Society for the Study of Southern Literature Conference 2026

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

Panel: The Future of Southern Studies

Building on the 2026 theme, Building Spaces of Freedom, this panel seeks work that imagines where southern studies is going and who will help carry it forward. The Emerging Scholars Organization (ESO) invites papers from emerging scholars for an open-call panel that looks ahead toward the next questions, methods, and interventions shaping southern studies. 

We welcome papers that take a wide-angle view of “the South” as a mutable, contested, and increasingly global category. Rather than anchoring the future to traditional regional, disciplinary, or methodological boundaries, this panel encourages approaches that expand, disrupt, or reconfigure southern studies altogether.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Digital humanities approaches to southern archives, storytelling, pedagogy, or data visualization.

• AI, algorithmic culture, and digital infrastructures as southern phenomena.

• Gaming, interactive media, and emerging technologies as southern narrative spaces.

• Visual storytelling including art, photography, and film.

• Southern futurisms, speculative fiction, sci-fi, horror, and dystopian world-building.

• Global Souths, hemispheric approaches, and transnational redefinitions of region.

• Queering the future.

• Indigenous approaches to futurity.

• Thinking through disability and accessibility in southern literature and culture.

• The Black South, Black Appalachia, the Global Black South.

• Asian American southern fiction or archives

• Global South frameworks that move beyond the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

• Racial narratives beyond the Black/white binary in the South. 

• Environmental humanities, eco-criticism, alternative ecologies, or animal studies. 

• Medical/Health humanities. 

• Reexamining the state of the field: disciplinary boundaries, institutional politics, and methodological futures.

• New theoretical frameworks or research directions that challenge where southern studies has been and where it is headed.

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.