Jessica DeSpain

The Society for the Study of American Women Writers is currently accepting abstracts for their upcoming 2021 conference.

CFP: 2021 SSAWW Triennial Conference “American Women Writers: Ecologies, Survival, Change”

November 4-7th, 2021 Baltimore, Maryland

For the 2021 SSAWW Triennial Conference in Baltimore, we invite proposals on the topic of “American Women Writers: Ecologies, Survival, Change.”

Proposals are welcome on subjects from early American literature to the literature of the present. Proposals might engage with these topics but are not limited to them:

I. Studies of Writing that

  • Examines the systems in which we live, labor, and love
  • Fosters survival and envisions change
  • Illuminates crises that make the ecologies that constitute our worlds visible or hyper-visible
  • Represents existing ecologies and imagines alternative ecologies
  • Brings together metaphors of disease, national peril, and anti-immigration, especially 19th and 21st century writing by women
  • Resists nativist discourses of contagion and national peril, especially 19th- and 21st century by immigrant women
  • Represents systemic barriers to social justice and routes to achieving it
    • Envisions intersectionality as forms of ecology
    • Exposes systemic gender inequities
    • Connects racism and racial and gender bias to physical and cultural health issues
  • Highlights memoir and letters as expressions of relationships between individual lives
  • Explores the role of writing in emotional recovery from systemic oppression and/or illness
  • Addresses women’s engagement with ecologies of print culture and beyond: periodicals, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, books, the internet, etc.
    • Opposes epistemicide
    • Explores ecologies of the archive: what is accessible, sustained, recreated, generated, perpetuated, and/or perpetrated in archival and recovery processes; where do women writers live, survive, and thrive?

II. Proposals on Teaching and Pedagogy that

  • explore the ecologies of academic institutions and the role of women scholars within (and against) them)
  • address literary canons as ecologies and propose healthier, more diverse ecologies of literature and literary study
  • model ways to by-pass anachronistic approaches and create new lenses for student research/scholarly production, etc.
  • move beyond academic monocultures by engaging the intersections of art, music, literature, etc. for a more interdisciplinary approach
  • examine the predominant methodologies of discrete historical eras and their presence in the work of women writers and artists

III. Public Humanities

  • Performance
  • Scholarship as social engagement
  • Teaching outside of the academic classroom
  • Creating partnerships for public humanities by bridging the university and the public sphere

IV. Pedagogies and Scholarship in the Digital Era

  • Surviving and thriving pedagogically in the digital era
  • Teaching via distanced learning
  • Using digital tools, assignments, and projects in the classroom
  • Adapting to the move to online curricula
  • Showcasing research projects and student work in digital modes
  • Devising models of resistance, politics, and economic compensation in the digital age
  • Shepherding projects from initial idea stage to fully-formed digital works

V. Digital Humanities

  • Building and sustaining DH projects from grant funding to long-term sustainability
  • Creating networks for digital projects beyond the university
  • Developing the relationship between recovery work and digital platforms
  • Making it count: how to construct a digital portfolio for research and promotion

VI. Professional Development

  • Professional challenges within universities or the discipline (e.g., how to “count” digital work toward promotion and tenure, reconsidering the value of edited volumes, etc.)
  • From PhD candidate to colleague: demystifying the academic job market
  • The non-academic job search and the role of humanities outside th academy
  • From proposal and beyond: understanding academic publishing in the twenty-first century

For more details and submission information, visit the SSAWW website.