American Literature Association / Boston / May 21-24, 2025

This roundtable celebrates the ten-year anniversary of the edited collection Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture. Panelists are invited to reflect on the book's impact and/or to explore the presence and pervasiveness of "undead souths" beyond what the book discusses.

Undead Souths argues that undeadness is an important, useful, and flexible critical lens—very possibly more useful than its more familiar counterpart, southern gothic. Our book casts both the south and the undead in a wide variety of lights, including regional, national, transnational, racial, gendered, sexual, social, historical, haunted, post-traumatic, ecological, carceral, post-apocalyptic, and cinematic. While the book embraces an expansive understanding of undeadness, it is far from comprehensive; one goal of this roundtable is to keep the conversation going by expanding the archive even more. (There's plenty of room for an Undead Souths sequel!)

Please send brief (one paragraph) abstracts to Eric Anderson (eandersd@gmu.edu) by the end of the day on January 17, 2025.