual paper proposals to southernlit2014@gmail.com

DEADLINE: December 15, 2013

Eric Gary Anderson
President, The Society for the Study of Southern Literature

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Women’s Narratives and the Formation of Empire

Editors: Mary McAleer Balkun, Seton Hall University
Susan C. Imbarrato, Minnesota State University Moorhead

     If woman is indeed not born but made, as Simone de Beauvoir maintained, then certainly the process of empire building also impacts the “construction” of woman—what is normative, what is not, and how the difference between the two is navigated, especially by women themselves.  As Kate Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury explain in their “Introduction” to Writing on the Body, there is a “tension between women’s lived bodily experiences and the cultural meanings inscribed on the female body that always mediate those experiences” (1).  This tension is especially acute during times of crisis and social change, natural consequences of the power struggles in emergent empires.  The lived bodily experiences of women can vary dramatically depending on age, class, and other variables, and what is ultimately written on their bodies may manifest as a call for change and an insistence on reform even in the midst of cognitive and/or physical disability, freakishness/monstrosity, and/or illness.
     Produced from their unique position as both insiders and outsiders—a location from which women were expected to support the work of empire but not participate in its power structures—as well as their status as items of exchange within that domain, women’s narratives can illustrate the ways gender is implicated in the process of empire building.  Thus, while women are supposed to embody the values of empire, the female form is also the place where difference is encoded and where the struggle between the empire and the other (whoever that “other” happens to be) is enacted.
     For this proposed volume we are looking for papers that examine women’s narratives produced between 1600 and 1820 in which the female body serves as a site of struggle in the development of the American empire. Papers should be 5000 -7500 words in length and formatted according to MLA Style.  Please send complete manuscripts, with 200-word abstracts, as well as any questions, to Mary Balkun mary.balkun@shu.edu and Susan Imbarrato simbarra@mnstate.edu.  Thank you.
Submission deadline: February 3, 2014