SSSL 2026: Panel Calls for Participants

Here you will find calls for pre-formed panels that are looking for participants. Calls are posted in the order in which they are received. To submit a call, please email your panel title, abstract, deadline, and contact information to conference@southernlit.org.

Emerging Scholars Organization - 12/15 deadline

Building Emerging Spaces of Freedom

The Emerging Scholars Organization (ESO) invites papers that center emerging perspectives on SSSL’s conference theme, Building Spaces of Freedom. This panel foregrounds the ongoing labor of emerging scholars who navigate long histories of exclusion, gatekeeping, and uneven access while also reshaping southern studies through new interventions, methods, and archival practices.

We are especially interested in work that thinks about “emergence” not merely as transition but as a form of spatial and methodological world-building. What does it mean to carve out space in a profession structured by precarity, scarcity, and institutional contradiction? How do early-career scholars reinterpret or refuse inherited traditions? How does southern studies—across literature, media, history, cultural studies, performance, digital humanities, or interdisciplinary approaches—help us reimagine academic spaces

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Reconsiderations of “place,” “region,” and “the South” through emerging/novel frameworks.
Approaches that unsettle dominant narratives or expand what counts as southern literature, history, culture, and/or identity.
Eco-power, climate precarity, and landscapes of agency or refusal.
Carceral geographies, the contemporary southern prison system, and state control as spatial regimes.
The politics of belonging, mentorship, and institutional culture for early-career scholars.
Defining—and destabilizing—the category of “emerging scholar” in the twenty-first century academy.
Pedagogical spaces of freedom: classrooms, syllabi, institutional memory, and student collaboration.
Fiction, film, tv shows, video games, or other materials that examine academia, graduate students, or scholars.
Black or Indigenous scholarship and the university.
The university as a neoliberal institution and the undercommons.
Histories and intellectual traditions of southern HBCUs.
Feminist, queer, or trans southern epistemologies or methods for building alternative scholarly futures.

We welcome proposals from graduate students, recent PhDs, contingent faculty, independent scholars, and anyone who identifies with the category of “emerging” in their scholarly trajectory.

Please send 250-word abstracts and 150-word bios to emergingscholarsorg@gmail.com by December 15, 2025.

The Future of Southern Studies

Building on the 2026 theme, Building Spaces of Freedom, this panel seeks work that imagines where southern studies is going and who will help carry it forward. The Emerging Scholars Organization (ESO) invites papers from emerging scholars for an open-call panel that looks ahead toward the next questions, methods, and interventions shaping southern studies.

We welcome papers that take a wide-angle view of “the South” as a mutable, contested, and increasingly global category. Rather than anchoring the future to traditional regional, disciplinary, or methodological boundaries, this panel encourages approaches that expand, disrupt, or reconfigure southern studies altogether.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Digital humanities approaches to southern archives, storytelling, pedagogy, or data visualization.
AI, algorithmic culture, and digital infrastructures as southern phenomena.
Gaming, interactive media, and emerging technologies as southern narrative spaces.
Visual storytelling including art, photography, and film.
Southern futurisms, speculative fiction, sci-fi, horror, and dystopian world-building.
Global Souths, hemispheric approaches, and transnational redefinitions of region.
Queering the future.
Indigenous approaches to futurity.
Thinking through disability and accessibility in southern literature and culture.
The Black South, Black Appalachia, the Global Black South.
Asian American southern fiction or archives
Global South frameworks that move beyond the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Racial narratives beyond the Black/white binary in the South.
Environmental humanities, eco-criticism, alternative ecologies, or animal studies.
Medical/Health humanities.
Reexamining the state of the field: disciplinary boundaries, institutional politics, and methodological futures.
New theoretical frameworks or research directions that challenge where southern studies has been and where it is headed.

We welcome proposals from graduate students, recent PhDs, contingent faculty, independent scholars, and anyone who identifies with the category of “emerging” in their scholarly trajectory.

Please send 250-word abstracts and 150-word bios to emergingscholarsorg@gmail.com by December 15, 2025.

The Evelyn Scott Society - 12/12 deadline

The Evelyn Scott Society invites abstracts of about 300 words to participate in a proposed panel focused on the writer Evelyn Scott’s life and work at the Society for the Study of Southern Literature’s biannual conference, which will be held at Fisk University from March 28th-31st, 2026.

