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.

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.

CFP: Special Session at MLA 2025 (Deadline: 3.18.2024)

CFP: “Monuments and Racial Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century American Poetry”

I am seeking papers for a proposed Special Session at the 2025 MLA Convention in New Orleans, January 9-12.

Please see the description below. If you’re interested, please email a 200-word paper proposal and a 100-word biography detailing your expertise and scholarship to me at elissa.zellinger@ttu.edu by Monday, 3/18. Thanks for considering it!

“Monuments and Racial Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century American Poetry” examines poems written about monuments erected in the nineteenth-century United States. While scholars have extensively discussed the racist and racialized imagery of these physical monuments, considerably less attention has been paid to their supporting literature—the dedication programs, speeches, letters of support and, crucially, occasional poems surrounding their unveiling. This panel will focus on commemorative poems as endeavors to correct the institutional forms of racism encoded within the monuments and, in so doing, change the meaning of what audiences to the memorials “see.” Through attention to such occasional poems, the panel hopes to make evident how memorialization in the United States always has a raced and racialized rationale.

CFP: Edith Wharton Society at MLA 2025 (Deadline: 3.25.2024)

Edith Wharton Society Panel

Modern Language Association Convention

January 9-12 New Orleans

Edith Wharton and the Politics of Visibility

Deadline for Submissions: March 25, 2024

Accepted presenters must be MLA members by April 7, 2024

The Edith Wharton Society invites papers that explore the Convention theme of Morrison’s metaphor of visibility.

In this call for papers, we seek to explore the multifaceted theme of visibility through the lens of Edith Wharton’s writings including her novels, short fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and plays. Building upon Toni Morrison’s metaphor of “invisible ink,” we aim to uncover the hidden layers of Wharton’s texts and examine the practices that make visible the aspects of society, culture, and identity that have been buried, obstructed, or marginalized.

We invite submissions that engage with the following themes and topics, among others:

1. Visibility and Power Dynamics
2. Social, Political, and Cultural Dimensions of Visibility
3. Visibility and Marginalized Communities
4. Academic Visibility and Censorship
5. Visibility and Disability Studies
6. Unmasking Practices and Disrupted Binaries
7. Visual and Material Culture in Wharton’s World

We welcome interdisciplinary approaches and diverse methodological perspectives.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words and a brief bio should be submitted by March 25, 2024 to mjjessee@uab.edu

CFP: 3 Panels on Contingent Labor at MLA 2025

(In)Visibility of Adjuncts

Visible to students but invisible to faculty/administration for governance, pay, and benefits, this panel seeks papers defining issues and/or strategies to increase adjunct visibility providing substantive, long-term, meaningful change.

Send 200-word abstracts: samo@uwsuper.edu & Amee.Schmidt@iavalley.edu

Deadline for submissions: Tuesday, 5 March 2024

Dr. Stacey Amo, University of Wisconsin-Superior (staceymarieamo@gmail.com )Amee Schmidt, Marshalltown Community C, IA (Amee.Schmidt@iavalley.edu )

Adjunct by Any Other Name

University administrators often refer to contingent faculty in nameless, generic terms. This panel invites participants to share stories from contingency (including resourcefulness, creativity, and perseverance) to demonstrate the complexity of the people delivering university instruction.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, 8 March 2024

Clark Barwick, Indiana U, Bloomington (mbarwick@indiana.edu )

Hot Labor Season

In 2022, about 60% of the nearly 225,000 employees in the US who engaged in work stoppages were educators, researchers, and other academic professionals. We welcome strategies, stories, and advice from labor activism.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, 8 March 2024

Lindsay Stephens, Black Hills SU (lstephens@olc.edu )

CFP: Willa Cather and the Readerly Imagination – 69th Annual Cather Spring Conference (Deadline: 3.1.2024)

Willa Cather and the Readerly Imagination

In her own time as in ours, Willa Cather’s books created vibrant and varied communities of readers. Cather’s literary works detail numerous acts of reading, and she herself was an avid reader with an acute awareness of the reading public. The 69th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference seeks to celebrate and explore both the act of reading Cather and the presence of reading and readers within Cather’s fiction and letters. The conference will be held Thursday, June 6 – Saturday, June 8, 2024, in Red Cloud, Nebraska.

