Call for Papers: Marianne Moore Generations Conference October 23 and 24, 2025
Organizing Committee: Jon Tadmor (Stanford), Celine Shanosky (Harvard)
Speakers: Elizabeth Gregory (University of Houston), Virginia Jackson (UCI), Cristanne Miller (University at Buffalo SUNY)
Location: Stanford Humanities Center

The Marianne Moore Generations Conference is an invitation to join in consideration of one poet in the broadest sense, and with a spirit of experiment. How does Moore contribute, or not contribute, to a variety of fields and approaches within literary studies? How might this poet be carried forward?

Our conversation meets an extraordinary moment in Moore scholarship, in which unprecedented resources—new editions of her work, a biography, and digitized archives—are poised to enable new research. Already, these resources have borne out many understandings of who she was: the subversive modernist and poet of syllabics, collage, quotation, and animals, but also the gender neutralist, hereditarian scientist, advocate for democracy, and midcentury celebrity in George Washington cross-dress.

For us, however, Moore is foremost a poet whose work is inexhaustible in the questions it raises and the kinds of thinking it provokes. Her poems have been an inspiration to generations of poets and scholars, including our own. We understand Moore not necessarily as the sole topic of interest for this conference, but rather as a shared starting point for inquiry that might contribute to a range of fields and approaches in literary study.

We welcome proposals for ~15-20 minutes papers on Moore as she relates to a number of topics, including poetics, lyric studies, modernisms, ecocriticism, queer studies, comparative literature, race and literature, digital humanities, and, of course, other authors. We welcome early-career scholars, graduate students, and those who have not yet written on Moore or who have not yet considered her as central to their work.

Deadline: June 1, 2025

To submit a paper, please email mooregenerationsconference@gmail.com a PDF that includes your title, abstract (~250 words), and a brief biography. If you would like to propose an artistic presentation, such as a poetry reading of your own work, Moore’s, or another poet’s, please indicate this in your submission email. We are attempting to secure some support for graduate student attendees; if you could benefit from such funds, please indicate so in your email.