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). This panel seeks to build upon and expand recent scholarly discussions of Welty’s complex engagement with women’s issues and feminist thought, inviting work by scholars examining the ways in which Welty’s “feminism is not the kind that pickets in the streets; it is a stealth feminism that explores and explodes the foundations under conceptual structures” (Ford and Mark 125: Women’s Studies 53.2). For this American Literature Association Conference panel, the Eudora Welty Society seeks proposals exploring the ways in which Welty’s works subtly subvert both patriarchal constructions of society and gender as well as classical feminist frameworks of thought. How does Welty employ serious daring in her depictions of the sheltered lives of others and herself? How is her art furtively radical in its engagement with conceptions of feminism and gender? 

Send abstracts of no more than 400 words and brief bios by December 1st to Adrienne Akins Warfield at aakins@mhu.edu. Earlier statements of interest are strongly encouraged. 2. Eudora Welty in the Twenty-First CenturyWelty tells us in One Writer’s Beginnings that while we experience events “in a sequence in time,” their “significance” often “find[s]” its “own order, a timetable not necessarily—perhaps not possibly—chronological” (68-69). If we are to see relevance in time more subjectively, as Welty teaches us in “Learning to See,” what new insights can we unveil by (re)centering her 20th century productions in the frame of our 21st century scholarly contexts? How does Welty’s art continue to speak to the complexities that shaped the past but that also still resonate in our present lives? For this session, the Eudora Welty Society seeks panelists across disciplines working on innovative 21st century approaches to Welty’s work. Presenters could propose new scholarship on Welty or explore sites of expansion of work begun for the April 2025 International Welty Conference in Jackson. Send abstracts of no more than 400 words and brief bios by December 1st to Rebecca Harrison at rharriso@westga.edu.  Early statements of interest are strongly encouraged.   ********************