The directors invite papers on a variety of topics related to Cather, readers, and reading, including but not limited to the following areas.

· Representations of readers and reading in Cather’s novels and short stories

· How readers navigate challenging topics in Cather’s fiction.

· Book clubs, both historical and contemporary, and their approaches to Cather.

· Teaching and pedagogical approaches; digital reading and/or the use of archival materials/Cather Archive documents.

· Reading Cather alongside banned or challenged books.

· Diverse communities of readers: women; immigrants; LGBTQ+ communities; Black, Indigenous, People of Color communities; disability communities; religious communities.

· Reading and affect: how emotions such as joy, grief, pleasure, and escape, are evoked by or represented in Cather’s works.

· Cather as a reader: the works and authors she read and their influence on her writing; her personal library; and her family’s library.

· Reader responses: how physical copies of Cather’s work (illustrations, typography, dust jacket and book cover design) affect readers’ reception; how audiobook features and narration shape how readers experience Cather’s work. responses.

· Genre: reading Cather within and beyond specific genres, including poetry, regionalism, modernism, the history of the novel.

· Reading Cather alongside her contemporaries

Proposals of no more than 500 words should describe papers or presentations approximately twenty minutes long. Innovative formats are encouraged. Abstracts, along with a short bio, your contact information and institutional affiliation, should be submitted to Rachel Olsen, Director of Education and Engagement, via the 2024 Spring Conference Proposal Form by March 1, 2024. Responses to proposals will be sent by mid-March. At this time we intend to offer an in-person conference but remain committed to offering digital programming to our audiences. Accepted speakers are asked, therefore, to prepare a video recording of their paper for submission by May 22, 2024, for our digital conference platform. Questions may be directed to Rachel Olsen or Sarah Clere and Kelsey Squire, Academic Advisors of the 2024 Spring Conference, at sarahclere@gmail.com or squirekelsey@gmail.com. Additional information about the conference can be found here: https://www.willacather.org/events/spring-conference

CFP: Lydia Maria Child Society at ALA 2024 (EXTENDED Deadline: 1.28.2024)

The Lydia Maria Child Society

American Literature Association Conference in Chicago, IL
23–26 May 2024 at The Palmer House Hilton
https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-annual-conference/

2. Celebrating Hobomok (1824) at 200: New Directions, New Reflections

The year 2024 marks the 200th publication anniversary of Lydia Maria Child’s novel Hobomok (1824). Set in early 17th-century Puritan New England, the book features a taboo marriage between Puritan Mary Conant and indigenous Pokanoket Hobomok and Mary’s eventual re-assimilation, with their mixed-race child, into Puritan society.  The Lydia Maria Child Society welcomes new ideas about, or inspired by, this novel. How might its treatments of religious intolerance, racial strife, and gendered rebellion against a religious patriarchy offer new ways of understanding our own times?  How might using Hobomok in the writing, literature, history, education, or fine arts classroom introduce fresh perspectives about community, prejudice, and understanding?  Ever wonder about “the beautiful grey fox of the Mississippi” (ch. 12)?  How might focusing on the natural world—plants, animals, weather—in Hobomok or other writings help us reconceptualize or resituate human agency vis-à-vis that of other life forms?  What might nonhuman life suggest about the choices that human life forms make?  If neither Hobomok nor Child lie within your areas of expertise, how might your own work be in conversation with either?  What fresh surprises await us through our connections to Hobomok or Child or the 19th century US?    

Please send 200-word abstracts, as Word documents, to Sandy Burr at sburr@nmu.edu by January 28, 2024.  Early submissions welcome!

