Volume 52, Issue 1 June 2018

Volume 52, Issue 1
June 2018
Transitions Issue

Associate Professor of American literature and culture at the University of Alabama, James A. Crank is a National Humanities Center Summer Fellow and the co-host of the podcast “The Sound and the Furious.” His essays have appeared in south: an interdisciplinary journal, Global South, Southern Literary Journal, Mississippi Quarterly, Southern Studies, and collections such as Agee Agonistes: Essays on the Life, Legend, and Works of James Agee (2007), and Southerners on Film: Essays on Hollywood Portrayals Since the 1970s (2011). His books include Understanding Sam Shepard, New Approaches to Gone with the Wind, and Race and New Modernisms.

 

Hello, SSSL fam!

I’ll start by sharing some news: after serving in this role for three years, I felt like it was a good moment to switch the authorship and vision for the newsletter to someone else, and the natural candidate was Amy King, a scholar who I have long respected and whose unique voice in our field will do wonders (I believe) in helping us understand our field and its relationship to the members within it. Amy and I will continue to work together this year putting out our fall/winter issue together before she takes over completely next summer, so please reach out to us both if you have questions, advice, or ideas for future issues of the newsletter. The two of us chose transitions as the theme of this issue of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature newsletter for a couple of (obvious) reasons. Summer is always a time of transition for us, as we move from the waterslide craziness of the spring term into summer. Of course, the organization itself is clearly in a time of transition as we change presidents, executive members, conference locations, and editors of the newsletter. As we begin to think ahead, I would like us to pause and imagine where we’re heading.

Where are we going?

I think “transition” is an apt word for us in southern studies right now: we are in a delicate moment in our field. As a discipline that long had issues with praising monoliths and policing its values, I want us to be certain that the direction we move towards is not backwards into a new kind of exceptionalism and a new mythology of region, aesthetic, or scholarship. We do each other a fundamental disservice when we attempt to codify southern studies into a field of stark boundaries and policed borders, and we risk losing scholars of value who find their work and their identity not a part of that conversation. As we imagine our own work progressing, let’s be careful also, even as we transition into new modalities of thought, that we aren’t reifying old models of mentorship and exclusionary rhetorics that work only to silence and disenfranchise our colleagues. Only good work can come from being thoughtful about how we define our field and what the consequences of those definitions mean for scholars whose work continually gets marginalized and made invisible by our efforts.

It seems to me one of the more salient truths of this society is that we tend to do our best work when we embrace the crossings and transversings (however messy) that come from scholarship across multiple constituencies—our strength lies in collaboration and invitation, and we’d be well served to remember that in the year ahead.

respect.

andy

amy:

“Transitions”

Amy King is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. This fall, she will join the Center for the Study of the American South at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a postdoctoral fellow, where she will complete her book manuscript about circum-Caribbean depictions of violence between women. Her work has recently appeared in the journalsThe Global South, Women’s Studies, south, and Mississippi Quarterly. She also co-edited the two-part forum “Emergent Critical Analytics for Alternative Humanities” with Chris A. Eng for Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association(2016, 2017), which features a call-and-response between established and emergent American Studies scholars.

 

I’m thrilled to join the SSSL officers as the incoming newsletter editor, and I anticipate using this platform to continue and expand Andy Crank’s efforts to help connect scholar-teacher-activists whose work bridge disciplines, temporalities, and geographies.

I would also like to echo Andy’s thoughts about SSSL in transition. The SSSL Statement on Diversity, which currently appears on the Society’s homepage (https://southernlit.org/), affirms that we collectively aim to “encourage dynamic critical dialogue that examines and expands the borders of the region” and “support others who advocate for diversity, community, inclusivity, and equality.” If we are to practice what we profess to believe, then we will consider every decision we make in terms of access.

One question that lingers from this spring’s biennial conference is this: Who are we inviting to the table? This question implicates all Society members, every time we plan a roundtable, every time we select contributors for a collection, every time we invite fellow conference-goers out to dinner, every time we cite other scholars’ work, and every time we vote for the Society’s new officers. Creating an accessible community is not about checking boxes; it’s about actively working to acknowledge and combat persisting structural harm, and it’s about living with the messiness of being in relation with people. When we invite people to the table, then it’s our responsibility to hear them out.

I joined SSSL as a new PhD student in 2010, and I’m thankful for each SSSL member who sat through my earlier presentations. Society members generously (and gently) urged me to engage with scholars who were in conversation with my work, they invited me to share a meal, and they ultimately asked me to contribute my writing. In these ways, Society members showed me, as an emergent scholar, how to access my own voice. Moving forward, I envision the SSSL newsletter as providing an accessible platform for emergent and established scholars to learn more about the interdisciplinary work in our field, widely defined, as well as opportunities for collaborative engagement. The newsletter is just one way for us to imagine and reimagine the shapes, tensions, and possibilities of our relationships with each other.

President’s Column

Lisa Hinrichsen is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Arkansas. She is the author of Possessing the Past: Trauma, Imagination, and Memory in Post-Plantation Southern Literature (LSUP, 2015) and co-editor, along with Gina Caison and Stephanie Rountree, Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television (LSUP, 2017).

 

 

 

Southern studies is in crisis. And that’s okay.

Our final plenary in Austin and the member questionnaire that preceded it publically illuminated the cracks and fissures of our organizational structure, set in motion fifty years ago when the academy was—and I write this without nostalgia—a different machine. The questionnaire responses revealed that, while overall our membership believes we are doing a “moderately effective” job of addressing the needs of members, we also are facing a variety of endemic difficulties that have no easy solution: a dearth of living wage jobs; a lack of diversity and inclusion, not only in regards to gender, race, and ethnicity, but also disability and sexuality; and a need for more public engagement, particularly in response to virulent rise of white supremacy.

More than one member wrote that southern studies has a “PR problem.” I wish that it was that simple: just a different spin, a change of rhetoric, some new branding. I’m afraid that I see our collective tasks ahead as more difficult, but also as more rewarding. For while the survey answers pointed to several concrete structural changes that need to happen to make our organization a space of diversity and inclusion—the election of a diverse leadership, the addition of a sexual harassment statement to our bylaws, and prominent disability awareness and support—it also underscored the more complicated interpersonal work we need to do as members of SSSL in order to make diverse voices not just guests at our conferences, but at home in our organization. That means, as one member said in the plenary, “listening to women.” It means rethinking forms of familiar address, patterns of citational practice, mentorship practices, and voting habits. It means not taking credit for the labor of those that are marginalized, showing up for difficult discussions, and owning a history of mistakes.

