Society for the Study of Southern Literature Conference 2026

“Building Spaces of Freedom,” March 28th-31st at Fisk University, Nashville, TN

Panel: Building Emerging Spaces of Freedom

The Emerging Scholars Organization (ESO) invites papers that center emerging perspectives on SSSL’s conference theme, Building Spaces of Freedom. This panel foregrounds the ongoing labor of emerging scholars who navigate long histories of exclusion, gatekeeping, and uneven access while also reshaping southern studies through new interventions, methods, and archival practices.

We are especially interested in work that thinks about “emergence” not merely as transition but as a form of spatial and methodological world-building. What does it mean to carve out space in a profession structured by precarity, scarcity, and institutional contradiction? How do early-career scholars reinterpret or refuse inherited traditions? How does southern studies—across literature, media, history, cultural studies, performance, digital humanities, or interdisciplinary approaches—help us reimagine academic spaces?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Reconsiderations of “place,” “region,” and “the South” through emerging/novel frameworks.

• Approaches that unsettle dominant narratives or expand what counts as southern literature, history, culture, and/or identity.

• Eco-power, climate precarity, and landscapes of agency or refusal.

• Carceral geographies, the contemporary southern prison system, and state control as spatial regimes.

• The politics of belonging, mentorship, and institutional culture for early-career scholars.

• Defining—and destabilizing—the category of “emerging scholar” in the twenty-first century academy.

• Pedagogical spaces of freedom: classrooms, syllabi, institutional memory, and student collaboration.

• Fiction, film, tv shows, video games, or other materials that examine academia, graduate students, or scholars.

• Black or Indigenous scholarship and the university.

• The university as a neoliberal institution and the undercommons. 

• Histories and intellectual traditions of southern HBCUs.

• Feminist, queer, or trans southern epistemologies or methods for building alternative scholarly futures. 

We welcome proposals from graduate students, recent PhDs, contingent faculty, independent scholars, and anyone who identifies with the category of “emerging” in their scholarly trajectory.

Please send 250-word abstracts and 150-word bios to emergingscholarsorg@gmail.com by December 15, 2025.