CFP: Emily Dickinson International Society, Annual Meeting

Emily Dickinson International Society, Annual Meeting, July 26-28, 2024

EDIS’s Annual Meeting returns to Amherst! This year’s theme, “Neighbor Dickinson,” celebrates the reopening of Austin and Susan Dickinson’s home The Evergreens, which has been closed to the public since 2019, and the publication of the first new complete edition of Dickinson’s letters in almost 70 years. Talks and panel presentations will discuss the idea of neighborliness, what it was like to have Dickinson as a neighbor, and what neighborliness meant to her. Talks will focus on family and friends at The Evergreens and throughout Amherst, and those like Charles Darwin who inhabited her intellectual neighborhood. As well as showcasing exciting new Dickinson scholarship, the meeting includes open tours of the Dickinson houses, a walking tour of Dickinson’s neighborhood (taking in downtown Amherst  and Wildwood Cemetery), and a luncheon in the Museum gardens.

Special events include a marathon reading inspired by the new edition of Dickinson’s letters and an opportunity to transcribe the manuscripts of nineteenth-century letters written by Dickinson’s neighbors. In addition to these activities and presentations, the meeting gathers “Dickinson Communities” to discuss research, pedagogy, translation, and the arts.

Join us in Amherst, 26-28 July 2024, to learn more about Dickinson and her neighborhood and to celebrate and share insights about her life and writings.

Further Information, including the draft program and details of how register, is available here: https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/edis-annual-meeting-2024/

CFP: Edith Wharton Review “Notes On…”

Edith Wharton Review

Announcing: “Notes On…”

for the Edith Wharton Review (the official refereed journal of the Edith Wharton Society)

Broadening the journal’s practice of including shorter essays alongside full-length scholarly articles, the Edith Wharton Review introduces a regular, ongoing section that aims to give greater visibility to shorter, less formal commentary while also expanding the scope of Wharton-related topics. The new section, entitled “Notes On …” (with a strong emphasis on the ellipses), aims to highlight the joys and inspirations – intellectual, emotional, professional, personal, among other possibilities – that Wharton’s works offer to her readers. “Notes On…” reflects the editors’ interest in the range of epistemologies that we all bring to the reading and teaching of Wharton’s work, and that of her contemporaries. While the journal’s anonymous peer-reviewed articles are crucial to advancing historical and critical scholarship in the fields of literary studies and provide intense gratifications of their own, essays appearing in the “Notes On…” section invite readers and writers to reflect together about the pleasures and challenges of reading, teaching, watching, discovering and thinking with Wharton’s work today. “Notes On…” invites reflections on the illuminating moment in the many forms that it may take in Wharton’s work. The section’s focus – more embodied at times; at times more affective – offers a greater use of the personal voice and formal experimentation than those that appear among the anonymous peer-reviewed articles (submissions to “Notes On …” are peer-reviewed by the editors). Contributions may offer perspectives on teaching a particular novel or range of texts; insights arising from archival work; ruminations upon what it means, or even how it feels, to read Wharton’s work in a particular historical context, place or at different life stages; reviews of and responses to popular culture productions and discussions of Wharton’s work presented in different formats – or any number of other subjects edifying, engaging, and perhaps diverting for our Wharton readers.

Suggested length for submissions is approximately 5-10 pages. Queries about possible topics can be directed to the editor: (rbode@trentu.ca), or any one of the associate editors: (sbrennan@carthage.edu); (myrto.drizou@nord.no), (hornk@uni-greifswald.de).

The journal continues to welcome, with appreciation and enthusiasm, full-length critical, scholarly essays on Wharton for its blind peer-reviewed articles section and is open to all Wharton-related topics from a broad range of theoretical perspectives. Suggested length is approximately 20-30 pages. Enquiries welcome (rbode@tretu.ca).

Details on submission are available at: https://www.psupress.org/journals/jnls_EWR.html

CFP: The Routledge Companion to Sylvia Plath (Proposals Due: 5.1.2024)

Call for Papers: The Routledge Companion to Sylvia Plath

This call for papers invites submission to The Routledge Companion to Sylvia Plath, edited by Janet Badia, Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, and Emily Van Duyne. The collection, now under contract, will be a new addition to the Routledge Literature Companions series—highly regarded, field-defining volumes that showcase exciting areas of literary studies. These volumes are ideal introductions for beginners and useful volumes for those already working in the field. By design, they summarize current scholarship while simultaneously highlighting emergent approaches to authors and areas of study.

