The Emily Dickinson International Society – Annual Meeting, July 21-23, 2023 (Amherst, MA) – Registration Open

Registration is now open for 

“Clasp Hemispheres, and Homes”

EDIS Annual Meeting, Amherst, Massachusetts July 21-23, 2023

EDIS is returning to Amherst! For the last three summers, while EDIS has gathered online and in Seville, the Emily Dickinson Museum was closed. The Museum used the time to undertake a major, impeccably researched and executed restoration of the Dickinson Homestead; they also launched the first comprehensive cataloging of the Museum’s collection of over 10,000 objects. The EDIS Annual Meeting will feature this work. Participants will be able to tour the magnificently restored Homestead, learn about the restoration from museum staff, and view objects relating to Dickinson’s home from the Museum’s collection that have never been exhibited. We will also view and learn about original Dickinson manuscripts in the Amherst College archives. The conference theme, “Clasp Hemispheres, and Homes,” comes from Dickinson’s poem “The Sunrise runs for Both – ” (M 355, Fr765, J710). In congruence with Dickinson’s “Both” 16 panels with nearly 50 presentations will delve into the relation between Dickinson’s mental and material interiors and her expansive embrace of wider, external spheres. Special events will include the screening of two recent Dickinson Opera films: Lesley Dill’s capacious  Divide Light (2020) and Dana Kaufman’s intimate Emily & Sue (2022). In addition to performances and panel presentations, the meeting will include special interest circles on research, pedagogy, translation, and the arts. On July 20th we will hold Critical Institute workshops to support the work of early career scholars.  Register to join us in Amherst to celebrate Dickinson’s work and the vibrant community she inspires. 

All attendees of the annual meeting must be members of the Emily Dickinson International Society. The Annual Meeting regular registration fee of $175 and student/financial need registration fee of $125 includes tours of the Dickinson Homestead, Opera film screenings, refreshments, two lunches, and the Saturday Meeting Picnic-Banquet. There are no additional costs for these Annual Meeting events.

A block of rooms has been reserved for the Annual Meeting at The Inn on Boltwood (an elegant inn walking distance from campus). Call 413-256-8200 and mention code EDIS 2023 to reserve your room at the EDIS discounted rate.

The Annual Meeting is being held at Amherst College and the College website provides a large list of local Hotels and of Bed & Breakfasts as well as Travel Information and Driving Directions.Address any questions about the Critical Institute and Annual Meeting to edismeeting@emilydickinsonmuseum.org

“The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters” Initiative (Upcoming Virtual Events)

Upcoming Events and New Resources in Our Phillis Wheatley Peters Initiative 

“The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters” Website: https://wheatleypetersproject.weebly.com/ 

 March 22, 3:00 CT (90 mins): “Phillis Wheatley Peters in Material Memory” 

Please encourage teachers and students, in particular, to attend this webinar, co-sponsored by our UGA-TCU collaborative team and the American Antiquarian Society. Besides being introduced to a range of items in the AAS’s rich archives that connect with PWP and her era, students will hear from several archivists about the building a career in vital institutions such as the AAS. Register here

April 33:30-5:00 CT (90 mins): Book Talk by Professor Vincent Carretta: “Recovering the life of Phillis Wheatley Peters, ‘A WONDER of the Age indeed!’” Two new biographies on Wheatley Peters are arriving in this anniversary year. One, published by project partner UGA’s outstanding academic press, is an update of Vincent Carretta’s influential 2011 biography. The 2023 edition both expands what we know about PWP and corrects several inaccurate details that have long circulated about her, while offering a highly readable portrait of the poet and her times. Carretta’s webinar lecture will provide a window into his research and writing process as well as an overview of his new discoveries. Register here

April 4, 9:00 a.m. CT (90 mins): “Re-reading a Life: Responding to Vincent Carretta’s New Biography of Wheatley Peters”—A Scholarly Roundtable via webinar 

An international cohort of scholars will respond to Carretta’s new book. Each will also be bringing a vital perspective on Wheatley Peters Studies today to this collaborative conversation, with Carretta then offering additional comments.  Register here

Writing Contests for Elementary, Middle, and High School Students 

Radford Chair Carmen Kynard has designed an exciting cluster of writing contests for school kids to join as a pathway to learning about Wheatley Peters and her era. Please pass along news of the contest to teachers and students across the DFW metroplex! Learn about this program—which creatively draws on TEKS expectations for reading informational materials as well as literary texts and writing that capitalizes on new media—in and overview and level-specific spaces (elementarymiddlehigh) on our PWP website. For an even fuller portrait of this exciting contribution to the PWP initiative, visit pages composed by Carmen in her own lively web spaces here.  

