Call for Proposals

 see: http://ssaww2012.wordpress.com/ for full details

Key dates:

Monday, February 6, 2012: Proposals due to ssawwconf@gmail.com; see page 2 for directions.

May 2012: Acceptance notifications sent

June 30, 2012: Program schedule announced

Note: Presenters must be members of SSAWW by the “early/discounted” date for conference registration in the fall of 2012.

Participants presenting one formal academic paper may also appear on the program in additional ways (e.g., as a respondent, on a roundtable, or in a “professionalization” session.)

Theme: Citizenship and Belonging

For the fall 2012 Conference of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW), we are issuing a special invitation for session and paper proposals linked to the theme of “Citizenship and Belonging.” As in the past, the conference organizers will welcome proposals on any topic related to the study of American women writers, broadly conceived. However, we are also eager to capitalize on the conference opportunity to promote conversations—both “in the moment” and sustained—around a shared theme.

Why “Citizenship and Belonging”?

Historically speaking, these have been concerns of American women authors from their earliest writings, published and unpublished, and they remain concerns today. Long before the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments, women writers raised questions about how they could participate in the leadership of new American communities; similarly, contemporary women respond to the day’s political events and social trends in many forms of the written word.  Just as women of all backgrounds considered the parameters of “Americanness”—its inherence or its acquisition, its stability or fluidity, its necessity or its superfluity—their contemporary counterparts are using both old-fashioned forms and cutting-edge technologies to reimagine the United States and its people for the 21^st century.  Whether one thinks of Harriet Jacobs pondering her own “sale” in 19^th-century New York, Jhumpa Lahiri imagining connections across seas and generations in her short fiction, or young writers seizing the potential of the internet and social media to create their own publishing worlds, women writers have always, and perhaps always will, wrestle with what it means to belong.

Citizenship—how to claim it, how best to exercise it, and where its boundaries lie—is at the heart of much women’s writing. Citizenship can be constructed in many ways, both legally and culturally, and can be explored in terms of race, class, ethnicity, family, sexuality, economics, religion, place, and region—in short, from multiple perspectives and through multiple lenses.  It can also be investigated as a question of form and genre:  what kinds of writing “belong,” and to what realms or entities do they claim entry?

We hope our fall 2012 conference will provide an array of opportunities for examining these interrelated themes of “Citizenship and Belonging,” even as we continue to honor the many other topics and organizing principles that have made our field so dynamic. So, as we build a strand of theme-related sessions, we encourage SSAWW members to consider these two terms—citizenship and belonging—either together, in dialogue with each other, or individually, as productive lenses for exploring the heritage, current work, and future promise of American women writers.

Harriet Beecher Stowe at 200
Home, Nation, and Place in the 21st Century

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine
22-25 June 2011
Sponsored by the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society

On the bicentennial of her birth, the Stowe Society announces a conference celebrating Harriet Beecher Stowe—her life and works—at Bowdoin College, where she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Conference organizers welcome participation from scholars, artists, and members of the community.

In The American Woman’s Home, Catherine Beecher and her famous sister Harriet, figure “home” as the “family state.” In fact, the great domestic writer of the nineteenth century, Harriet Beecher Stowe, consistently imagines American cultural geography in terms of family and state—at the intersection of home and nation. This conference will examine how Stowe creates her own place in the world of American letters through her expansive consideration of familial and national life. Conference organizers solicit papers that broadly explore the theme of home, nation, and place in the work of Stowe through lenses such as politics, education, reform, race, and religion. Studies on the works of Stowe’s family members—Henry Ward Beecher, Calvin Stowe, and Catherine Beecher—are also welcome.

Possible topics include:

• The national divide: North and South
• Justice in the home and/or nation
• National religion/religion at home
• Race and family and/or national life
• National and transnational identities
• Reform in the home and/or nation
• Cosmopolitanism and citizenship
• Stowe’s place in letters
• Exile and conceptions of home
• Education in the home and/or nation
• Stowe’s literary lineage: literary ancestors and successors, black and white
  Biological, political, and anthropological constructions of citizenship

In addition to scholarly presentations, dramatic performances, readings, and informal conversations are welcomed.

For further information about the conference, contact the conference director: Tess Chakkalakal (tchakkal@bowdoin.edu). Email 250-word proposals and 1-page CVs by December 1, 2010 to the chair of the program committee: Mary Wearn (marywearn@gmail.com).

All participants must be members of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society at the time of registration.

Since these essays will take a cultural studies approach, topics such as the following are also welcome:

–Uncle Tom’s Cabin on stage and screen (the widespread popularity of the 19th c. drama; the silent film version; Judy Garland in Broadway Melody; the King and I)

–efforts at publishing her collected letters

–more recent biographical approaches post-Hedrick

–Stowe Facebook frenzy (distant relatives chiming in on the Stowe Center page)

–UTC and material culture (Topsy-Turvy dolls; the legacy of Little Eva, etc.)

