Welty's Dissident Spaces

Panel at Conference of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (March 28-31, 2026 at Fisk University in Nashville, TN)

Co-coordinated by Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Mae Miller Claxton, & Rebecca L. Harrison

     In Exposing Mississippi, Annette Trefzer argues that Welty’s dissident photographic framing is “‘radical,’ ‘instructive,’ and ‘disruptive’”; it engages “the economic, gendered, and racial histor[ies]” that “expose and transform” southern spaces (4, 7). Eudora Welty certainly took on the geographies of the South—literal landscapes, public spaces, and institutions—as Trefzer notes, but she was also a wanderer who spent time in cities from New York and San Francisco to London and Rome. Her travels provided both new ways of seeing and the necessary distance from the cultural norms of her home in Mississippi to open sites of new formations in her work. This panel seeks presentations that investigate Welty and the concept of “dissident space” broadly: those in her creative imaginary (fiction and non-fiction), those in the body of her photography, and/or those she physically inhabited.

Topic may include, but are not limited to

• Urban and Non-Southern Wanderings and their influence on Welty’s work
• Use of Southern spaces—literal and textual—especially those that dissented from white, middle-class Jackson norms
• Construction of freedom throughout the varying geographies of her work and/or extensive archive
• Framing of artistic space as one of rebellion/alternative ideas
• Spaces that Welty inhabited, from her Jackson home and environs to college, Yaddo, or friends’ houses
• Spaces that her art inhabited, from venues for photography shows to women’s magazines
• Civil Rights spaces in Jackson that figure in Welty’s life, work, and political activism

Send 300 word abstracts and 100 word bios by December 5th to panel chair Sarah Gilbreath Ford (Sarah_Ford@baylor.edu). Earlier statements of interest are encouraged.