This year, SSSL has designated “Building Spaces of Freedom” as the overarching conference theme. While we invite abstracts for papers that discuss Evelyn Scott’s life and work or her positionality as a southern writer from a wide variety of approaches and frameworks, the conference’s theme seeks panels that broach the topics of “Dissident spaces, including spaces of defiance, resistance, activism, expertise, service, safety, care, growth, flourishing, joy, and justice.” In addition, Scott’s writing is uniquely poised to be analyzed from the frameworks of “Old and new relationships between southern literature and African American literature,” “Gender, sexuality, the body,” and “Literary canons, intertextualities, and networks of influence.” You can read more about SSSL’s conference theme on their website (https://southernlit.org/conference/).

Submissions may focus on any genre of her work, including Scott’s fiction, memoirs, poetry, young adult literature, letters, or manuscripts. Participants should be members of the dues-free Evelyn Scott Society by the time of the conference. You can read more about Scott’s writing, becoming a member of the society, and upcoming events and calls for papers on Evelyn Scott at http://www.evelynscott.org/

For consideration, please send 300-word abstracts and a brief 100-word biography to Rachel Bryan at (rbryan5[at]vols.utk.edu) on or before December 12th, 2025.

The Flannery O’Connor Society - 12/12 deadline

The Flannery O’Connor Society invites abstracts (of about 300 words) to be submitted for participation in an open topics panel on Flannery O’Connor’s life and work at the biannual conference of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature.

This year, the theme of SSSL’s biannual conference is “Building Spaces of Freedom.” The conference encourages panel submissions that speak to this theme using historic, spatial, political, and aesthetic approaches. Citing this year as the conference’s first time to be held at a southern HBCU, we particularly invite submissions for papers that consider questions of racial representation and inclusion in O’Connor’s fiction, as well as papers that discuss teaching O’Connor in light of her views on race and the legacy of racism in her fiction, correspondence, and criticism. This panel is likely uniquely poised to welcome papers that discuss O’Connor’s fiction in conversation with Fisk University’s storied alumni—including, as the conference’s call for papers notes, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Hope Franklin, Diane Nash, John Lewis, Nikki Giovanni, and the university’s faculty, including James Weldon Johnson, Arna Bontemps, Robert Hayden, and John Oliver Killens. The full conference theme is described on SSSL’s website (https://southernlit.org/conference/)

Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:

Film and media adaptations of O’Connor’s life and work
Evaluations of O’Connor’s work in relation to other authors, genres, and media, or between texts
Race and racism in O’Connor’s fiction and correspondence
O’Connor and modernism/postmodernism
Ability and disability in O’Connor’s life and work
Class concerns and social status for O’Connor and her characters
Place, space, region, and politics in O’Connor’s letters and fiction
Aesthetic and rhetorical considerations in O’Connor’s fiction
Approaches to teaching Flannery O’Connor’s work
Gender and sexuality in O’Connor’s fiction, as well as evaluations of the body of criticism on gender and sexuality in O’Connor’s work
Canonicity and O’Connor’s place in southern literature

Please send abstracts to Rachel Bryan (rbryan5[at]vols.utk.edu) by Friday, December 12th, 2025. Please include your name, email, institutional affiliation and a short bio (100 words) with the abstract. Presenters must be members of the Flannery O’Connor Society by the time of the conference. Information about the conference’s fee and potential reserved hotel rate (yet unannounced) can be found on the Society for the Study of Southern Literature’s website (https://southernlit.org/conference/). Information about the Society, including how to join, can be found on the Flannery O’Connor Society Website (http://flannerysociety.org).

Welty’s Dissident Spaces - 12/05 deadline

In Exposing Mississippi, Annette Trefzer argues that Welty’s dissident photographic framing is “‘radical,’ ‘instructive,’ and ‘disruptive’”; it engages “the economic, gendered, and racial histor[ies]” that “expose and transform” southern spaces (4, 7). Eudora Welty certainly took on the geographies of the South—literal landscapes, public spaces, and institutions—as Trefzer notes, but she was also a wanderer who spent time in cities from New York and San Francisco to London and Rome. Her travels provided both new ways of seeing and the necessary distance from the cultural norms of her home in Mississippi to open sites of new formations in her work. This panel seeks presentations that investigate Welty and the concept of “dissident space” broadly: those in her creative imaginary (fiction and non-fiction), those in the body of her photography, and/or those she physically inhabited.