The theme for this issue is “transitions,” a word more powerful to my ears at this moment abbreviated, made “trans” in order to gesture toward the work we must to do to transcend and transform our organization in ways that transfer privilege, translate our work to the public sphere, and transpose who is being listened to and why. I invite your feedback, initiatives, and ideas, and I welcome your investment in the work ahead. 

Emerging Scholars Organization Update

Elizabeth Gardner
President, Emerging Scholars Organization; PhD Student, Louisiana State University
[email protected]; [email protected]

Elizabeth Gardner is the incoming president of SSSL’s Emerging Scholar’s Organization. She is a PhD student at Louisiana State University, where she researches southern women writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, focusing on the intersection of communities and communication.

As the new president of the Emerging Scholars Organization, it is my honor to be working alongside a thoughtful and dedicated executive council. Its members include Delia Byrnes, Josh Jackson, Will Murray, Will Palmer, and Kristin Teston. Delia Byrnes is a PhD Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she researches energy cultures in contemporary Gulf Coast narrative media. Josh Jackson is a PhD student at Georgia State University; his interests include the speculative south and applying digital humanities methodologies to southern studies. Will Murray is a PhD Candidate at the University of Alabama, and his work considers how conceptions of southern communities, in literature and on screen, perpetuate ides of white innocence. Will Palmer, a PhD student at the University of Mississippi, studies the connection between the Mississippi River and the racial imagination. And Kristin Teston, also a PhD student at the University of Mississippi, researches ruins in the US South to see how they correspond with ideas on landscapes and the Anthropocene. To learn more about these incredible emerging scholars, please read their statements below.

This current executive council is lucky to be following the fantastic work of the second executive council members; Kelly Vines (the former president), Jennie Lightweis-Goff, Heather Fox, Jill Fennell, Will Palmer, and Stephanie Rountree. Through their efforts the ESO has established a strong presence at SAMLA, created a new award for the best graduate student conference paper at SSSL’s biennial conference, and grown the mentorships program to include approximately 50 active mentees, as well as other vital advocacy initiatives.

This new council hopes to continue to serve as advocates for all those that consider themselves to be emerging scholars. In our first meeting, inclusion and accessibility were common refrains among new council members. Our highest priority this term will be to create a welcoming and accessible space for often marginalized voices. This also means reaching out to  scholars who may not necessarily identify as “southernists,” but whose work informs and enriches southern studies, and those individuals who may not identify as “academics,” but do vital work for and about the South in spaces not usually seen from the ivory tower.

This council also takes into consideration the implications of what it means to be an emerging scholar. To be emerging often means to be in a state of vulnerability: financially, emotionally, and professionally. For that reason, the ESO is committed to finding and creating resources to help emerging scholars succeed. We also hope to create supportive spaces to allow emerging scholars to share their experiences and develop a more cohesive community.

Currently, the ESO is in the process of organizing two panels for this fall’s SAMLA conference: “Progress, Radicalism, and the U.S. South” and “Queering the U.S. South.” We invite you to submit abstracts for those panels (by June 14th) and to attend these panels if you are able. In addition to these panels, we will be holding a business meeting and a social event at SAMLA, and we welcome you to attend and share your ideas with us. We are also hoping that all of you who consider yourselves to be emerging scholars join us in our future conversations and initiatives. We will keep the website updated with current information about our projects. We also hope to find a digital platform through which all emerging scholars can meet at least once a semester to discuss ideas and concerns relevant to the organization, so please keep an eye out for those opportunities. Until then, please feel free to email me or any of the executive council members with your ideas and suggestions. Ultimately, the ESO is here to serve the needs of emerging scholars, and we are best able to achieve that goal when we know what those needs are.

As always, thank you all for continued support of the Emerging Scholars Organization.

Delia Byrnes
Mentorships and Advocacy Chair, Emerging Scholars Organization
PhD Candidate, University of Texas at Austin
[email protected]

In 2013, after a few years’ hiatus from the halls of academia, I made the move from British Columbia to the Lone Star State—a space hovering ambiguously on the margins of “the South” in the US imagination—to attend graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. As I walked every day through a campus that monumentalizes the twin legacies of the Confederacy and the oil industry, I became increasingly interested in the entanglements of energy culture, environmentalism, and social justice; these intersections remain the central site of my research. Since beginning my graduate studies, I have co-coordinated the most recent SSSL biennial conference in Austin, published a chapter from my dissertation (which examines Gulf Coast energy culture in contemporary narrative media) in The Global South, and recently had the opportunity to edit a special section of the E3W Review of Bookson environmental justice in the Anthropocene.

As the ESO Executive Council begins its 2018-2020 term, I want to take this opportunity to express my gratitude for all of the work the ESO has done over the past four years to advocate for a diverse body of emerging scholars confronting especially precarious professional conditions. As I begin my tenure on the ESO’s Executive Council, I am pleased to introduce myself as the incoming Mentorship and Advocacy Chair. Facilitating supportive relationships between emerging scholars and established professionals in the field is an invaluable part of the ESO’s mission, and I am grateful for the opportunity to continue this work. Ultimately, I view mentorship as not only a one-on-one relationship, but a community-based process. Thus, holding the ESO’s Mentorship and Advocacy Chair means acknowledging the varied experiences, needs, and institutional challenges that shape each of us, and advocating for the needs of graduate students and contingent laborers across a range of different conditions. During my term on the Executive Council, I hope to further explore how we might advocate not only for ourselves as emerging scholars, but also how we can make advocacy and activism a grounded part of our praxis as teachers, students, and scholars. As we work toward inclusive, diverse, and accessible intellectual communities, I hope to ensure that the ESO remains a practical resource for all those who identify as emerging scholars.

William Murray
Projects Chair, Emerging Scholars Organization
PhD Candidate and Jr. Blount Fellow, University of Alabama.
[email protected]

The only time I ever heard my grandmother use a curse word was in reference to Sherman’s burning of Atlanta. Her disgust with the “damn Yankee general” existed alongside a view of the South steeped in an intense version of romanticism. She would wax nostalgically about her youth, speaking of debutante balls, the city of Charleston, and her rice-planter grandfather in ways that clearly belied the realities of the region. My grandmother was wrong about the South, and she was also one of the kindest women I have ever known. She passed away shortly before my son was born, and since her death and his birth, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we get our beliefs.