The editors seek proposals for chapters that explore Plath’s work, life, and cultural and historical contexts. Proposals on any aspect of Plath studies will be considered, but the editors especially welcome chapters that investigate the following topics:

• Plath’s life and work after the Beuscher letters and/or in light of recently acquired and newly accessible archival materials
• Criticism and reception in countries other than the U.S. and U.K.
• Plath in cross-cultural contexts and/or through the lens of globalization, including her cross-cultural influence and appeal
• Plath and trauma studies, including domestic and sexual violence, suicide, racism and sexism, etc.
• Intersectional approaches to Plath’s writing, including new perspectives and orientations to her life and work that value anti-racism and social justice
• Plath’s engagement with constructions of manhood, masculinities, and queer sexualities
• Plath in creative contexts, including how she has served as inspiration for new literature and the ways her work is taught in creative writing classrooms
• Plath and social media and/or in the context of mass media consumption
• Plath through new disciplinary perspectives and/or through cross- and transdisciplinary perspectives
• Plath in the classroom, including approaches to teaching her work in a variety of educational contexts and through different disciplinary lenses. Reflections on the challenges of teaching Plath in the contemporary classroom in the context of current cultural politics are especially welcome.
  

The editors welcome work by established, emerging, and new scholars. Work by scholars outside the United States and the United Kingdom, women, minorities, and underrepresented voices is especially encouraged.

To be considered, please submit an abstract of 300-500 words describing your topic and/or approach to Plath, as well as a short author biography of no more than 250 words that includes your current professional affiliation, publication record, or relevant qualifications given the goals of the collection suggested above.

The deadline for proposals is May 1, 2024. Review of proposals will begin immediately.

If accepted, chapters of 3,000-6,000 words would be due by December 1, 2024. We expect to submit the completed manuscript by November 2026.

Please send your queries and/or proposals to routledgesylviaplath@gmail.com.

Call for ALA Reporter: Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society Panels

Planning to attend the American Literature Association conference in May 2024? The Sedgwick Society will reimburse the ALA conference registration fee for one CMSS member to cover and report on the Sedgwick Society sessions for our Fall 2024 newsletter. Please email Emily.VanDette@fredonia.edu to express interest or for more details.

Call for student papers: Emily Dickinson Undergraduate Scholarship Award (Deadline: 6.30.2024)

EDIS Undergraduate Scholarship Award 2024

The Emily Dickinson International Society is pleased to sponsor a prize for undergraduate work on Emily Dickinson. Our goal is to encourage, recognize, and publicize outstanding scholarship among undergraduate students. Students whose work was created for any undergraduate course, and touches on any aspect of Dickinson, are eligible to submit. Papers and projects should be no longer than 15 pages or the equivalent and should include a heading with the student’s name, undergraduate institution, and email address; a title; and a work cited list. We are also happy to receive experiential and experimental work in different media. A panel of Dickinson scholars will review all submissions and provide feedback to highly ranked submissions. The author of selected submissions will receive a small cash prize and can list this national award on their resumés. In addition, the selected work will be posted on the EDIS website in September and will be noted, either by an interview with the writer, or by publication, in the EDIS Bulletin.

Teachers: please encourage your students to submit their work.

Send it, with a cover page that contains the student’s email and mailing addresses, and a short recommendation or contextualization from the instructor, to Elizabeth Petrino, Professor of English, Fairfield University (<a href="http://epetrino@fairfield.eduepetrino@fairfield.edu<mailto:epetrino@fairfield.edu). The deadline for papers to be submitted is June 30, 2024.

Virtual Event: “Learning from Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters” 5:30 pm CT/6:30 pm ET – April 17th, 2024

Dear SSAWW members,

As we continue to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the publication of Phillis Wheatley Peters’ Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, I want to invite you to an exciting virtual event on April 17, 6:30-8 pm ET. This is an interactive discussion in which K-12 and college teachers will present and reflect on their creative and pedagogical work on Wheatley Peters. This event is the culmination of a project for teachers of which I am the lead humanities scholar, “Learning from Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters.” Cosponsored by the National Writing Project and Humanities Texas, “Learning from Legacies of PWP” is one part of the larger initiative “The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters.”

