William Faulkner and Louise Erdrich

A Conference Sponsored by the Center for Faulkner Studies

Southeast Missouri State University

Cape Girardeau, Missouri

October 22-24, 2026

The Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University announces its fall 2026 conference: William Faulkner and Louise Erdrich. Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers on any topic related to Faulkner and/or Erdrich, and papers will be considered from all critical perspectives as well as pedagogically focused approaches. Papers that critically respond to both authors are especially welcome, but examinations of their work separately are also encouraged as are proposals of organized panels.  

Conference events include a keynote address by Dr. Eric Gary Anderson (Associate Professor of English at George Mason University), an opening dinner banquet, a tour of the University’s renowned L.D. Brodsky Collection of William Faulkner materials, and a Faulkner and Erdrich art exhibit and reception. Events will be held on Thursday, Oct. 22 – Saturday, Oct. 24. 

William Faulkner and Louise Erdrich have each created modern literary landmarks with multivolume, multigenerational sagas imagining vast fictional worlds intertwined with place, history, and culture. Mississippi-born William Faulkner set many of his most widely read novels and stories in “Indian Country,” as the names he selected for his characters and settings suggest, and some of his most memorable characters are Indigenous People. Louise Erdrich, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, has chronicled Anishinaabe life in rural North Dakota and Minnesota across dozens of novels and short stories as well as a great deal of acclaimed poetry. In her 1985 New York Times essay “Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place,” Erdrich reflected on Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County that it has been “as real to me as any place I’ve actually been,” and she described differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors’ representations of land. In turn, Faulkner’s fabled Yoknapatawpha, an invented place name with Chickasaw- and Chocktaw-language origins, provided the locus for dozens of novels and stories set in northern Mississippi totaling 68 Yoknapatawpha fictions. Faulkner and Erdrich share formal narrative patterns across their literary works that reveal connections between people, land, place, and history in differing ways. Brought together, their novels and stories provide scholars and teachers today with grounds for critical and comparative responses while also inviting questions and studies from a range of approaches, perspectives, and methodologies.  

Paper topics on Faulkner and/or Erdrich may include but need not be limited to the following: 

• Geography, land, place, and/or temporality; 

• Genealogy and literary narrative; the historical novel; history and the novel; historiographies of settler colonialism in U.S. literature; 

• Faulkner and Native American literatures/Indigenous authors other than Erdrich; 

• Erdrich and modernist or postmodern authors other than Faulkner; 

• The literatures of the Americas and/or transnational studies; 

• Digital humanities projects; archival and/or biographical approaches; 

• Contexts and approaches for teaching Faulkner and/or Erdrich;  

• Race, ethnicity, nationality, and/or tribal enrollment; 

• Social justice, racial and sexual violence, juridical law, and/or Indigenous sovereignty; 

• Feminist literary criticism, gender and sexuality studies, including Two-Spirit and queer approaches to narrative and history; 

• Literary representations of education and/or schools; 

• Ecocriticism and Indigenous futurism, southern or Indigenous literature and the Anthropocene; 

• Economic criticism and material cultures; social class in modernist or Indigenous prose; 

• Interdisciplinary approaches, such as ethnohistorical studies; Native literary nationalist critiques of scholarship on Faulkner or Erdrich; 

• Visual culture, film and television, and Hollywood cinema; Faulkner’s screenplays, etc.; 

• Humor and comedy studies; 

• Other literature by either author, such as poetry, young adult books, non-fiction and memoir, etc. 

The Center for Faulkner Studies is currently seeking a journal or book publisher for expanded chapter-length versions of selected conference papers for publication. 

Please email abstracts of 200-300 words with a CV or short biography by May 15, 2026 to cfs@semo.edu. A Zoom presentation option will be available on a limited basis for those unable to attend in person. (Please note in the proposal if your paper will be delivered via Zoom.)

For further inquiries, please contact Dr. Jon Hayes at jhayes@semo.edu or (573) 651-2620.