The realities I learned as a student at the University of Mississippi, the College of Charleston, and finally here at the University of Alabama all speak to the dangers of her way of consuming the South. But I’m left wanting to understand how she came to feel the way she did about the region (and whiteness in general). I feel, in some ways, like she was betrayed by a society that allowed and encouraged such naivety. I also want to know how I could grow up in Georgia and still feel pretty post racial for the first eighteen years of my life. If I could feel this way in the “backward” South, what does that mean for how the rest of the nation sees itself? Sitting here today, it seems impossible that investments in white innocence could continue so vigorously given the preponderance of evidence available, yet narratives of this innocence refuse to die out, rising again and again like some hydra that grows two heads every time one is cut off.

My dissertation and much of my research is concerned with questioning how whites keep fantasies of innocence alive. In my work, I focus on the ways postmodern and metamodern literature, television, and graphic novels work to convince us that the nation’s problems happen somewhere else and are someone else’s responsibility. This seemingly unending deferral of white-accountability is at the center of what I study, and I’m deeply interested in discussions that link narrative to action and rhetoric to results.

It is this same desire to turn thought into action that drew me to ESO and led me to running for the executive council. The work that Kelly, Jennie, Heather, Jill, Will, and Stephanie have accomplished over the last two years is impressive, and it is real. Their efforts have made a difference and have helped make the field more welcoming, inclusive, and relevant. I am excited to join this new council and to build on those efforts, to keep pushing for a Southern Studies that has moved past myopia and navel-gazing, and to try and turn ambitions for inclusivity and respect into realities. We know, though, that such hopes depend on an SSSL that is dedicated to these ends, and we are very much looking forward to working with each of you in the larger community to reach these goals.

William C. Palmer
General Council, Emerging Scholars Organization
PhD Student at the University of Mississippi
[email protected]

Prior to starting in my current program at the University of Mississippi, I was a lifelong resident of Alabama. My biographical and intellectual interests coalesced in a seemingly incessant return to the South and the study of its politics, environments, and cultures. On the previous executive council of the Emerging Scholars Organization, I served as the MA Representative helping to chair panels, promote discussion, and advocate progress in the institutions with which all those reading this newsletter should be familiar. The work of the last council pushed the Society for the Study of Southern Literature in a healthy direction for the future of the organization and, coincidentally, made spaces for voices that had previously been silenced. My research focuses on the way sound works within and without power structures within specific geographic and environmental locales, and I constantly look for ways to apply my theories in the personal, social, and professional fields to which I am attached. As an emerging scholar, I recognize the value of listening to my peers in order to build the world we can achieve. With that said, I look forward to being a conduit through which other emerging scholars can expand their influence in the future of SSSL and academia more generally. The previous council did excellent work I was proud to be a small part of, and I want to continue that trajectory. I also want to push it further with this next council and expand the democratic advocacy work proven necessary in our current socio-political climate. Under the leadership of Elizabeth Gardner and the incoming new executive members, I know such ambitious goals can be achieved. Let us be an ear to hear you and a megaphone to shout through.

Kristin Teston
Professionalization Chair, Emerging Scholars Organization
PhD Student, University of Mississippi
[email protected]

I have spent my entire life in Mississippi, initially by the circumstance of my birth and now as an active choice to pursue my PhD at the University of Mississippi. I could write about my upbringing in a rural south Mississippi, or about my more recent years in academia where I’ve found the words to articulate that experience. But these words were not how I first understood my own circumstances or the place in which I lived, and such understandings are often reached only by those within the academy. As a scholar, I hope to combine the theoretical and the practical to facilitate connections beyond the classroom or the conference table. My dissertation project focuses the visual representations of ruin and poverty in the contemporary U.S. South. I explore how humans have reshaped the climate and the natural landscape and how literature and other media reflect that creation and destruction.

As an ESO representative, my goals are to increase the resources and opportunities for emerging scholars in order to expand their prospects within and beyond the field of academia. I am excited to take on the responsibilities of the Professionalization Chair and hope to continue the work of the previous council. ESO is committed to the future of its members and the field of southern studies, and professionalization is essential to the success of emerging scholars whether they find themselves employed as faculty members or in positions outside of the academy.

Joshua Ryan Jackson
Networking Chair, Emerging Scholars Organization
PhD Student, Georgia State University
[email protected]

Having been trained how to perform close readings at a former bastion of the Southern Agrarians—by a professor who was one of Allen Tate’s former students no less—I was made aware of Southern Literature’s fascination with the past at a relatively early stage. As an English major and Philosophy minor, I was drawn to the work of Cormac McCarthy for its prophetic tendency to take the long view—to not only account for the past, but to look to the future. You could say that what drew me to McCarthy’s work has informed my own fascination with the South as a time and space where futures are projected, often by authors like McCarthy who reside outside the region, rather than abandoned.

I came to southern studies proper during my MA at the University of Arkansas, after which I freelanced as a self-taught data journalist, marketing copywriter, and editor. My academic research interests include speculative narratives of region in nineteenth and twenty-first century Souths, with a particular interest in examining how the South is marketed. My work has appeared in various academic and non-academic publications, both digital and in print. These include The Cormac McCarthy Journal, In Media Res, and TheBlack90s.com. I have also been a regular contributor to organizations that publish content on state-of-the-field issues affecting digital marketing, online education, and higher education, including Online Marketing Instituteand Online Course Report.

I have joined the Executive Council as Networking Chair with the hope of facilitating more academically diverse and community-engaged learning projects. These include, but are not limited to, creating service-learning partnerships with the Equal Justice Initiative and alternative academic professionalization opportunities with the Southern Poverty Law Center. Along with the rest of the ESO, I hope to foster a more welcoming professional space for women, queer scholars and scholars of color, one that both models and spearheads clear and responsible social planning, rhetoric, and action for the whole of SSSL.

Garrett Bridger Gilmore
General Council, ESO
Instructor of English, University of Alabama
[email protected]

I come to the ESO Executive Council by way of the University of California, Irvine, where I recently completed my PhD in English. My research focuses on the role of literary criticism and pedagogy in shaping political horizons for anti-racist thought and action. My dissertation focuses on the political stakes of “white racial melancholy” in how canonical white Southern writers are taken up by critical proponents of racial liberalism in the mid twentieth-century. I identify a tendency in these authors to rewrite potentially radical scenes and characters from works before the rise of racial liberalism (1940s) as scenes of facile white redemption in line with racial liberalism’s focus on individual attitudes over material structures. I argue that the transparently racist and reactionary regional politics this revision supports offers a key to reading the white supremacist and anti-black foundations of racial liberalism in general.

Coming from a graduate institution outside of the South, I hope to help expand the ESO’s geographic outreach and online community in order to help connect emerging scholars at non-Southern institutions. I hope to establish online writing and reading groups that will bring in participants from potentially far-flung graduate programs and teaching positions, and to make sure that our organization’s mentoring programs work for those not in close proximity. Though I will be an instructor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa this academic year, I remain committed to broadening our community’s geographic and institutional ranges.

