The Graduate Student Representative for the Modernist Studies Association seeks paper proposals from graduate students and emerging scholars on the topic of “precarious modernisms” for a guaranteed MSA 2023 panel. In a rapidly shifting climate of academic precarity, what can modernism’s own precarities offer in the way of addressing our contemporary crises of the humanities? Panelists might consider, but are certainly not limited to:

• How culturally marked modernist and twentieth-century writers negotiated emerging forms of radical contingency, from Jim Crow segregation to the Lavender scare;
• Eco-critical approaches to modernist studies in our late stage of the Anthropocene, or the precarity of non-human life in modernist depictions of the rural/pastoral;
•  “Passing” modernisms, or negotiating safety under conditions of racial and sexual threat;
• The precarity of modernism itself as a discipline, as suggested by the rise (and decline) of the New Modernist Studies, or the paradigms of multiple modernisms.

Please submit abstracts of 300 words to MSA grad rep Zoë Henry (zlhenry@iu.edu), and a brief bio, by March 20th. For more on the MSA 2023 annual meeting, please visit: https://msa.press.jhu.edu/conferences/msa2023//CFP.html.