In “Learning from Legacies of PWP,” Sarah Ruffing Robbins and I have been working with a spectacular group of teachers who have immersed themselves in Wheatley Peters’ life and poetry and have created outstanding lesson plans, some for college students, some for K-12 students; the latter can easily be adapted to college-level courses You are certain to be energized by these participants and their work, to get a sense of the resources available at “The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters” website, and to come away with new ideas about teaching and researching PWP.

Go to this link for fuller information and to register for the April 17 event:

https://wheatleypetersproject.weebly.com/overview.html

and

scroll down to

April 2024

Mapping and Visiting the Phillis Wheatley Peters Project Online

I hope to see many of you on April 17.

Warmly,

Sandy Zagarell

SSAWW President 2018-2021

Virtual Event: “Scholarly Editing: Fostering Communities of Recovery” April 4th and April 8th (registration required)

Please consider joining “Scholarly Editing: Fostering Communities of Recovery,” a two-part webinar series hosted by eLaboratories and presented by Dr. Noelle Baker, Dr. Raquel Baker, Bianca Swift, and the Artist Marcia X that will explore the community building work of Scholarly Editing. The first part will be held on April 4 at 11:00 AM EDT, and the second on April 8 at 1:30 PM EDT. More details are provided below. Please share these event details widely.

Scholarly Editing: Fostering Communities of Recovery

Scholarly Editing is an open-access, peer-reviewed annual that fosters multiple communities of recovery. The journal seeks to amplify contributions from and about Black, Latinx, and Indigenous peoples; Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders; women; LGBTQ+ individuals; and peoples and cultures of the Global South. A public-facing publication platform, the journal welcomes contributions from all custodians of knowledge, including academics from all disciplines and at any career stage, K-12 teachers and students, community groups, collectors, and local genealogists. In addition to textual scholarship theory and praxis, we welcome interviews, oral histories, creative works of “rememory,” and the decolonizing of artistic works, archives, records, and editions for the discoverability of underrepresented stories and artifacts. 

In a two-part event series, two of Scholarly Editing’s editors and two of its contributing authors will explore the nature and impact of the journal’s expanding content and communities of journal editors, readers, contributors, and genres. In the second part, they will also invite you to engage in project planning exercises similar to those asked of authors, peer reviewers, and other collaborators.  

Part one, which will be held on April 4 at 11:00 AM EDT, will welcome Co-Editor in Chief Noelle Baker and author Artist Marcia X. Baker will introduce the journal’s philosophy and infrastructure, and will discuss how these components have been essential to cultivating communities of recovery. Following, the Artist Marcia X will share their art, demonstrating how their recovery work evolved as a result of engaging with the Scholarly Editing community. To register for part one, please visit https://elaboratories.org/event/scholarly-editing-fostering-communities-of-recovery-part-1/.

Part two, which will be held on April 8 at 1:30 PM EDT, will welcome Essays Section Co-Editor Raquel Baker and author Bianca Swift. Together, they invite you to workshop your scholarship goals and to apply Scholarly Editing’s community-driven philosophy to your own work. To register for part two, please visit https://elaboratories.org/event/scholarly-editing-fostering-communities-of-recovery-part-2/.

New Book: Reading Madeleine L’Engle Ecopsychology in Children’s and Adolescent Literature by Heidi A. Lawrence

Author: Heidi A. Lawrence

Reading Madeleine L’Engle: Ecopsychology in Children’s and Adolescent Literature

Routledge – 2023 (e-book edition available)

Using a critical lens derived from ecopsychology and its praxis, ecotherapy, this book explores the relationships Madeleine L’Engle develops for her characters in a selection of the novels from her three Time, Austin family, and O’Keefe family series as those relationships develop along a human-nonhuman kinship continuum. This is accomplished through an examination both of pairs of novels from the fantastic and the realistic series, and of single novels which stand out as slightly different from the most prominent genre in a given series. Thus, this examination also shows L’Engle’s fluid movement along a fantasy-reality continuum and demonstrates the integration of the three series with each other. Importantly, through examining these relationships and this movement along continuums in these novels, the project demonstrates how ecopsychology and ecotherapy provide strong and important – and as-yet virtually unexplored – intersections with children’s literature.