LMC Society

Melissa Gniadek, President
Sandy Burr, VP of Programs

Gia Coturri Sorenson, VP of Membership & Records
Sarah Olivier, VP of Communications
Lori Robison, VP of Inclusive Excellence & Social Action

listserv: lmcs-listserv@googlegroups.com

Reminder – CFP: Lydia Maria Child Society (2 panels) at ALA 2024 (Deadline: 1.15.2024)

The Lydia Maria Child Society is issuing two CFPs for ALA 2024:

American Literature Association Conference in Chicago, IL
23–26 May 2024 at The Palmer House Hilton
https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-annual-conference/

1. Social Justice Pedagogy Roundtable

The Lydia Maria Child Society seeks participants for a roundtable on pedagogy, social justice, and American literature. Considering contemporary social justice concerns ranging from the global rise of white supremacism to persistent gender and racial inequities accentuated by COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on Black, Hispanic, and Native American and Alaska Native people, and by various state- and community-based oppositions to, and banning of, K–12 books and public-school curricula about race or gender, the Child Society feels strongly that many of the issues for which Child fought so passionately remain deeply relevant today. To honor her lifelong commitment to both education and writing as ways to attain social change, we ask that our selected panelists prepare brief presentations (approximately 10 minutes) on how they address the above issues and/or others within the literature classroom, before engaging in what we hope will be a fruitful and wide-ranging open discussion on social justice pedagogies and American literature. What texts and social issues have proved particularly pertinent to your students’ lived experiences of activism, marginalization, etc.? How do you productively draw parallels between the concerns of the literary works you teach and those we are facing in the world outside the classroom? What specific lesson plans, textual pairings/groupings, and/or other pedagogical approaches might you recommend to colleagues striving to make their syllabi and classrooms more socially conscious and engaged?

Please send 200-word abstracts of your proposed presentation, as Word documents, to lydiamariachildsociety@gmail.com by January 15, 2024.  Note that while we, of course, welcome proposals that engage with Child’s work, Child need not be included for your proposal to be considered.

2. Celebrating Hobomok (1824) at 200: New Directions, New Reflections

The year 2024 marks the 200th publication anniversary of Lydia Maria Child’s novel Hobomok (1824). Set in early 17th-century Puritan New England, the book features a taboo marriage between Puritan Mary Conant and indigenous Pokanoket Hobomok and Mary’s eventual re-assimilation, with their mixed-race child, into Puritan society.  The Lydia Maria Child Society welcomes new ideas about, or inspired by, this novel. How might its treatments of religious intolerance, racial strife, and gendered rebellion against a religious patriarchy offer new ways of understanding our own times?  How might using Hobomok in the writing, literature, history, education, or fine arts classroom introduce fresh perspectives about community, prejudice, and understanding?  Ever wonder about “the beautiful grey fox of the Mississippi” (ch. 12)?  How might focusing on the natural world—plants, animals, weather—in Hobomok or other writings help us reconceptualize or resituate human agency vis-à-vis that of other life forms?  What might nonhuman life suggest about the choices that human life forms make?  If neither Hobomok nor Child lie within your areas of expertise, how might your own work be in conversation with either?  What fresh surprises await us through our connections to Hobomok or Child or the 19th century US?    

Please send 200-word abstracts, as Word documents, to Sandy Burr at sburr@nmu.edu by January 15, 2024.  Early submissions welcome!

LMC Society

Melissa Gniadek, President
Sandy Burr, VP of Programs

Gia Coturri Sorenson, VP of Membership & Records
Sarah Olivier, VP of Communications
Lori Robison, VP of Inclusive Excellence & Social Action

listserv: lmcs-listserv@googlegroups.com

CFP: Elizabeth Oakes Smith Society at ALA (Upcoming Deadline: 1.15.2024)

CFP: American Literature Association Conference, May 2024:

Elizabeth Oakes Smith in Relation

Due date: Jan 15, 2024

Contact: Timothy H. Scherman, t-scherman@neiu.edu

A recent blog post on the Oakes Smith Society’s website* asks us to reconsider Nina Baym’s dismissal of Oakes Smith in Women’s Fiction (1978, 1993), where Baym described Oakes Smith as “not a team-player,” and the work that established her fame, “The Sinless Child,” a political “dead-end.”

