Calls for Papers

Calls for Papers

“Emerging Scholars, Emerging Scholarship”

Special Issue of Mississippi Quarterly

The Emerging Scholars Organization (ESO), an affiliate of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL), is pleased to announce a collaboration with Mississippi Quarterly on a special issue that will showcase the work of emerging scholars in southern studies. The ESO was formed in 2014 to weave formal professionalization and mentoring opportunities for emerging scholars into SSSL’s structure. In their 2016 “Afterword” in PMLA’s “Changing Profession,” former ESO members Amy Clukey and Gina Caison defined emerging scholars as ranging from grad students to early-career and independent scholars from a wide range of career paths. The ESO advocates for and showcases the work of the profession’s most vulnerable researchers, educators, and other faculty, knowing that the future of southern studies–along with literary studies more broadly– relies on our ability to nurture junior scholars. Emerging scholars contend with many difficult issues today including labor exploitation, racial exclusion, economic disparity, a dwindling tenure market, legal challenges to CRT, and scholarly freedom. As Clukey and Caison wrote, “If we are so quick to forgo discussions of our scholarly creativity, then who owns our futures?” Even today, as universities respond to the shifting political winds, emerging scholars must contend with two urgent demands: job insecurity and scholarly creativity. What does it mean for the future of southern studies if young scholars are prohibited or discouraged from entering the profession due to job scarcity and rising living costs or external pressures to censure their intellectual creativity?

This special issue will comprise works by those who identify as emerging scholars based on individual connection to the aforementioned definition. The issue will consider what it means to be “emerging” within today’s context. Emerging scholars in southern studies and/or adjacent fields are encouraged to submit proposals for articles or book reviews (primary and secondary) on literature of the US South, the Global South, or other ways of imagining souths. Article topics may include—but are not limited to—ecocriticism and environmental humanities, animal and food studies, racial injustice, social (in)visibility and disability, family dynamics, gendered inequalities and queer theory, genre analysis, and aural and visual culture. We also welcome articles that address the role of emerging scholars, their teaching, or their scholarship in the field of southern studies. All emerging scholars are encouraged to submit, regardless of previous publication history.

At this time, we only require a proposal, not a draft of the manuscript. We anticipate that drafts from successful applicants will need to be completed by mid-April 2025.

Submission Requirements:

Complete the submission form below by Friday, January 17, 2025:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfIB0Hoi8jaTMkuItrssOnpXAxPbE9RA-faMExfDh-aen-XPg/viewform

Submissions will not be considered if all the following three requirements are not met:

  • A proposal (500 words maximum).
  • A biography (200 words maximum) for each author.
  • A response (300 words maximum) to the questions: “Why do you think you fit as an emerging scholar?”; and, “What are the unique challenges that emerging scholars face today?” This response should be separate from and independent of your proposal. In other words, your proposal can but does not need to be about emerging scholars.

Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2025
“Faulkner’s Bodies”
July 20-24, 2025 — University of Mississippi

Critics have long recognized William Faulkner as one of twentieth-century literature’s foremost students and chroniclers of the vicissitudes and viscerality of embodiment, in both human and nonhuman forms. There’s still much to be said, however, about the role of “the” body in his imagination and work: characters rendered in strikingly embodied terms; recurring scenes of bodily extremity and damage; narrative immersions in perception and affect; the often violent inscription of identity, difference, and other modalities of meaning on bodies; not to mention the writer’s own complex embodiments of literary authorship. We will take up such questions and more at the fifty-first annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference, over five days of keynote lectures and readings, academic panels, teaching sessions, exhibits, tours, and other activities.

Topics could include, but are not at all limited to:

  • the authorial body: images, performances, physical conditions, textual traces 
  • representing embodiment: style, technique, narrative, lexicon 
  • the body in Faulkner’s visual art: drawings, sketches, illustrations 
  • readerly bodies: the somatics of response and reception • infirm bodies: diseased, disabled, debilitated, aging, injured, invalid 
  • monstrous bodies: gothic, grotesque, carnivalesque 
  • dead or “dying” bodies: corpses, cadavers, carcasses, remains 
  • trauma studies approaches to embodiment and representation 
  • interspecies embodiment or other forms of transcorporeality 
  • animal and vegetal bodies/embodiment in Faulkner 
  • Faulknerian anatomy 
  • embodied memory 
  • posthuman embodiment: prostheses, cyborgs, machines 
  • bodies and/as identities: racialized, gendered, sexed, sexualized, queered, classed 
  • the body and/in consciousness: perception, emotion, affect, interoception 
  • embodied states, experiences, extremes: hunger, desire, pregnancy, pain, sleep, nausea, orgasm, etc. • cognitive approaches to Faulknerian textuality and narrative 
  • Faulknerian disembodiment: as ideal, as aspiration, as fate or doom 

Comparative approaches to Faulkner’s work are welcome. We especially encourage full panel proposals for 60-minute conference sessions. Such proposals should include a one-page overview of the session topic or theme, followed by 400-500-word abstracts for each of the panel papers to be included. We also welcome individually submitted 400-500-word abstracts for 15-20-minute panel papers. Panel papers consist of approximately 2,500 words and will be considered by the conference program committee for possible expansion and inclusion in the conference volume published by the University Press of Mississippi.

Session proposals and panel paper abstracts must be submitted by January 31, 2025. All manuscripts, proposals, abstracts, and inquiries should be addressed to Jay Watson, Department of English, C-135 Bondurant Hall, University of Mississippi, P.O. Box 1848, University, MS 38677-1848. E-mail: jwatson@olemiss.edu. Decisions for all submissions will be made by March 15, 2025.

http://www.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner