RSAJournal, no. 38 (2027) - Call For Papers: Contested Meanings of Freedom in the United States

Guest editors: Dr. Janine Giordano Drake (Indiana University Bloomington) and Dr. Matthew E. Stanley (University of Arkansas)

As mass movements and resistance struggles from Reconstruction and Indigenous sovereignty through women’s liberation and civil rights activism make clear, American history has been indelibly shaped by divergent, contradictory, and deeply contested understandings of a common political language centered on “freedom.”  Far from a static, settled, or predetermined concept, Eric Foner contends that “freedom” has proved “a terrain of conflict, open to very different and sometimes contradictory interpretations.” The story of the United States is, in no small part, a contest over what it means to be free. 

Freedom has shaped the nation’s imagination as both an individual aspiration and a collective ideal. Across genres—from slave narratives and sentimental novels to protest poetry and songs, to political novels and treaties, to Western and speculative fiction —and across literary traditions, from Transcendentalism to Modernism, literature has persistently engaged with the meanings, possibilities, and limits of freedom. Despite recurring attempts to police its forms and effects through censorship and book banning, literature has remained a privileged space for imagining, contesting, and expanding the orbit of freedom.

In that spirit, RSAJournal, the journal of the Italian Association of North American Studies (AISNA), is actively seeking article proposals for a thematic section on “Contested Meanings of Freedom” in United States history, literature and culture. The section, which will feature in its 2027 issue, will be edited by guest editors Dr. Janine Giordano Drake (Indiana University Bloomington) and Dr. Matthew E. Stanley (University of Arkansas).

We are interested in essays that explore the relationship between capitalism and democracy, between democracy and freedom, and positive and negative visions of freedom in American history, culture and literature. We are also interested in essays that offer new ways of conceptualizing and periodizing the story of American freedom across the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. In literature and American Studies, we seek contributions that explore the ways American freedom has been represented, critiqued, and reimagined especially in times of social and political crisis.

RSAJournal (Rivista di Studi Americani) is the official journal of AISNA, the Italian Association of North American Studies. It is devoted to all areas of American Studies—including literary and cultural studies, media studies, history, and political science—and aims to foster the debate on the history, impact, and issues of U.S. civilization within a global scholarly context.

Published online in open access once a year, RSAJournal reaches an international audience and provides opportunities for engagement, dialogue, and intellectual exchange among American Studies scholars across disciplines worldwide.

If accepted, articles will be due in January 2027 and submitted for peer review for a final September 2027 publication. Article drafts should be max 50,000 characters (spaces, title, abstract, keywords, bibliography and footnotes included).  Subtopics might include (but are not limited to):

• Alternative understandings of freedom, liberty, or justice

• Radical articulations of emancipation, including emancipation from slavery, patriarchy and gendered scripts

• Freedom struggles and histories of resistance

• The past and future of the American Left

• Systemic freedom and/or systemic slaveries

• Freedom expressions or practices in art and literature

• Freedom and collective memory

• Global perspectives and legacies of freedom

• The use and abuse of American freedom documents and discourses

• Cases of direct action, civil disobedience, or working-class self-activity in the pursuit of unconventional or transformative notions of liberation

• Poetics of freedom

• Theories and imaginaries of freedom in American literature and culture

• Utopian, dystopian, and speculative visions of freedom and their relevance to past and contemporary social, political, and environmental crises

• Freedom and unfreedom in slave narratives, Indigenous literatures, immigrant writing, prison writing, and other traditions that challenge dominant narratives of liberty

• Discourses of the frontier – including critiques of “rugged individualism” and expansionism

IMPORTANT DATES:

• Abstract Submission Deadline: September 30, 2026.

• Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: October 15, 2026

• Drafts Due/Peer Review Process Begins: January 15, 2027

• Publication: September 2027

CONTACT:

Interested scholars should submit a short bionote and a 300/500-word abstract to Drs. Janine Giordano Drake (jgdrake@iu.edu) and Matthew E. Stanley (ms179@uark.edu) no later than Wednesday, September 30, 2026.