Kelly Vines
Past-President Advisor, Emerging Scholars Organization
Dissertation Fellow, American Association of University Women
PhD Candidate, Louisiana State University
[email protected]

It has been my honor to have served on the Emerging Scholars Organization’s executive council since its inception in 2016, serving first as the MA Representative and then as the President. As I move into an advisory role and look toward the organization’s future, I am amazed at what we have accomplished together in these first four years, and I am endlessly optimistic about our potential to shape the future of southern studies.

I feel especially fortunate to have found a community of scholars–both established and emerging–who recognize the ways in which our profession is changing, and who have dedicated themselves to facing those changes head-on. As emerging scholars must meet increasingly higher expectations to compete in an ever-shrinking job market, the ESO’s foundational mission has been to provide these scholars with the tools they need to succeed in all of their professional endeavors. While we have made many strides toward this goal by creating opportunities for recognition and support within the ESO and the SSSL more broadly, I am hopeful that the newest executive council will develop partnerships with an even broader range of organizations to provide even more support for emerging southernists who are interested in pursuing alt-ac and non-ac career paths.

We might also discover in these partnerships how to better contribute our skills to the cause of social justice in our academic communities and beyond. We might take lessons from organizations doing advocacy and activism in southern spaces to make our own organizations and institutions more welcoming to all scholars. The presidential plenary conversation at this year’s conference provided a space to begin some of the difficult and necessary conversations we must have in order to make SSSL and the ESO a more welcoming and inclusive space. I believe we could benefit from reaching out to activist organizations as we consider how we might continue to push forward.

Again, I am so proud of what we have accomplished together and hopeful about what lies ahead for both the ESO and SSSL. I am grateful to those who have provided us with so much support along the way. Thanks especially to Eric Gary Anderson and those established scholars who helped to make this organization a reality four years ago. Thank you to Stephanie Rountree, who helped us find our footing and whose moral compass has always guided us in the right direction. Thanks to Matt Dischinger, Monica Miller, Zack Vernon, Jennie Lightweis-Goff, Jill Fennell, Heather Fox, and Will Palmer for putting so much of your time and energy into the ESO as members of the first two executive councils. I am grateful for your hard work, your innovative ideas, and your continued friendship. Thanks also to Lisa Hinrichsen and the SSSL executive council members who have on every occasion welcomed emerging scholars into important conversations about the future of the field. Last but not least, I would like to thank the members of SSSL who have volunteered to serve as mentors, who have participated in our professionalization panels, who have encouraged their graduate students to seek out our organization, and who have listened and responded to our requests for support and guidance. You have helped us create something truly special.

I am already impressed by the dedication, thoughtfulness, and brilliance our newest executive council members have demonstrated in our first few conversations together, and I look forward to the important work that will no doubt emerge from their collaborative efforts.

 

SSSL Presidential Survey Overview
Lisa Hinrichsen, Gina Caison, Molly McGehee

The 2018 biennial conference in Austin concluded with a Presidential plenary in which SSSL members addressed the results of a survey distributed electronically to all members prior to the conference. 44 responses were received.

Overview of Survey Format

The questions in the survey were as follows:

• How effective is the Society for the Study of Southern Literature in addressing the needs of its members?
• What is the most pressing issue for the field of southern literary studies? What should the organization do to address the issue?
• In what ways could the Society for the Study of Southern Literature more effectively address the needs of its members? Areas of improvement might include conference, governance, online presence, outreach to potential members, public engagement, etc.
• What are the biggest challenges facing recent and current graduate students in the field, and what would you like to see SSSL and the Emerging Scholars Organization do to provide support for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and contingent faculty?

Overview of Survey Responses

In response to the first survey question (“How effective is the Society for the Study of Southern Literature in addressing the needs of its members?”), 34.09% of responding members thought that the SSSL performs “Very Effectively” and 50% of members thought the organization addressed the needs of members “Moderately Effectively.” 9.09% of members believe the organization performs “Slightly Effectively” and 4.55% judge the organization as “Not Effective at All.”

The qualitative responses to the second and third questions emphasized the following five broad issues 1) Jobs; 2) Diversity and inclusion; 3) Public engagement; 4) Organizational transparency; 5) More support for archival work, pedagogy, or other approaches to the field.

In response to employment and jobs, members suggested the following solutions: offer public support for the academic labor movement; provide support to emerging scholars on both alt-ac and non-ac paths, including ImaginePhD efforts; host workshops for grant and fellowship applications; establish guidance for TT and tenured scholars about how to advocate for southernist TT lines in their home departments; create a PR campaign about why every department needs a southern studies scholar; decrease the number of (or don’t admit anymore) southern studies graduate students; mentor graduate students as Americanists rather than southernists; and offer guidelines on best practices in mentoring.

In response to issues of diversity and inclusion, members provided the following comments: attempt better long-term connections with fields and organizations that support scholars of color and their work; diversify the organizational leadership and award committees; create a statement on sexual and gendered harassment; increase disability awareness and support; establish a larger presence in organizations such as ALA, ASA, MELUS; open up the Rubin Prize beyond SSSL membership; and consider broadening the organization’s focus on literature to media and other arts.

In response to issues of public engagement, members offered the following suggestions: make timely public statements on important matters that take clear stands against white supremacy; revise SSSL’s mission statement; enlist the help of a PR consultant; invite public writers/intellectuals/artists/activists to the conference; reach out to public venues with audiences “interested” in the South; engage with secondary school educators; learn from our colleagues in history, who seem to be doing a better job engaging a broader public; revise the SSSL website; and reimagine the newsletter as a blog.

In regard to organizational transparency, members suggested that we should host an open membership meeting at every conference; allow the past-president of ESO to have a voting seat on the SSSL Executive Committee; and have clear policies and protocols for moving into SSSL leadership positions.

Finally, in regard to support for archival and pedagogical work, members suggested that we increase the bibliography section of newsletter; establish more research funding for archival work; encourage publication around archival work; offer summer/research funding for graduate students and contingent faculty members; host more conversations about pedagogy; and, finally, increase awareness of unique challenges facing SLAC faculty.

