african-american

MELUS 2026

Austin, Texas

Women of Color Caucus (WOCC)

Conference Dates: Thursday, April 30 – Saturday, May 2, 2026

Genre-blurring as Feminist Practice and Methodology (WOCC scholarship panel)

Announcing

The 2026 First Book Institute

May 31-June 6, 2026

Hosted by the Center for American Literary Studies (CALS) at Pennsylvania State University

Co-Directors

Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English, Duke University, and Co-Editor of American Literature

Sean X. Goudie, Director of the Center for American Literary Studies and Past Winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book

CFP | Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society (PEHS) session 

American Literature Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, May 20-23, 2026

Hopkins’s America, Then & Now

Proposing a panel or panels on postmodern-era US Fiction for this year’s American Literature Association Conference, which will happen in Chicago from May 20-23.

The Margaret Fuller Society invites proposals for a panel at ALA 2026 about teaching in difficult times. As we head into the spring 2026 semester—the mid-point in an academic year when students and educators read U.S. literature amidst rising book bans, closing degree programs and DEI offices, and even the dismantling of the Department of Education—many of us are facing existential crises about how to do what matters to us most. How to support our students? How to sustain our disciplines? How to teach in ways that do justice to our subjects? The most basic day-to-day parts of our teaching lives have never felt more vulnerable—or more urgent.

We invite faculty, advanced graduate students, and independent scholars to apply for a three-week National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on the New Deal era Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), taking place June 29–July 18, 2026. The institute will be conducted in a hybrid format, with the first and third weeks held virtually and the second week convening on site at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. for guided research in its extensive FWP collections. This interdisciplinary program offers participants the opportunity to deepen their understanding of the FWP and to develop hands-on experience using its rich documentation of American lives, communities, and cultures for teaching, research, and scholarship.

Mimbres School Monsoon Session 2026, Aug 10-14.Slavery’s Domestic Economy

The Mimbres School for the Humanities invites applications to participate in our first in-person Monsoon Session Symposium. This symposium takes recent historical and theoretical work on slavery in the Americas as an occasion to ask what it would mean to take the family and the household, rather than labor or industrial profits, as the primary point of departure for understanding the slave power and its various afterlifes in the present.

American Literature Association

May 20-23, 2026

Palmer House, Chicago, IL 

The Richard Wright Society announces two sessions on Wright to take place at the 37th Annual American Literature Association Conference.

Rethinking Richard Wright’s Depiction and Analysis of Gender and Sexuality

American Literature Association

May 20-23, 2026

Chicago, IL

Thoreau and Abolition

This roundtable seeks to explore Thoreau’s relation to the abolitionist movement, whether through his antislavery writings, his biography, or the legacies and afterlives of some of his more famous essays such as “Civil Disobedience.” We are interested in papers that explore any aspect of his political and/or abolitionist thought, his political-economic critiques, or the intertwinement of Thoreau’s ecological and antislavery thinking. We also welcome papers that consider how turning to Thoreau or the politics of nineteenth-century abolition in these terrible times provides us with political paths forward.