The Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society seeks proposals for a roundtable discussion at the next meeting of SSAWW, held in Philadelphia from November 6-9, 2025.  The theme of this year’s SSAWW is “Understanding Histories, Imagining Futures: 25 Years of SSAWW.”  With this theme in mind, our roundtable is titled “The History and Future of Author Societies.”  The roundtable will ideally consist of participants from various author societies, who will discuss anticipated changes and relevance for author societies, talking about both their histories and their imagined futures.  We imagine this roundtable will examine many of the important elements highlighted in the call for papers for the conference, including the way that author societies create communities to “engage with the creative work of women across the Americas who foster change and build networks that sustain us through difficult times.” 

The Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society celebrated its 25th anniversary conference in the summer of 2023, but with the continued decrease in stable faculty positions in academia, the society has observed real challenges to membership and participation. Given this changing climate, what does the future look like for single-author societies? Where might societies draw new membership and encourage participation if traditional pathways in academia are no longer available?  What will be lost if single-author societies are unable to sustain themselves in the future?  What is the role for such societies as both the humanities and, even more specifically, literary studies continue to be maligned within and without higher education? Additionally, the participants might explore questions from the SSAWW call for papers such as, “How do we honor our commitment to these authors, our organization, and these enterprises more broadly in the face of limited resources and structural changes within academia? And … how do we nourish one another and our work through such times?” 

Please, contact James Stamant at jstamant@agnesscott.edu with a proposal (250-300 words) or questions if you have an interest in joining this discussion. The deadline to submit is February 21, 2025.