Plenary Discussion

As the final, stand-alone event of the 2018 conference, the plenary discussion was well attended by members from a variety of career stages, institutions, and specializations. We began by circulating a handout with an overview of the responses and issues listed above in order to solicit and focus discussion. Kelly Vines, ESO President, discussed the ESO’s work with early-career faculty and graduate students, particularly in regard to issues of jobs, career mentoring, and activism, noting the ESO’s circulation of sample letters for graduate students and their allies to send to legislators in response to the proposed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.  The discussion then turned to sharing strategies for mentoring graduate students facing an uncertain job market, the need to appeal to administrators, and ways that faculty and graduate students can work together to generate marketable, relevant work.  Following this discussion, the rest of the plenary focused on an extensive discussion of diversity and inclusion, with members offering personal testimony, strategies for creating a more inclusive organization, and ways of forming alliances with other organizations sharing similar goals (MELUS, etc).

A key takeaway from the conversation was that the organization has historically done a poor job of supporting young scholars from diverse backgrounds. Several members shared their experiences with gender harassment as well as anti-inclusive practices that disproportionately affect scholars of color. These concerns were echoed by a number of attendees, and there was consensus that the organization should prioritize addressing these issues in order to move forward. While some members encouraged the organization to look outside of itself (specifically to other academic organizations) in order to help address matters of diversity and inclusion, others expressed hesitation about the Society branching out when it has not yet taken the necessary steps to address its own internal shortcomings.

The organization’s failure to address diversity in a meaningful way routinely intertwined with a conversation about the field’s larger relevance in institutional settings. The field’s perceived insular nature has had an affect on how departments and universities may perceive their need for a southern literature specialist. Thus, many attendees concurred that the field could not address one issue (diversity) without thinking through the larger intellectual questions of the field that contribute to constriction (lack of jobs).

There are many institutional pressures facing those who work in the field of southern literature or fields adjacent to southern literature. All attendees seemed well aware of the issues facing graduate students in the field, and the current work by the Emerging Scholars Organization was cited as a positive direction for ways to support graduate students, junior scholars, and those in contingent positions. Some senior scholars proposed a more formalized mentoring structure while many junior scholars also want to see senior scholars advocate to their home departments about why hiring a southern literature scholar can benefit a university’s needs. The consensus seemed to be that both approaches–better mentoring and more robust institutional advocacy—will be necessary to support emerging scholars in the field.

Scholars from universities outside the U.S. encouraged the Society’s membership to take international opportunities more seriously. There seemed to be a common concern that the Society can occasionally mirror the region it studies in that it defaults to regional and national insularity rather than seeking opportunities in a larger global context. Just as the field increasingly addresses the U.S. South’s place in the world, scholars who study southern literature should also be reconsidering their own interactions with broader audiences.

One place that these concerns over diversity, inclusion, and the field’s larger relevance appear to intersect is in the matter of public scholarship. There was a large consensus that, because we study a region so closely associated with histories of racial oppression, anti-labor politics, and environmental “frontlines,” the organization has a responsibility to become more public-facing in its response to issues in the popular consciousness.

Another theme that emerged was the perception of the field as dominated by a collection of “cliques.” There was a large call to discourage the practice of “pre-formed” panels, which allows small groups of scholars to repeatedly only talk to one another without engaging newcomers to the field or those from other fields that may be interested in dialogue. Several people spoke in favor of requiring all conference panels to post open calls. Other scholars encouraged discontinuing the practice of organizing panels comprised entirely of white men from similar institutional backgrounds and ranks. The opening of panel calls emerged as a strong potential step in encouraging more diverse representation across the Society and at the conference.

Ultimately, the conversation proved well worth the time. Attendees approached the topics with candor, thoughtful reflection, and mutual respect. The open forum demonstrates the Society’s need for more transparency if it wishes to address important issues such as diversity, inclusion, and public engagement. Likewise, the opportunity for scholars from across ranks to have a dialogue about the future of the field should prove useful in sustaining the organization as well as encouraging its growth as a resource for the problems facing the U.S. South–and indeed many Souths–in the twenty-first century.

Presidential and Executive Council Response (Lisa Hinrichsen)

While the EC will consider all suggestions from our membership, I want to highlight the ways we have already responded to the survey results.

In response to jobs, we will offer a variety of workshops on jobs and diverse post-doctorate career paths at the 2020 conference in Boca Raton. We plan to invite folks with experience in alt-ac, non-ac jobs, public scholarship and/or public advocacy to attend and present at the conference. In addition, Kelly Vines and I are drafting best practices in mentoring guidelines for distribution to the membership at large.

In the service of diversity and inclusion, I have set up a task force of EC members to address how best to make our organization more diverse and inclusive, especially in terms of race/ethnicity and gender. I have appointed José Limónas an honorary EC member and as chair of that committee. John Wharton Lowe is working to set up SSSL-sponsored panels at MELUS, MESEA, and CAAR as a first step in attempting better long-term connections with fields and organizations that support scholars of color and their work. A bylaws and constitution task force, made up of EC volunteers, will be adding a statement on sexual harassment to our bylaws, in addition to making other changes to our organizational documents to reflect the ways that SSSL is currently run. These changes will be shared with and voted on by the membership when they are complete. The 2020 conference committee has been made aware of the need for disability access and support, and members should expect these issues to be in the foreground of our next meeting.

To increase public engagement, SSSL will continue to make public statements against white supremacy, and I will make sure these statements are delivered in a timely fashion. Our new website has been up and running since late April (https://southernlit.org/), and I invite members to view it if they haven’t already done so. Our current digital media coordinator, Kristen Figgins, will help maintain the website and keep information current. Starting next year, when Amy King takes over as newsletter editor, members can expect changes to the newsletter format and style. We are exploring ways to invite public intellectuals and activists to our next conference and examining how to host forums in which to productively engage with secondary school educators. We also plan to develop resources for the website to benefit both emerging scholars and established scholars who would like to engage with public audiences.

To improve organizational transparency, we will host an open membership meeting at the next conference, and our revised bylaws and constitution will provide clear policies and protocols for moving into leadership positions. In addition, members can always feel free to reach out to me with questions about SSSL leadership.

In response tosupport for archival and pedagogical work, budget limitations prevent us from offering research funding in the ways members have suggested. The 2018 conference offered more pedagogy sessions than ever before, and we will continue to offer a diverse range of conversations about pedagogy at the 2020 conference. Our new webpage offers updated syllabi, teaching resources, and other pedagogical materials, and I hope to further grow this section of the webpage. We are also exploring podcasting or recording some of our pedagogical discussions at the next conference to make these conversations more widely available.

