The Society for the Study of American Poetry invites proposals for a session to be held at the 37th annual American Literature Association conference in Chicago, IL, May 20-23, 2026. 

Panel: Mediating American Poetry

This panel invites papers that examine American poetry through the lens of media, broadly construed and across historical periods. We seek work that explores how poetic production, circulation, reception, and interpretation have been shaped by media forms—from print technologies and the history of the book to digital platforms, archives, and social media.

American poetry has always been mediated: by material formats, editorial practices, performance contexts, recording technologies, and now by databases, algorithms, and networked publics. This panel aims to bring together scholars working across periods and methodologies to consider how changing media environments have shaped poetic form, authorship, readership, and cultural meaning.

We welcome papers that address (but are not limited to) the following topics:

• Print culture, periodicals, little magazines, chapbooks, and book history
• Manuscripts, archives, and editorial or bibliographic approaches
• Sound, performance, radio, film, and other audiovisual media
• Digital archives, data-driven criticism, and platform studies
• Social media, online poetry communities, and contemporary circulation
• Remediation, intermediality, and poetic responses to new technologies
• Media theory, materiality, and the politics of poetic transmission
• Comparative or transhistorical approaches to media and American poetry

We encourage submissions from scholars working in all periods of American poetry and from diverse methodological perspectives. The panel seeks to foster conversation across temporal, formal, and media-specific boundaries.

Submission Guidelines:
Please submit a 250–300 word abstract and a brief bio by Jan 29 to Nikki Skillman nskillma@iu.edu