The Flannery O’Connor Society
The Society for the Study of Southern Literature
March 28th-31st, 2026
Fisk University
Nashville, TN

The Flannery O’Connor Society invites abstracts (of about 300 words) to be submitted for participation in an open topics panel on Flannery O’Connor’s life and work at the biannual conference of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature.

This year, the theme of SSSL’s biannual conference is “Building Spaces of Freedom.” The conference encourages panel submissions that speak to this theme using historic, spatial, political, and aesthetic approaches. Citing this year as the conference’s first time to be held at a southern HBCU, we particularly invite submissions for papers that consider questions of racial representation and inclusion in O’Connor’s fiction, as well as papers that discuss teaching O’Connor in light of her views on race and the legacy of racism in her fiction, correspondence, and criticism. This panel is likely uniquely poised to welcome papers that discuss O’Connor’s fiction in conversation with Fisk University’s storied alumni—including, as the conference’s call for papers notes, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Hope Franklin, Diane Nash, John Lewis, Nikki Giovanni, and the university’s faculty, including James Weldon Johnson, Arna Bontemps, Robert Hayden, and John Oliver Killens. The full conference theme is described on SSSL’s website (https://southernlit.org/conference/) 

Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:

• Film and media adaptations of O’Connor’s life and work
• Evaluations of O’Connor’s work in relation to other authors, genres, and media, or between texts
• Race and racism in O’Connor’s fiction and correspondence
• O’Connor and modernism/postmodernism
• Ability and disability in O’Connor’s life and work
• Class concerns and social status for O’Connor and her characters
• Place, space, region, and politics in O’Connor’s letters and fiction
• Aesthetic and rhetorical considerations in O’Connor’s fiction
• Approaches to teaching Flannery O’Connor’s work
• Gender and sexuality in O’Connor’s fiction, as well as evaluations of the body of criticism on gender and sexuality in O’Connor’s work
• Canonicity and O’Connor’s place in southern literature

Please send abstracts to Rachel Bryan (rbryan5@vols.utk.edu) by Friday, December 12th, 2025. Please include your name, email, institutional affiliation and a short bio (100 words) with the abstract. Presenters must be members of the Flannery O’Connor Society by the time of the conference. Information about the conference’s fee and potential reserved hotel rate (yet unannounced) can be found on the Society for the Study of Southern Literature’s website (https://southernlit.org/conference/). Information about the Society, including how to join, can be found on the Flannery O’Connor Society Website (http://flannerysociety.org).