New LibGuide/Research Resource from the Mary Couts Burnett Library 

TCU library colleague Robyn Reid (with research support from Ammie Harrison and several English Department grad students) has been building a multi-faceted LibGuide for the PWP project. Check it out here. Faculty, students, and community members will find many helpful resources for learning about Wheatley Peters, and, like our website, this online resource will continue to grow content throughout the 2023 celebration year. https://libguides.tcu.edu/phillis_wheatley_peters 

Recovery Hub for American Women Writers – Spring 2023 Info Session – TODAY – 3.16.2023 3:30 pm ET/2:30 pm CT

Are you interested in the Recovery Hub’s services but not sure where to start? Join us on March 16 at 2:30 pm Central to celebrate the Recovery Hub’s new grant, which will support further development of the Hub’s services, and learn about our work! We’ll discuss the Recovery Hub’s mission and services, and there will be plenty of time for questions and discussion.

Register for the Session – HERE

SSAWW & Recovery Hub – Five FREE Digital Humanities Memberships for Graduate Students (first come, first served!)

The Society for the Study of American Women Writers is sponsoring five free one-year graduate student memberships to the Recovery Hub for American Women Writers:

 https://recoveryhub.siue.edu/

If you are interested in starting a digital project but don’t know where to begin, this could be the perfect opportunity for you! Your annual membership will include up to five, hour-long appointments throughout the year with the Hub’s group of trained consultants. 

The Recovery Hub helps early-stage projects find their footing, offers peer review, and makes affiliated projects available for classrooms and communities. The Hub fosters collaboration, mentorship, and community-building among women working in the digital humanities while seeking feminist and decolonial approaches to the creation, curation, design, sharing, and archiving of digital content. They mentor practitioners in the field of digital recovery, including students, K-12 teachers, librarians, archivists, and scholars of all kinds. Their mission is to diversify the field of literary study. They hub aims to support the work of BIPOC scholars and for at least 50% of affiliated projects to recover Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and LGBTQI+ stories, texts, experiences, and voices.

The SSAWW’s memberships will be awarded on a first-come-first-serve basis. Please email recoveryhub@siue.edu with your name, email, and institution, if you are interested.

Recovery Hub for American Women Writers – Spring 2023 Info Session – 3.16.2023 3:30 pm ET/2:30 pm CT

Are you interested in the Recovery Hub’s services but not sure where to start? Join us on March 16 at 2:30 pm Central to celebrate the Recovery Hub’s new grant, which will support further development of the Hub’s services, and learn about our work! We’ll discuss the Recovery Hub’s mission and services, and there will be plenty of time for questions and discussion.

Register for the Session – HERE

NEH Institute: “Willa Cather: Place and Archive” Application Deadline: TODAY

“Willa Cather: Place and Archive,” an NEH Institute for Higher Education Faculty to be held in Lincoln and Red Cloud, Nebraska, from July 16 to 28, 2023.

Come out to the Great Plains this summer and immerse yourself in Cather-related places and archives!

Applications are due TODAY by 11:59 PACIFIC TIME.  That gives those of you in the eastern half the country a few post-midnight hours if you need them!

The application is not onerous—just a brief application statement (cruise the institute website a bit and explain why you are interested in attending) and a brief cv. Go to the “apply” tab and fill out the web form.

https://cather-institute.unl.edu/

Accepted participants will receive a $2200 stipend designed to cover the cost of attendance, and in the case of this institute, it should actually do so. Faculty at all kinds of higher education institutions, full and part time, tenure track or not, as well as advanced graduate students, are welcome to apply.

