The Society for Textual Scholarship invites proposals for our 2024 conference hosted by the University of Tulsa, June 6-8, on the theme Text Under Pressure. The deadline for proposals is Monday, March 18.

Texts manifest many varieties of creative, social, and political pressure in their expressive content and form. But text is also often a matter of technological pressure: printing techniques rely on the pressure of a platen, roller, or squeegee; other recording and playback processes require the pressure of a stylus, a chisel, a nib, or the gentle pulse of a wifi wave. Such pressurized circumstances, symbolic and material, reveal core issues of textual production, circulation, reception, and contestation. 

Taking our inspiration from the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, this year’s conference will explore topics such as:

• Texts of resistance and dissent
• Texts of coercion and/or liberation
• Texts enacting and/or combatting erasure
• Texts produced by and about the Tulsa Race Massacre
• Texts of settler colonialism
• Text on and beyond the reservation
• Protest song history
• Technological pressures w/r/t printing, publishing, producing, and performing
• Creative alliances and alignments in response to pressure
• Archiving fragile forms of expression, researching with fragile media
• Text and resource extraction
• Pressures on/of mythologies of the Western U.S.
• The pressures of historical preservation and commemoration
• Textual emergencies and other products of temporal pressure
• Teaching texts under pressure

The Society for Textual Scholarship is a multi-disciplinary organization focused on book history, digital textuality, scholarly editing, editorial theory, and other issues related to the materialities and histories of textual culture, writ large.

Please see the CFP at our website for more information. There are options for in-person and remote participation.

https://textualsociety.org/2024-conference-text-under-pressure/