Fortunately, Oakes Smith’s contemporaries in the feminist movement of the mid-19th century and later academic critics working in the wake of Baym’s early pronouncements have found neither to be the case, but looking more closely at Baym’s language, this panel asks as to contemplate what it might have meant for any woman writer to be a “team player” in the mid-nineteenth century US? Shared experiences with other women? Shared goals? A shared rhetoric or strategy? Must it involve contemporaneous interpersonal relationships? What sort of criticism of other women (something Oakes Smith never avoided) would disqualify one from being counted a “team player?”

The Oakes Smith Society welcomes papers considering all manner of ways in which Oakes Smith was seen in her day, or might be seen in our day, in relation to other women writers of her time—as pre-cursor, as co-worker, or even in her criticism of particularly privileged women whose influence delayed the emancipation of women in the US. The following examples may provide graduate students and others less familiar with Oakes Smith’s career some points of departure:

• The Feminist as Prophet—as Ashley Reed has argued in Heaven’s Interpreters (2020), Oakes Smith was part of an extensive tradition of women embracing the role of prophet to assert their cultural authority. While the relation between Eva, the child heroine of Oakes Smith’s “The Sinless Child”(1842, 1845) and Harriet Stowe’s Little Eva from Uncle Tom’s Cabin(1852), has been suggested, nowhere has a detailed comparison been elaborated. More broadly, echoes between Oakes Smith’s rhetoric of prophecy in her treatise Woman and Her Needs or her novel Bertha and Lily and the writings and speeches of women from Maria Stewart and Harriet Jacobs to Olympia Brown and Elizabeth Stoddard might be explored. In a related vein, how might Oakes Smith’s Shadowland, or The Seer participate in the spiritualist tradition that gave Hattie Wilson fame and income in her later career?

• Formal and Generic Innovations—while scholarship has found no specific bio-critical relationships between Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Gilman scholars and others already aware of the formal relationships between Oakes Smith’s “The Defeated Life” (1847) and the diary structure of “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) may be surprised to read a utopian pre-cursor to Gilman’s Herland (1915) in Oakes Smith’s “The Amazons of Mexico” (1877). Indeed, what examples of utopian fiction in the US were available to Oakes Smith in the 1870s, and how might we explain her adoption of the genre?

• Women and Labor—from the time of Woman and Her Needs and the beginnings of her career as a lecturer (principally in “The Dignity of Labor” (1852)), Oakes Smith made women’s equal opportunity to gainful employment the key to the emancipation of her gender and the recuperation of the “sanctity of marriage.” Alcott scholars and others might find Oakes Smith’s career-long arguments repeated and expanded not only in Alcott’s novel Work: A Story of Experience (1870) but likewise in the details of Alcott’s struggle for income as a woman writer in earlier decades. A similar study might consider Oakes Smith’s arguments in relation to Ruth Hall and the career of Fanny Fern.

• Team Transcendentalist—scholars such as Tiffany Wayne, Dorri Beam, Mary Louise Kete and to some extent Elissa Zellinger have argued for the inclusion of Oakes Smith’s work in the progress of transcendentalist thought, but the interpersonal dimensions of Oakes Smith’s relationships with key figures in the movement have yet to be fleshed out. If Thoreau’s journal reflections on his conversations with Oakes Smith were none-too-promising on December 31, 1851, the evening she delivered her lecture “Womanhood” at the Concord Lyceum, is there an archival record (journal, diary, newspaper) of what other transcendentalists Oakes Smith name-checks in her late lecture on Emerson and his circle (1884) may have thought of her work?

Inquiries or Abstracts of 250 words should be emailed to Secretary of the Oakes Smith Society, Rebecca Jaroff, at rjaroff@ursinus.edu or President of the Society, Timothy H. Scherman, at t-scherman@neiu.edu by January 15.

*Many of the links in this CFP invite scholars to consider the development of the Elizabeth Oakes Smith website, along with the appearance of the first volume of Elizabeth Oakes Smith: Selected Writings in 2023 and the arrival of the second volume early in 2024, all of which afford established scholars and their students at all levels the opportunity to incorporate Oakes Smith’s work into current critical debates and revise literary histories already established.

The Oakes Smith Society invites you to use (or order!) these new resources and become part of this major 19th century woman’s recovery—for our ALA panel and beyond.