Finally, let me offer some thoughts on what members can do to help:

• Offer public support for the academic labor movement.
• If you advise M.A. and Ph.D. students or serve as DGS at your home institution, offer information about alt-ac and non-ac paths and host workshops for grant and fellowship applications.
• Engage in excellent teaching. Generating new, popular courses in southern literature could bring more students into individual departments, and thus signal to colleagues and administrators the need to hire more southernists. Share your pedagogical strategies and successes by sharing syllabi, assignments, and writing prompts on our website.
• Help us with public engagement. Present at book clubs, lifelong learning institutes, give radio and television interviews, and start or promote southern literature and culture podcasts (like About Southand The Sound and the Furious).
• Run for a position on the EC or in the ESO.
• Share your work with us on the SSSL Facebook page or listserv.
• Donate to SSSL if you are able. Your donations will help support graduate travel or other activities, including research support. You can bookmark your donation for a specific purpose when you donate.

 

Announcements and CFPs

Announcement 

Graduate Assistant Position(s) Available: 
An Opportunity to Work on the Staff of the Award-Winning North Carolina Literary Review

The East Carolina University master’s degree program in English accepts applications for the fall through July 31.

Graduate assistantships include the opportunity to apply to be an editorial assistant with the award-winning North Carolina Literary Review (NCLR).

For information about ECU’s graduate program, go to: http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cas/engl/gradindex.cfm.

For more information about this award-winning journal, go to: http://www.nclr.ecu.edu.

Students interested in working with NCLR should contact the editor, Professor Margaret Bauer, via email ([email protected]) for more information as soon as they apply to the graduate program.

 Announcement 

Southern Spaces has added a section for “Reading and Writing Souths”

CFP

On behalf of the Southeastern American Studies Association (SASA), I invite you to propose papers or panels for our biennial conference, scheduled for March 14-16, 2019 at the Emory Conference Center and Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia. The CFP is below, and you may find more information about the conference on our website (www.southeasternasa.org) and Facebook page. Speakers at SASA 2019 will include Dr. Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, and Dr. Calinda Lee, VP for Historical Interpretation and Community Outreach at the Atlanta History Center. We will also have a colloquy focused on MacLean’s work, including her most recent book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (Viking, 2017).

Hope to see you in Atlanta in March 2019, if not before! Molly McGehee, SASA President

Call for Papers
Southeastern American Studies Association (SASA)
March 14-16, 2019
Emory Conference Center and Hotel
Atlanta, Georgia

Submission Deadline: August 1, 2018

Looking Back, Talking Back, Moving Forward

Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo Movement, the Women’s March, DREAMERs, the March for Our Lives. In recent years, we have witnessed—whether on the ground or via social media—a diversity of individuals and groups speaking up and talking back publicly in response to systemic intimidation and violence that has marginalized certain populations within and beyond the United States. Some say that we are at a watershed moment in U.S. history, but are we? Who and what have come before, and in what ways did they succeed and/or fail? How do the writers, speakers, and activists of today build upon the work of writers, speakers, and activists of yesteryear? And—in what ways—do new technologies impact social movements and the backlashes against them?

For the 2019 SASA conference, we invite interdisciplinary papers and roundtables that explore moments (whether literary, historical, and/ or cultural) of “talking back” within national and transnational contexts. Where does public intellectualism/public scholarship fit into the research and teaching agendas of American Studies scholars? Where, when, and how do we speak up and talk back? With its 2018 theme, “States of Emergence,” the American Studies Association “emphasizes that our sense of crisis must be thought alongside our constant commitment to challenging the calamities that beset us and to producing alternative—indeed better—worlds.” In that spirit we welcome papers and sessions that explore how your scholarship, teaching, and/or service contributes to producing such worlds within and beyond your particular academic setting.

Possible foci for papers, panels, or roundtable sessions:

• Civility, civil discourse, civil disobedience, civil rights
• Social media and social movements
• Hashtag activism
• Student activism
• Talking back, disruptive staring, and other performances of creative resistance
• Immigration, migration, gentrification, urbanization
• Inequality as a given
• Making sense of the 2018 midterms
• Public scholarship, public intellectualism
• Museums, archives, and collective memory in the age of fake news
• Creativity and the effectiveness of criticism
• Pedagogical approaches to teaching about dissent, protest, movement-making
• Pedagogical approaches to teaching American Studies in 2019

Guidelines for submissions:

Please use the online form available here to submit your proposals by August 1, 2018.

• • For individual papers, you will be prompted to submit the following: 1) an abstract for your proposed paper (500 words) and 2) a brief bio 300 words).
  • For complete panel or roundtable proposals, you will be prompted to submit the following: 1) a title and description of the proposed panel or roundtable (300 words); 2) a brief abstract for each presentation within the session (300 words per abstract); and 3) a brief bio for each presenter (250 words per bio).

The full link to the submission form is https://goo.gl/forms/pZIOSNvtP3nf5BCh2 .

In the interest of involving as many people in our conference as possible, each conference attendee may be listed in the conference program as a participant in a maximum of two sessions. While we welcome a range of formats, we ask that panels be designed so that they fit within a 75-minute time frame with at least 15 minutes dedicated to discussion. As always, we especially encourage graduate students to attend our conference, to present research, and to enjoy being part of our scholarly community.

The Critoph Prize recognizes the best graduate student paper presented at each SASA conference. It includes a certificate and a check for $250, as well as recognition at the next biennial gathering. The deadline for graduate students to submit the papers they are presenting at the 2019 conference—as a Microsoft Word or PDF attachment to SASAcritophprize@gmail—is noon on March 14, 2019.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected].

Be sure to check out our website (www.southeasternasa.org). You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter.

CFP

Studies in the Work & Life of Truman Capote

Truman Capote Literary Society (SAMLA)
This panel welcomes abstracts on the works and life of Truman Capote. Please submit a 200-word abstract, brief biographical statement (inclusive of academic affiliation and contact information), and A/V requirements to Stuart Noel, Georgia State University, at [email protected]by June 16^th

CFP

 Call for Submissions: Queer Intersections / Southern Spaces

Series editor: Eric Solomon, PhD
Submission deadline: July 30, 2018
Submission requirements: 350–500 word proposals OR full projects
Send submissions and direct all inquiries to: Series editor Eric Solomon ([email protected])

Southern Spaces, a peer-reviewed, multimedia, open access journal, invites scholars, critics, writers, artists, and activists to submit essays, photo essays, original documentaries, and digital projects for a new series: “Queer Intersections / Southern Spaces.”

In a 2013 short manifesto, “Stomp for the Shadows,” filmmaker Pratibha Parmar defines the word QUEER via an acronym: Queer, Unspoken, Embolden, Erased, Reclaimed. In Parmar’s radical formulation of the category “queer,” the term becomes less a concrete noun denoting states of being, in which gathered under the umbrella of “queer” are LGBTQ+, and more a verb of doing: speaking or not speaking, emboldening or not emboldening, erasing or making visible, reclaiming or failing to claim, and finally queering or not queering. In this way, to queer is to exist as subjects in the transitive space of choice between doing and not doing. The question shifts from identifying queer subjects as intelligible, fixed beings to asking the critical questions: To queer what? Where? When? What do, or should, we queer and why?

