The Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society will host two sessions at the upcoming ALA Conference in Boston, May 21-24, 2025. The PEHS is collaborating with the Research Society of American Periodicals (RSAP) on one of these two sessions. You can find the two CFPs below. Please consider submitting a proposal. The deadline is January 15, 2025. 

PEHS CFP One:

Research Society of American Periodicals (RSAP) and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society (PEHS) co-sponsored session, American Literature Association Annual Conference, Boston, MA, May 21-24, 2025

“Immediate Need” and Collective History: Periodical Networks of Pauline Hopkins

In 1900, the Boston-based Colored American Magazine launched its inaugural issue, convinced of the “immediate need of a Race Journal, otherwise than our current local periodicals.” Pauline E. Hopkins would become the magazine's best-known literary contributor and one of the few Black women editors from the era. Complex print systems like the Colored American Magazine participated in the creation of interconnected networks of authorship and meaning as they solicited editorials, correspondences, photographs, poetry, nonfiction prose, and short stories from established authors to little-known, amateur, or occasional writers. As highlighted in the fall 2024 American Periodicals forum, “Editing Black Literature from Periodicals,” Black periodical production–and Hopkins’ writing in particular–expands into new circuits of meaning and influence across generations of readers. This session will explore the historical and contemporary opportunities for connection, celebration, and community exchange through a focus on the periodical lives of Pauline E. Hopkins.

In this co-sponsored session, the Research Society of American Periodicals (RSAP) and the Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society (PEHS) invite proposals that build from and/or contribute to the growing body of scholarship on periodical studies and Hopkins and her milieu for presentation at the 36th Annual American Literature Association Conference in Boston, May 21-24, 2025.Topics might include, but are not limited to Hopkins’ writings and editorial work for the Colored American Magazine or the short-lived New Era Magazine, her readings of or borrowings from other periodicals, her relationships to other journalists and literary figures, and/or her contributions to other Black and white print networks in Boston, New York, and elsewhere.

Please send 300-word proposals and CVs to Sarah Salter (sarah.h.salter@emory.edu) and Edlie Wong (edlie@umd.edu) by January 15, 2025.

PEHS CFP Two:

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society (PEHS) session, American Literature Association Annual Conference, Boston, MA, May 21-24, 2025

Hopkins and her Society: Fifteen Years of the Pauline E. Hopkins Society

Our session marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Pauline E. Hopkins Society. Established at the 2009 American Literature Association Conference in Boston, the Society dedicated itself to fostering scholarship and dialogue on Hopkins and her era. In the intervening years, the digitization of the Colored American Magazine, the publication of a second collection of Hopkins scholarship, and the release of modern annotated editions of Hopkins’s serial novels have helped reignite interest in Hopkins’s life and writings, cementing her role as one of the foremost African American artists and intellectuals of the early twentieth century. We use this anniversary occasion to take stock of past scholarship and look forward to new research and perspectives on Hopkins. The Pauline E. Hopkins Society invites proposals that build from and/or contribute to this growing body of scholarship for presentation at the 36th Annual American Literature Association Conference in Boston, May 21-24, 2025. 

As the ALA conference returns to Boston where Hopkins first made her mark, we welcome papers that examine any aspect of Hopkins’s work, especially in conversation with Hopkins’s own society and/or the past criticism and/or more recent theoretical/critical approaches on Hopkins in the past fifteen years.Topics might include, but are not limited to: Hopkins’s relationship to other writers and authors represented by ALA member societies; her relation to the Colored American Magazine and other Black intellectual, political, and literary figures; and/or her relationship to other print, artistic, or performance cultures in Boston or elsewhere. The current PEHS President John Gruesser will chair this session.

Please send 300-word proposals and CVs to Courtney Novosat (cnovosat@andrew.cmu.edu)  and Edlie Wong (edlie@umd.edu) by January 15, 2025.