Texas Regional SSAWW Study Group – Spring Meeting, March 25, 2023

The Spring 2023 meeting of the Texas Regional SSAWW Study Group will be on Saturday March 25, 2023 at Texas Women’s University in Denton, TX, hosted by Brian Fehler. Our common reading will be the new collection of Zora Neale Hurston’s short fiction, Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance (Amistad/Harper Collins, 2020), edited by Genevieve West. Dr. West will be a special guest participant.

Please RSVP to Brian Fehler at bfehler@twu.edu by March 17, 2023.

The schedule of the day’s events and information about meals, location, and parking can be found here: https://txssaww.wordpress.com/

The Study Group is an informal gathering of professors, graduate students, and independent scholars who share an interest in American women’s writing. We share a lunch (provided by the host campus), spend the afternoon discussing the common reading, and have dinner at a local restaurant (paid individually). We welcome new participants to join the conversation, which is always rich and stimulating, and often touches on larger professional concerns (teaching, publishing, mentoring, etc.). 

Dr. Desirée Henderson 

Professor

Director of Graduate Studies

Department of English 

University of Texas Arlington

CFP: 2024 MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions (Deadlines: 3.17.2023 and 3.19.2023)

Teaching Scholarly Editions

What do effective approaches to teaching scholarly editions look like? What hallmarks or features of a scholarly edition are necessary or desirable for success in the classroom? Work featuring underrepresented writers encouraged. Abstract; brief bio.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, 17 March 2023

Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, Indiana U–Purdue U Columbus (juligood@iu.edu )

The Future of the Scholarly Edition: Lessons from the Margins

The scholarly edition as a genre has often served to legitimize and authorize white, Western, and male-centered literatures. How might it adapt to serve under-represented authors and modes of authorship? Roundtable. Abstracts, brief bio: rodrigue8@grinnell.edu

Deadline for submissions: Sunday, 19 March 2023

Elizabeth Rodrigues, Grinnell C (rodrigue8@grinnell.edu )Gabrielle Dean, Johns Hopkins U, MD (gnodean@jhu.edu )

NEH Institute – Willa Cather: Place and Archive (Applications Due: 3.3.2023)

Members of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers may be interested in Willa Cather: Place and Archive, a two-week NEH Institute for Higher Education Faculty from 16 July to 28 July 2023, directed by Melissa J. Homestead, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and director of the Cather Project.

Twenty-five participants will explore place-based and archival approaches to the life and works of American novelist Willa Cather. At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, participants will have access to unparalleled archival holdings of Cather materials and the expertise of a leading center for digital humanities. At the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, they will experience landscapes and buildings represented in Cather’s fiction that function as a kind of archive. The institute will take a critical approach to all three kinds of archives (special collections, digital resources, and place), considering how they are mediated and what is absent. Cather’s fiction celebrated the achievements of recent European immigrants who settled on the Great Plains but ignored the then-recent forced relocations of indigenous people to make way for settlement. Both the European immigrant presence and absence of the Pawnee will receive particular attention. In addition to Homestead, scholars from UNL leading sessions will be Andrew Jewell, Emily Rau, and Margaret Jacobs. Participating scholars from outside UNL leading sessions include Walter Echo-Hawk, Jennifer Ladino, Susan Naramore Maher, Eveylyn Funda, Mark Van Wienen, and Gabi Kirilloff.

For more information, including how to apply, visit cather-institute.unl.edu. Applications are due 3 March 2023.

CFP: Celebrating Mark Twain at MLA 2024 (Deadline: 3.24.2023)

Call for Papers:  Celebrating Mark Twain

The Mark Twain Circle invites 250-350 word proposals for 20-minute presentations at the 2024 MLA Convention in Philadelphia January 4-7. 

Topics may address any theme or work(s) in Mark Twain’s long life and career, but papers responding to the convention theme, “Celebration: Joy and Sorrow,” are particularly welcome, considering how it echoes the clincher of “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” (1874): “Oh, no, Misto C—, I hain’t had no trouble. An’ no joy!” 

Panelists should be members of the Circle at the time of the convention; details at <https://www.marktwaincircle.org/join-renew>. 

Deadline for submissions: March 15, 2023, to Judith Yaross Lee, Ohio University, leej@ohio.edu