With the series “Queer Intersections / Southern Spaces,” Southern Spaces welcomes submissions from scholars, activists, and artists who stand in this intersectional space and raise these critical questions. Southern Spaces asks contributors to consider what ways of being and doing (real and imagined) exist at the intersections of LGBTQ+ identity within locations across southern spaces and the Global South. We invite contributions from writers and creators of any orientation whose work addresses the lives of LGBTQ+ persons and/or applies queer and feminist theory to various topics. We encourage a diversity of methods and theoretical approaches.

All submissions must be original work. Although we expect submissions to consider space, place, and LGBTQ+ subjects critically in relation to the series, the list of possible topics to consider includes (but is not limited to):

Spaces and Identities

• Intersectionality, hybridity, identity: race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, regional identity, and class
• Migration narratives, globalization, queer diaspora, and spaces of sexuality
• Public and private spheres and the development of queer subcultures
• Urban/rural and digital: gentrification, shifts in LGBTQ+ enclaves, and the importance of digital apps/dating in queer space and practice
• Lesbian, Transgender, and Bisexual southern experiences
• Gender identity and performance

Canons and Questions

• Histories of sexuality in critical and popular thought
• Identity politics in site-specific contexts
• Pedagogy and the academy’s responsibility to LGBTQ+ subjects
• Queer theory and feminist theory (pasts, presents, futures)
• Reconsidering the queer theory canon (Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick, and other foundational theorists)

Social Justice and Public Policy

• Violence, vulnerability, and precarity, perhaps with a particular emphasis on Trans women of color in southern spaces
• Hate crimes and legal protections
• Incarceration, institutionalization, and sexual violence
• Pulse and its aftermath
• Employment, discrimination, and the law
• Movement reflections: after “Don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT), after marriage legalization, etc., what next?

Health, Affect, Memory

• Biopolitics and public health
• HIV/AIDS, seropositivity, stigma, PreP and TasP
• Disability
• Safer sex, sex positivity, and radicalism
• Intimacy, love, and affect
• Memory, loss, mourning, and memorial practices

Queer Activism

• Development, evolution, and futures of gay rights movements
• Resistance and queer counter-narratives
• Queer(ing) ethics and morality
• Faith, religion, and spirituality

Media and Genre Analyses

• Film and video (Queer Cinema)
• Literary studies
• Art, visual rhetoric, and representation
• Archives: reclamations and erasures

Please submit proposals (350–500 words) or full projects to series editor Eric Solomon ([email protected]) on or before July 30th, 2018. There is no submission fee or article processing charge. Visit our submissions page for more information.

CFP

“Progress, Radicalism, and the U.S. South”
SAMLA 90 (South Atlantic Modern Language Association)
Birmingham, AL / Nov. 2-4

In recent years, the U.S. South has re-emerged as a hotbed of grassroots progressive politics, serving as the home to innovative and forceful anti-racist, anti-poverty, anti-homophobic/transphobic and environmental justice campaigns. National media attention that has followed such organizing has both challenged and reinforced notions of the U.S. South as a monolithic conservative political entity. Narratives of progressive politics in the South have brought with them re-evaluations of Southern history that have focused on historical continuity of progressive political goals. For example, a recent article in The Atlantic revisited the early days of Reconstruction to explore “When the South was the Most Progressive Region in America,” and offered a description of the antebellum South that confirms national suspicions about the South in the 21st century: “The antebellum South had long been a conservative bastion, characterized by its dogged commitment to states’ rights, low taxes, strict construction of the Constitution, and especially the maintenance of traditional gender roles and white supremacy.” By correcting these enduring phenomena, the demands of so-called “Radical Reconstruction” finds a home in a lineage of contemporary progressive politics.

Yet, as Saralee Stafford and Neal Shirley demonstrate in Dixie Be Damned (2015), the South has always been home to radical anti-state and anti-racist politics that have aggressively taken on institutional and extra-political forms of violence. This left-radicalism challenges not only the hegemony of racist patriarchy, but also the assumed value of “progressive” institutional politics. Thinking radicalism in the South also sheds light on the concepts of compromise and political moderation, which have long been points of contention in anti-racist organizing and activism. This panel seeks to address how the region is defined as a place of battling conservative and progressive politics, and looks for submissions that explore the many ways this dichotomy is deployed in the loosely defined South. We are particularly interested in the relationship between conservative and progressive politics, and radical movements on both the right and the left that reify or challenge our conception of a conservative-moderate-progressive schema. We welcome a wide range of topics and encourage work that touches on the relationship between radical demands and narratives of political progress in the South. Additionally, we welcome examinations of a range of print and non-print media, from conventional literary forms to multimedia, performance art and political texts.

Possible topics include:
• How are progressivism and conservatism represented in literary and artistic works from and of the U.S. South?
• What is the role of the “moderate” and the “radical” in fictional and political narratives?
• How have southern organizations and leaders influenced radical politics in the broader U.S. and abroad?
• How are progressive coalitions built and sustained? What sacrifices must be made for progressive political gains? Who makes those sacrifices?
• How does violence shape political demands and literary representation?
• How does media cover various radical organizations and ideas?
• What radical demands can be carried across issues and historical periods?
• How have calls for representation, justice, and redistribution changed since the nineteenth century?
• How do we teach radical texts? Conservative texts? Progressive texts?

We welcome papers on other topics related to these questions as well. Please submit by June 14th, a 250-word abstract, brief bio, and A/V requests to Garrett Bridger Gilmore ([email protected]) and Kelly Vines ([email protected]).

CFP

Call for Submissions for the 2019 issue of the
NORTH CAROLINA LITERARY REVIEW (NCLR; see www.nclr.ecu.edu),
Featuring African American Literature of North Carolina
Complete submissions are due by August 31, 2018.

We are seeking critical analyses of North Carolina African American writers of any period and interviews with contemporary African American writers who live in North Carolina now or have lived in North Carolina.

Early submissions and proposals are welcome. Queries and proposals for the special feature section may be emailed to the editor, Margaret Bauer ([email protected]). For formatting manuscripts and online submission instructions, please consult our website: www.nclr.ecu.edu/submissions.

CFP

The West Virginia University Press has invited North Carolina Literary Review Editor Margaret Bauer to edit a volume of critical essays on Cold Mountain author Charles Frazier. Please email paper proposals before the final submission July 15 due date. Papers may be on a single Frazier novel, or they might trace a theme/conflict/character type through all of his novels. If needed, writers of the latter type of paper will be given the opportunity to expand their papers to include the recently released Frazier novel, Varina. ([email protected]).

