Call for FULL Chapters:

Update: The manuscript is nearly finished however some of the planned chapters have fallen through. I need a replacement chapter, possibly two, in short order. Please review the CFC details below and contact me with any questions: maureenfadem@gmail.com

The Routledge Research Companion to Toni Morrison

Editor: Maureen E. Ruprecht, CUNY

This is a call for chapters for The Routledge Research Companion to Toni Morrison. This companion text is intended for a scholarly audience and as support for newer Morrison scholars as they approach their research.

Each chapter of the book has a DUAL function: to offer a new reading of Morrison AND to review the Morrison scholarship in whatever general terrain the chapter falls within:

1)     Different from some companion texts, the Routledge Research Companion series publishes cutting-edge research rather than (mostly) secondary material. The secondary nature of such a companion—that it informs readers about scholarly trends and history or generally accepted understandings of an author and her work—is, in this case, to be built into each chapter. Each chapter is to point the way forward in terms of new directions in the study, interpretation, and theorization of Morrison’s oeuvre and, they are to review, in a thoroughgoing manner, existing scholarship on the topic area or theme of the chapter, to fill out the picture in terms of where and what Morrison studies has been, what scholars have been thinking, writing, and arguing since she started publishing through to today. 

2)     Largely what we want to accomplish here is to tell the history of Morrison studies, through those reviews, and importantly to create a vision for it going forward, for the 21st Century. That is, to think beyond some of the more or less entrenched, perhaps restrictive, borders around the reception and interpretation of Morrison, some of the givens. How do we think beyond those limits or outside accustomed responses to Morrison? How create new and fruitful passages, meanings, readings, new knowledges inspired by the work of this African American woman writer and thinker, also a universally celebrated Nobel Laureate?

It is critical that all chapters include both pieces. A few notes:

--Importantly, any chapter of this collection should not be restricted to a single work by Morrison, all chapters must work with multiple texts (of whatever genre) from Morrison's oeuvre.

--Each chapter is eligible for Open Access, for those interested in that or whose universities encourage it. Open Access can mean greater exposure, both for the book and for the individual scholar.

Full chapters due by 11/15/25, including a Bio. (The absolute latest date I could accept chapter submissions would be end of November.)  The idea is that you already have new exciting material on Morrison that you are working on, and this window gives you time to develop the opening piece (#1 above) before submission. Chapters should not be more than 10,000 words.

This is a final deadline as the manuscript will be delivered to the publisher soon after. Email it to: maureenfadem@gmail.com. (My Bio is copied, below, if helpful.)

~Maureen Ellen Ruprecht, The City University of New York  

~~~~

Bio: 

Maureen E. Ruprecht (Fadem) completed her PhD at The Graduate Center, CUNY in 2012. She is Professor of English at KCC CUNY and a widely published postcolonial, partition, and political justice scholar. Maureen appears in interview, organizes and presents at conferences, and recently Maureen completed a two-year term on the MLA committee on Academic Freedom (CAFPRR). This January, she’ll give two papers at MLA: “Coalition, Colloquy, and Commune: The Longue Durée of Unjust Enrichment and the Indispensability of Abolition Solidarities” on the TC Philosophy and Literature session: “Moral Agency in a Nonmoral World”; and, “Where is the CC Classroom? Seeking Social Justice, Finding Social Agency” on the session hosted by MLA’s Higher Education Practices Board for Two-Year Colleges: “Community College Strengths.” Maureen’s research on literatures of Ireland, of the African diaspora, and on the global literatures of partition looks at the poetics of conflict, trauma, and silence in verse and narrative, at race and gender justice, and at social and political justice, especially reparations. Recent articles include “‘A thing breaks beyond naming’: A Review Article on David Lloyd’s 2022 Books, Counterpoetics of Modernity and The Harm Fields” (ISR 2023) and “Architecting the Carceral State: The Fragment in Medbh McGuckian’s Diaries and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses’” (RISE 2021). Accepted for publication and in production now is “Deconstructing Modernity, Decommodifying Capitalism: The [Post]Pandemic World According to Emily St. John Mandel” (Apocalyptica, special issue:“Critical Theory at the Endgame,” 2025). Her first foray into apocalyptic literature, it uses a cross-section of theory—Benjamin, Lukács, Bloch, Jameson—to argue that the novel Station Eleven de-auratizes and de-commodifies modern objects and institutions and uses them as (new) materialist objects in a searing critique of capitalism. Maureen has four scholarly monographs in print: The Literature of Northern Ireland: Spectral Borderlands (Palgrave 2015) and Silence and Articulacy in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian (Rowman & Littlefield, now Bloomsbury, 2020). In 2021, Routledge brought out two additional books: Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’: The Case for Reparations, and the co-edited collection The Economics of Empire. She’s at work now on two scholarly collections, both in contract: Imperial Debt: Colonial Theft, Postcolonial Reparations (Liverpool UP 2025) and The (New) Routledge Research Companion to Toni Morrison (2026). The prospectus for a new single-author monograph has also been submitted, and is in review: The Case for Reparations for Empire: Four Rocks and a Geological Tropology of Imperial Debt. A thoroughgoing treatment of the question of repair for modern era imperialism, it takes up histories of (colonial) partition—Ireland, South Asia, Sudan, and Palestine-and-Israel—as critical evidentiary material for the argument.

[end]