This book is available for purchase in hardback and E-book editions: https://routledge.comReading-Madeleine-LEngle-Ecopsychology-in-Childrens-and-Adolescent-Literature

CFP Edited Collection: Dreaming of Christmas (Proposal Deadline: 5.1.2024)

Dreaming of Christmas: Rediscovering the Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Christmas Story

Throughout the nineteenth century the Christmas story was a key driver of the publishing industry on both sides of the Atlantic. Christmas editions of magazines and newspapers, saturated with seasonal stories, sold more copies than at any other time of the year. Editors competed for the best Christmas copy from the most prominent contemporary authors, with commensurate price tags. Christmas and its emerging tropes were also deeply implicated in the shifting contours of the literary landscape across the nineteenth century: Christmas played a key role in the establishment of sentimental literary culture, just as it provoked literary realists; it stimulated the development of diverse genres, from children’s literature to stories of the supernatural. For all that, however, the vital place of Christmas in the Transatlantic literary life of the nineteenth century remains profoundly neglected. While seasonally inflected cultural touchstones like A Christmas Carol and Little Women still claim significant attention, thousands of stories, published each December in journals across Britain and America, linger unread and unexamined; countless novels and poems with Christmas themes share the same fate. As such, our sense of the nineteenth century literary world remains distorted, warped around a Christmas-shaped void. This edited collection therefore seeks to rediscover, reexamine and reframe the Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Christmas Story. We are interested in essays which examine any aspect of the literary use of Christmas across the nineteenth century. Essays may address, but aren’t limited to:

• Christmas gift books
• Christmas and the publishing industry
• Christmas and sentimental culture
• Christmas and literary realism
• The Christmas story as a genre
• Christmas and the supernatural
• Christmas and children’s literature
• Christmas and gender
• Christmas and race
• Christmas and Empire
• Christmas and cultures of protest 
• Christmas and the Transatlantic
• adaptations of nineteenth-century Christmas stories
• Christmas and abolition
• Christmas and the South
• Christmas food
• Christmas and religion  

Please send proposals of roughly 300-500 words, a short bio, and any other enquiries, to editors Monika Elbert (elbertm@mail.montclair.edu) and Thomas Ruys Smith (thomas.smith@uea.ac.uk) by May 1^st 2024. Final essays (roughly 7000 words) will be due by October 15^th 2024.

CFP: Margaret Fuller Society at MLA 2025 (Deadline: 3.22.2024)

“Imperfect Women Writers” sponsored by the Margaret Fuller Society

Modern Language Association 2025 | January 9–12, 2025, New Orleans

In Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, the editors cite an anonymous correspondent of Fuller’s, who writes, “Margaret was one of the few persons who looked upon life as an art, and every person not merely as an artist, but as a work of art. She looked upon herself as a living statue, which should always stand on a polished pedestal, with right accessories, and under the most fitting lights. She would have been glad to have everybody so live and act. She was annoyed when they did not, and when they did not regard her from the point of view which alone did justice to her. No one could be more lenient in her judgments of those whom she saw to be living in this light. Their faults were to be held as ‘the disproportions of the ungrown giant.’ But the faults of persons who were unjustified by this ideal, were odious.”

Plenty of Fuller’s best and most sensitive readers would disagree with this appraisal. Still, it is useful for thinking about the ways readers and critics continue to render women writers works of art upon pedestals. How do we chip away at that penchant? What responsibilities do we have as critics to remove women writers from the pedestals predecessors or previous readers may have made?

How should we write and teach women writers in ways that document their flaws, failures, shadows, perceived imperfections, or positions on “wrong” sides of history?

How do women writers—and their readers—contend with criticism or with pressures not to speak up and out during their time?

How do censorship and/or recovery scholarship affect the ways we study women’s writing in our own difficult moment, especially amidst increasingly racist and misogynist currents within/against academia?

How should critics handle violence in nineteenth-century women’s views/voices and writing?

Submissions about Margaret Fuller are, of course, welcome, but proposals need not be limited to Fuller’s life or work. The Margaret Fuller Committee for Racial Justice encourages submissions to all panels to address anti-racist approaches to scholarship, pedagogy, and community engagement. Early career scholars are—as always—especially encouraged to apply.

Please send 250-word proposals or questions to Mollie Barnes at mbarnes2@uscb.edu with “MLA 2025 Proposal” in the subject line by March 22, 2024.