american

The year 2025 will mark the centennial of one of the most powerful voices in twentieth-century American Literature. Author of a reduced fictional production (two novels and three collections of short stories), Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) remains among the most widely praised authors of the United States, to the extent that, shortly after her premature death, claims by, among others, Brainard Cheney, Robert Giroux, and Caroline Gordon were made about the country having lost their next Nobel Laureate for Literature. Alternative history aside, what is true is that the last century of American literature would have lost an enormous amount of its meaning without the existence of Flannery O’Connor’s writing.

"The Future of the American Literary Archive" panel at NeMLA 2025 (March 6-9, Philadelphia) invites panelists to share archival discoveries in American literature while also engaging in broader methodological reflections on the state of archival research in the humanities. In the context of explaining their own archival work and/or pedagogy, panelists will discuss how archival research has been impacted—for better or for worse—by tectonic shifts in the US humanities landscape including technological developments (AI, digitization), declining undergraduate humanities enrollments, and calls for more public-facing humanities scholarship readable to a general audience.

In the often-quoted line from her groundbreaking Borderlands/la frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa identifies the US/Mexico borderlands as a site of pain and creation: “The U.S-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture” (25). While Anzaldúa uses the geo-political border as a means of illustrating the unnatural divides governments impose on peoples, she also recognizes that we create many borderlands within ourselves and our own communities: psychological, sexual, and spiritual.

The African American Literature and Culture Society invites abstracts (of no more than
250 words) for presentations at the annual conference of the American Literature
Association (http://americanliteratureassociation.org/). We will also consider a limited
number of panel proposals (of no more than 500 words).

We invite abstracts for a proposed edited collection of scholarship on Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology.

Topics of interest include gender, sexuality, race, regionality, reception, pedagogy, performance, and adaptation.,

The Leon Edel Prize is awarded annually for the best essay on Henry James by a beginning scholar.  The prize carries with it an award of $300, and the prize-winning essay will be published in HJR.

The competition is open to applicants who have not held a full-time academic appointment for more than four years. Independent scholars and graduate students are encouraged to apply.

Essays should be 20-30 pages (including notes), original, and not under submission elsewhere or previously published.  Please send electronic submssions in Microsoft Word format and a current CV to hjamesr@creighton.edu.

Young Scholars Literary SymposiumShenandoah University’s Arts and Humanities Conference

Call for Proposals

The Harlem Renaissance:  Community and Convergence

Saturday, November 9, 2024: 12:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. EST

Hosted by Shenandoah University’s Department of English in Winchester, Virginia

The SU Young Scholars Literary Symposium is a one-day conference held on SU’s Winchester campus. This event brings together outstanding high school and undergraduate students from the region to share their academic and creative work related to the symposium’s annual theme. 

Call for Papers

Poetry & Poetics (Critical)

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

46th Annual Conference, February 19-22, 2025

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://www.southwestpca.org

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2024

The Charles Olson Society and the Jonathan Bayliss Society are pleased to announce a collaborative panel to be held at the upcoming American Literature Association Conference in Boston, May 21-24, 2025. This panel will focus on writers who were inspired by Gloucester, Massachusetts and Cape Ann. The richness of Cape Ann, its history, people, and geography, deeply influenced poets Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini as well as novelist Jonathan Bayliss. How did these figures incorporate Gloucester’s geography, history, population, ecology, or other distinct elements in their work? How does place influence and determine the nature of a poet’s or novelist’s writing?

The Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Society will sponsor a panel at the 36th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association, May 21-24, 2025, at the Westin Copley Place in Boston, MA. Our focus this year will be “Freeman’s Historicisms.”  The Society welcomes submissions related to this topic, including proposals that bring Freeman’s work into substantive conversation with that of her contemporaries. 

Possibilities include:

I'm writing to share the CFPs for the two Eudora Welty Society sessions that will be featured at the 2025 American Literature Association Conference in Boston at the Westin Copley Place (May 21-24, 2025). ******************** 1. Welty’s Sheltered Daring and Furtive FeminismEudora Welty concludes her literary autobiography One Writer’s Beginnings with the self-summation, “[a]s you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring comes from within” (104).

HENRY MILLER'S PLACE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

From 16-19 October of 2025, Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal and the

Henry Miller MemorialLibrary will host aconference at Asilomar in Pacific Grove,

California, with an excursion to the Henry MillerMemorial Library in Big Sur. We will

examine Miller in light of contemporary thinking, asking the question: Is Henry

Miller relevant today?

Although presentations on any aspect of Miller's writing, artwork, and life are

welcomed, the conference organizers particularlyencourage consideration of the

theme of Miller's place in the 21st Century.

Topics for presentations might include, but are not limited to:

Weeks after the death of Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro this year, her daughter Andrea Skinner disclosed the longstanding sexual abuse she'd suffered as a child at the hands of her stepfather, Munro’s husband, Gerald Fremlin—abuse about which Munro had known and stayed silent. The disclosure is but the latest revelation to throw into question the legacy of a revered cultural icon. Neil Gaiman, Louis CK, Jean Vanier, and Avital Ronell are only a few public figures to be reassessed in recent years in the wake of accounts of sexual abuse.

Guest editors: Nathan Ashman (University of East Anglia) and Steven Powell (University of Liverpool)