–Stowe’s role as editor of Our Young Folks and her promotion of 19th c. children’s literature (a la Lydia Maria Child)

Please send a 1-2 pp. proposal as a Word attachment by July 1 to philip.j.kowalski@gmail.com.

1. “Harriet Beecher Stowe and Visual Culture.” Papers can address illustrations of Stowe’s work in the 19th century and later, evocation of visual experience in her writing, or other aspects of visual culture.

2. “Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Legacy of the Beecher Family.” Papers can address connections between Stowe and particular Beecher family members, how Stowe handles the legacy of her heritage in her writings, or cultural responses in the 19th century to the Beechers (collectively or as individuals).

To submit a proposal to either panel, please send abstracts and contact information to Lisa West by January 15, 2010.

also…

Call for Papers: ALA 2010. The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society invites papers on the following topics for the annual American Literature Association (ALA) Conference in San Francisco, Thursday, May 27-Sunday, May 30, 2010.

1. “Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Religion.” While Catharine Maria Sedgwick is often linked with Unitarianism, her writings on benevolence and didacticism also overlap with different forms of Protestantism. In what ways can we expand our understanding of her use of religion in her writing? How would reconsidering the role of religion in her writing help us position her within different writing communities – such as post-bellum women writers, transcendentalists, or antebellum evangelists?

2. “The Sketch Reconsidered: Sedgwick, Irving and their Contemporaries.” This panel seeks to reconsider the cultural and literary work of the “sketch,” either as a genre or as a subgenre. The focus is on writing between 1815 and 1840.

To submit a proposal to either panel, please send abstracts and contact information to Lisa West by January 15, 2010.

Thematic and formal connections, or “threads”, run through American literature. Some have been acknowledged by the writers themselves, others have been identified by academia. The aim of this conference is to show that the link between a nineteenth-century novelist, Harriet Beecher-Stowe (1811-1896), and a twentieth-century, poet John Beecher (1904-1980), is not merely genealogical. The theme “forms and reform” is an invitation to trace new continuities or overlaps beyond generic and chronological boundaries, and to examine these authors’ problematic inclusion in–or exclusion from–the canon in a new light.

In spite of the publication in 1980 of John Beecher’s Collected Poems, his work was neglected for many years. But One More River To Cross, a new “Selected Poems” edited by Steven Ford Brown and brought out by NewSouth Books in 2003, has made available again for reappraisal the work of one in turn dismissed as no poet at all or celebrated as “an American hero.” As for Harriet Beecher Stowe, the need to reread Uncle Tom’s Cabin seems particularly acute in the wake of three recent publications (Gregg Crane’s The Cambridge Introduction to The Nineteenth-Century Novel [2007], Sarah Robbins’s The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe [2007] and The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Hollis Robbins [2007].) Both authors therefore bear some relevance to the present.

Among the features common to both writers:

- their obvious concern for slaves in the case of Harriet Beecher Stowe and for workingmen, particularly African-Americans, in the case of John Beecher. Such priorities account for an inclination to preach, common to both authors. To various degrees, their works qualify as protest literature but are also informed by religion. Another tension worthy of exploration is that between sentiment and politics. Are these balancing acts successful? What is the political and religious relevance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to today’s America? How religious do John Beecher’s politics sound to those who call themselves the Progressives of the 21st century? Should ‘the Beechers’ be considered as ultimately engineering social stability rather than radical reform? Surely they were not Anti-moderns in Antoine Compagnon’s understanding of the term—or were they?

- an apparent disinterest in formal innovation or just a taste for well-tried literary forms. But was it really the case, or did they simply choose to take their pick among available middle-of-the-road contemporary forms as their priorities lay elsewhere? Besides, is preaching out of bounds in literature? Where exactly does the border run between rhetoric and literature? Can the preaching, progressive thread(s) in John Beecher’s and Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s writings be tied to other significant works of American literature?

- their being a part of the Southern heritage for different reasons, although their roots lay in the North. How does John Beecher’s poetry tie into the some-say-non-existent Southern poetry tradition? What do Southern Studies have to say about the evolution of the assessment of Beecher-Stowe’s work? How do both writers’ attempts at writing the Southern idiom look and sound today?
The purpose of this conference is to provide the opportunity for a (re-)assessment of one of these two writers or of their possible connection. Priority will be given to papers showing an interest in bringing out continuities in American literature.

This project, initially conceived as a call for papers, has become a call for contributions for two reasons. Due to budget cuts, the recent academic context has been rather unfavourable. However, we are very happy to announce that we have found a possible publisher (a scholarly publisher, based in the UK) who has offered to examine our book proposal.

-articles should be approximately between 7,000 and 15,000 words in length (style sheet: MLA)

-In order to make sure that the collection of articles will be a coherent and self-sufficient volume, as the published has required, contributors are encouraged to address some of the key issues mentioned above, specifically: the canon, political commitment, genre, rhetorical and stylistic strategies, interdisciplinary issues, the literary tradition, etc.

Proposals of about 300 words to be sent to Guillaume Tanguy and Vincent Dussol by January 30th 2009, along with a short biographical note.