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Historically speaking, these have been concerns of American women authors from their earliest writings, published and unpublished, and they remain concerns today.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.

“Family Life & the Fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe.”

Papers are sought on any aspect of family life in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe.  Proposals are welcomed for studies that approach Stowe’s fiction using rubrics such as motherhood, fatherhood, siblings, the figure of the child, slave families, faith and the family, citizenship and the home, family and nation, or politics and family life.

While you need not be a Stowe Society member to submit a proposal, you must become a member to present on the Stowe panel at ALA.

Please submit a one page abstract and a one page CV to Mary Wearn (mary.wearn@maconstate.edu) by January 9, 2012.

Conference Planning for the Author Society: A Roundtable Discussion
(Friday, 23 Oct., 4:00-5:15 p.m.)

1. Beth L. Lueck, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, chair, “Planning an International Conference on a Shoestring Budget”

2. Brigitte Bailey, University of New Hampshire, “Framing Conference Questions,
Developing Programs, and Collaborating with Other Organizations”

3. Lucinda Damon-Bach, Salem State College, “From the Ground, Up: Five Conferences in Ten Years for Sedgwick and Her Contemporaries”

This roundtable will offer officers of other author societies, as well as any conference participant, information about how to plan a small to mid-sized conference. The three participants listed above all have experience in conference organization, from small conferences (several dozen participants) to mid-sized (75 to 80), from regional to international conferences. During the planning of the international conference Transatlantic Women: 19th-C. American Women Writers in Great Britain, Ireland, and Europe, the organizers remarked numerous times that the planning would have been easier if we had had the benefit of other author societies’ experience. While everyone we asked for advice gladly gave it, we still sometimes felt as if we were “reinventing the wheel.” For this roundtable, Brigitte Bailey, President of the Margaret Fuller Society, brings her experience working on conferences with the Fuller Society and writing the CFP and organizing the program for Transatlantic Women; she will also discuss collaborating with other organizations. Lucinda Damon-Bach, President of the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society, offers her experience planning smaller conferences that offer opportunities to present on a range of authors and topics. Beth Lueck directed Transatlantic Women and will offer tips on planning an international conference and dealing with contracts, both domestic and international.