Call for Chapters:

The Routledge Research Companion to Toni Morrison

Editor: Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem, CUNY

This is a call for chapter proposals for The Routledge Research Companion to Toni Morrison. This companion text is intended for a scholarly audience and as support for newer Morrison scholars as they approach their research.

Each chapter of the book has a dual function: to offer a new reading of Morrison and to review the Morrison scholarship in whatever general terrain the chapter falls within:

1)     Different from some companion texts, the Routledge Research Companion series publishes cutting-edge research rather than (mostly) secondary material. The secondary nature of such a companion—that it informs readers about scholarly trends and history or generally accepted understandings of an author and her work—is, in this case, to be built into each chapter. Each chapter is to point the way forward in terms of new directions in the study, interpretation, and theorization of Morrison’s oeuvre and, they are to review, in a thoroughgoing manner, existing scholarship on the topic area or theme of the chapter, to fill out the picture in terms of where and what Morrison studies has been, what scholars have been thinking, writing, and arguing since she started publishing through to today.

2)     Largely what we want to accomplish here is to tell the history of Morrison studies, through those reviews, and importantly to create a vision for it going forward, for the 21st Century. That is, to think beyond some of the more or less entrenched, perhaps restrictive, borders around the reception and interpretation of Morrison, some of the givens. How do we think beyond those limits or outside accustomed responses to Morrison? How create new and fruitful passages, meanings, readings, new knowledges inspired by the work of this African American woman writer and thinker, also a universally celebrated Nobel Laureate?

At this point, because I already have a set of very good chapter proposals, I am ONLY looking for proposals on the following two topic areas:

Morrison and Race / racism / antiracism

Morrison and Trauma Studies

A few additional notes... Importantly, any chapter of this collection should not be restricted to a single work by Morrison; all should work with multiple texts from the oeuvre. And, each chapter of the book is eligible for Open Access, for those interested in that or whose universities encourage it. Open Access can mean greater exposure, both for the book and for the individual scholar's contribution.

A one- or two-page proposal on either race or trauma (only) is due by 8/15/22, including a Bio and being sure to make the methodology clear: where, how, in what ways does your chapter enter and fit into the conversation on Morrison on your topic, what you are innovating or primarily responding to; this should be clear as well as some of the theoretical scaffolding for chapter. (This could either be a separate statement, a working bibliography, or simply made clear through the content of your proposal.)

Email it to:  mfadem@kbcc.cuny.edu  by 8/15/22. This is a final deadline as the prospectus for this volume will be delivered to the publisher in September. 

In the meantime, questions or suggestions, if there is anything you would like to discuss, please don’t hesitate to reach out: mfadem@kbcc.cuny.edu  (My Bio is copied, below, if helpful.)

~Maureen Ellen Ruprecht, The City University of New York (Kingsborough)

~~~~

Bio: Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem (she/her) completed a Ph.D. in English at The Graduate Center-CUNY under the mentorship of Wayne Koestenbaum. She is Professor of English at Kingsborough-CUNY and a postcolonial, Irish studies, and Black studies scholar; she works on Anglophone writing of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries specializing in historical literatures of Ireland and African America as well as the literatures of partition more broadly. Maureen’s research looks at the poetics of poetry and prose in relation to the political history of empire, especially the imposition of national partition schemes and other imperial borders. Her work is broadly concerned with political justice, notably reparations and (de)carceration, with social justice of race, class, and gender, and with the poetics of conflict, trauma, and silence. Maureen frequently presents at conferences; this year, she will chair and introduce a session she organized for the 2023 MLA Convention: “Political Threats to Academic Freedom: A Call for Antiracist Advocacy.” She actively publishes her research, including the monograph Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian which was brought out by Rowman and Littlefield in 2019. In 2020, Routledge, Inc. published two books authored by Maureen: the monograph Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’: The Case for Reparations as well as a collection she co-edited with Michael O’Sullivan, The Economics of Empire. She has two very recent articles: “Architecting the Carceral State: The Fragment in Medbh McGuckian’s Diaries and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses,’” which appeared in the journal Review of Irish Studies in Europe (Dec. 2021), and the opinion piece “‘Going Public’ with the Humanities in a Fake News World” that was published by Inside Higher Ed (April 4, 2022). She is at work on a number of new projects: a collection titled Imperial Debt on reparations for empire as well as a book series based on that theme; she was commissioned to edit The Routledge Research Companion to Toni Morrison; and, she’s writing a book chapter on Joyce’s “The Dead” in comparison with other instances of postcolonial fiction (Pamuk, Naipaul, Coetzee) that use, as chief allegory, the triptych: snow, silence, and sleep. Maureen is currently serving a three-year term on the MLA Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Rights and Responsibilities (CAFPRR).

[end]