Building Spaces of Freedom
Society for the Study of Southern Literature 2026 CFP
Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, March 28-31, 2026

The Society for the Study of Southern Literature seeks submissions for our biennial conference, which will take place March 28-31, 2026, at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.

The 2026 theme, “Building Spaces of Freedom,” pays tribute to the conference’s host. Founded less than a year after the conclusion of the US Civil War, Fisk University is the oldest institution of higher education in Tennessee and one of the most significant Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the history of southern studies—an apt setting for the SSSL’s first conference to be hosted by an HBCU since our organization’s establishment in 1968. Fisk’s literary and historical contributions have come from alumni including W. E. B. Du Bois, John Hope Franklin, Diane Nash, John Lewis, and Nikki Giovanni, and faculty including James Weldon Johnson, Arna Bontemps, Robert Hayden, and John Oliver Killens.

More widely, as a postcolonial metroplex, Nashville occupies the ancestral hunting and traditional Lands of the Cherokee, Shawnee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek peoples—homelands that, between 800 to 1500 CE, housed a sprawling Indigenous city. Today, Nashville is known well beyond its reputation as a college town or, “the Athens of the South”: a hilly, forested midpoint between Appalachia and the Mississippi Valley, a global city, a state capital, and a music and entertainment mecca.

The SSSL 2026 program committee welcomes proposals for individual papers or full panels/roundtables. We also welcome proposals for more experimental panel formats, such as guided discussions, lightning presentations, poster, art, or media displays, writing workshops, sessions that combine scholarly and non-scholarly participants, or other alternative formats.

We especially invite works that engage with the conference theme in a variety of contexts, but all approaches are welcome, including papers that seek interdisciplinary understandings of the historical and contemporary South in literature, by way of particular writers and/or texts, as well as such forms as film, music, visual art, popular culture, and performance.

Possible areas of interest may include, but are not limited to:

● Dissident spaces, including spaces of defiance, resistance, activism, expertise, service, safety, care, growth, flourishing, joy, and justice
● Social and political freedom movements, including the Black freedom struggle
● HBCU history and culture within and beyond the South, and HBCU-affiliated writers’ influence on the field
● Old and new relationships between southern literature and African American literature
● Power and knowledge, including the past and contemporary politicization of education, and the precarity of teachers, students, and institutions of learning
● Authoritarianism, one-party rule, political violence, voter suppression, carcerality, censorship, threats to free speech and expression, scholarship, publishing, teaching, and citizenship
● Cultural, ecological, and/or geographic approaches to community formations within and surrounding the conference location: including Appalachian/Affrilachian, Indigenous, immigrant, and others
● Regional and global contexts, including circum-Atlantic, circum-Mississippian, migratory and diasporic connections
● Gender, sexuality, the body
● Pedagogies of southern studies, Black studies, the Global South, and related areas
● Literary canons, intertextualities, and networks of influence
● Environmental and ecocritical approaches
● Medical and health humanities approaches
● Futurity

The program committee is committed to curating an inclusive, equitable, and diverse program of participants and urges panel organizers to select panel participants accordingly. We welcome scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, especially those who may not identify primarily as “southernists,” and we actively encourage the work of graduate, junior, contingent, and independent scholars, who can take advantage of SSSL’s robust Emerging Scholars Organization and travel grant programs.

Panel/roundtable proposals should include a 500-word panel introduction, plus 300-word abstracts for each presentation, and 100-word bio for each presenter. Individual papers/other formats should include a 300-word abstract and 100-word bio.

Please email this information to conference@southernlit.org by December 15, 2025.