Topic may include, but are not limited to

—Urban and Non-Southern Wanderings and their influence on Welty’s work

—Use of Southern spaces—literal and textual—especially those that dissented from white, middle-class Jackson norms

—Construction of freedom throughout the varying geographies of her work and/or extensive archive

—Framing of artistic space as one of rebellion/alternative ideas

—Spaces that Welty inhabited, from her Jackson home and environs to college, Yaddo, or friends’ houses

—Spaces that her art inhabited, from venues for photography shows to women’s magazines

—Civil Rights spaces in Jackson that figure in Welty’s life, work, and political activism

Send 300 word abstracts and 100 word bios by December 5th to panel chair Sarah Gilbreath Ford (Sarah_Ford[at]baylor.edu). Earlier statements of interest are encouraged.

Fleeting Moments and Wonderful Weirdness in Welty - 12/05 deadline

In the 2013 issue of the Eudora Welty Review, Mitch Frye points to Welty’s “astonishing stories” that “are filled with weird gems” and her oft “interplay between the homely and the unheimlich” (77). Indeed, from Eugene’s brief witnessing of a streetcar accident in “Music from Spain” and the talking head in a trunk of The Robber Bridegroom to the Guinea pig in a pocket and mysterious naked man with a herd of goats in The Wide Net and Other Stories, Welty’s work proliferates with fleeting moments, uses of the uncanny, and just down right oddities. What do such unsettling moments and images actually provoke in her work? How does the sensational become narrative strategy? What possibilities are enabled specifically through the fantastic? Welty, in such curious moments, seems to revel in wonder, “to dance with astonishment” to “be blessed with more imagination” than “the given moment” knows “what to do with” (“Meditation on Seeing” 1974). With this theme in mind, this panel invites papers that consider any fleeting moments and wonderful weirdness that Welty dances with—the moments that take us by surprise, when the ordinary becomes extraordinary—throughout her oeuvre.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

—The unheimlich or the uncanny

—People or actions that seem out of place or out of time

—Imagination and dreaming

—Weird characters – the “freak,” the outcast, the “foreign,” the eccentric

—Horror and the supernatural

—Violence

—Surrealism, visual anomalies

—Altered forms of consciousness

—Science fiction, machinery, invention

Send 300 word abstracts and 100 word bios by December 5th to panel chair Laura Wilson (archivalauras[at]gmail.com). Earlier statements of interest are encouraged.

Robert Hayden's Poetry - 11/15 deadline

Call for panel participants for the 2026 SSSL Conference at Fisk University in Nashville on Robert Hayden’s Poetry. Hayden’s life and work directly engaged with the SSSL meeting’s theme of “building spaces of freedom.” Hayden taught for decades at Fisk, of course, and his work also addresses many of the related topics listed in the recent SSSL announcement and CFP. Please send proposals for a 15-minute paper on Hayden and your CV by Nov. 15 2025 to Peter Schmidt (pschmid1[at]swarthmore.edu).

Photo Credit: Fhaywood25 via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

Murals by Aaron Douglas in Cravath Hall, Fisk University

Photo Credit: Dale Winling via Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic

Photo Credit: C Hanchey via Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic

Cravath Hall on the Fisk University campus.

Photo Credit: Brent Moore via Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic

2026 Program Committee

Robert Jackson, University of Tulsa, Chair
Katie Burnett, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Joanna Davis-McElligatt, University of North Texas
Savannah DiGregorio, Arizona State University
Garrett Fuller, University of Mississippi
Jennifer Hayes, Tennessee State University
Magana Kabugi, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Allison Rittmayer, Northwestern State University of Louisiana
La Tanya Rogers, Fisk University
Scott Romine, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Stephanie Rountree, University of North Georgia
Harper Strom, Georgia State University
Laura Wilson, University of St. Andrews