CFP

Pirates and the American South
deadline for submissions:
August 15, 2018
full name / name of organization:
Kristopher Mecholsky (Louisiana State University)
contact email:
[email protected]

Given their contribution to the historical development of the coastal south and the Americas in general, pirates are relatively absent in the present southern literary canon and its criticisms. As the Companion to Southern Literature mentions with some surprise, “southern writers…seem not to have cared much about pirates…[particularly] given the fact that some of the most notorious pirates worked the coastal regions of the Southeast.” And yet, nineteenth-century fiction about the American South was flooded with pirates.

This CFP seeks essays for a planned edited collection that will augment papers delivered at a panel on pirates in southern fiction at the 2018 Society for the Study of Southern Literature. Proposed essays should address gaps in criticism about piracy in southern fiction (both broadly understood) from all periods. Proposals about historical approaches to piracy and the American South are also encouraged. From the cultural echoes of Sir Walter Scott’s The Pirate to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” and Joseph Holt Ingraham’s Lafitte: The Pirate of the Gulf and more—and encompassing the cultural role of pirate fiction in triangulating gender, colonial, racial, economic, and nationalistic attitudes with respect to Mexico, the Caribbean, and the entire coastal American South—the proposed collection will form the first substantial critical exploration of pirates in southern literature. Possible topics include (but are certainly not limited to) the following:

• Jean Lafitte in literature and film
• Mark Twain and piracy
• the relationship between Bahamanians and Floridians (esp. the Conchs), particularly in fiction
• the relationship between the Scottish & British literary world and the American South
• authors from outside the traditional South who wrote about pirates in it
• pirates in twentieth-century fiction and film about the South
• the role of pirate myth in the coastal Carolinas, Georgia, and the Gulf coast states
• the economics of piracy in the development of colonial America
• how pirate fiction represents, navigates, and negotiates the intersectional complexities of slavery
• the role of piracy in the relationship between the Caribbean and the American South
• 19th-c. dime novels about pirates in and around the South
• piracy during the Civil War (e.g., the Confederate privateer ships Jefferson Davis, Savannah, and Petrel)
• Joseph Holt Ingraham’s fiction and the South
• buried treasure motifs in ficiton of the American South
• piracy in stage dramas
• gender and piracy
• race and piracy
• sexuality and piracy

Please send abstract proposals (up to 500 words) to Kristopher Mecholsky at [email protected] by August 15, 2018. Formal proposals to publishers will then go out; accepted proposals will be expected to submit a finished essay (~6,000 to 8,000 words) by April 15, 2019. Feel free to send queries with any questions regarding proposals (including feedback on ideas) at any time.

 CFP

 Gothic Nature TV/Film Reviews
Deadline for submissions:
July 20, 2018
Full name / name of organization:
Gothic Nature
Contact email:
[email protected]

A new academic journal, Gothic Nature, is seeking TV/ film reviews. The show or film reviewed needs to be recent (last 12 months ideally), have a clear thematic link to eco-horror/eco-gothic, and the reviews should aim to be about 1,000 words in length. Deadline: July 20, 2018. Send inquiries and submissions to Sara L. Crosby at [email protected]. For further information about the journal, please visit: gothicnature.net.

CFP

Queering the U.S. South
For SAMLA 90 in Birmingham, AL November 2-4, 2018.
Deadline: June 16, 2018

The queer/quare South has long been an important aspect of the region’s cultural and literary imagination. Stories by authors such as Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Allison, Truman Capote, Alice Walker, and Fannie Flagg (to name a few) provide a rich discourse surrounding queerness, while narratives such as the film Moonlight, the graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby,and the podcast S-Town move the discussion beyond the written word and into other forms of storytelling. As Michael Bibler explains, “a queer study of the region means doing more than simply pointing out aberrant forms of gender, desire, eroticism, and identity [. . .] it also enables a systemic critique of the larger social and ideological structures that define normativity and transgression both within the region and at the junctures between the region and nation.” In other words, embracing a study of queerness allows us to explore not only gender and sexuality but also the presuppositions of normative behavior in general, which can open up new discourses surrounding regional difference and normative prescriptions about “right” and “wrong” action. It allows us to dig into assumptions made by dominant cultures and to push back against the oppressive structures that often result from normative ideologies. This panel, then, seeks to address how the region is queer(ed), and looks for submissions that explore the many ways queerness is deployed in the loosely defined South. We welcome a wide range of topics and encourage work that touches on how we can queer the South both in our reading of texts and in our actions as teachers and members of the larger community. Additionally, we welcome examinations of a range of print and non-print media, from conventional literary forms to multimedia and performance art.

Possible topics include:

• How does race and/or class play into our considerations of queerness?
• How do queer narratives from or about the South resist or counter more mainstream narratives about the region?
• What is a queer southern narrative? What makes a queer narrative southern? What makes a southern narrative queer?
• How have southern cultures influenced LGBTQIA+ politics, and vice versa?
• How do queer presences in the South queer southern ethics and morality?
• How do we queer faith, religion, and/or spirituality in the South?
• How do we queer our classrooms, and what role does the South play in this queering?

Other topics related to these questions are also more than welcome. Please submit by June 16th, a 250-word abstract, brief bio, and A/V requests to the ESO email address: [email protected]

SSSL Bibliography, Spring/Summer 2018

Will Murray, Bibliographer and Editorial Assistant for the SSSL Newsletter, is a PhD candidate at the University of Alabama. If you would like to add your recent work to the next bibliography or have suggestions about journals/presses we should add, please email him at [email protected]

 

Scholarly Journals

African American Review

• Crane, Jacob. ““Razed to the Knees”: The Anti-Heroic Body in James McCune Smith’s “The Heads of Colored People”.” African American Review, vol. 51 no. 1, 2018, pp. 7-21.
• Devlin, Paul. “Albert Murray’sThe Spyglass Tree and the 1923 Armed Defense of Tuskegee Institute.” African American Review, vol. 51 no. 1, 2018, pp. 23-36.
• Sargent, Andrew. “To Counter a Mockingbird: Black Sacrifice, White Heroism, and Racial Innocence in William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer.” African American Review, vol. 51 no. 1, 2018, pp. 37-54.

American Indian Quarterly

• Squint, Kirstin. “Monique Verdin’s Louisiana Love.” 21 February 2017. American Indian Quarterly. 42.1 (Winter 2018)

American Literary History

• Parra, Jamie. “In the Vestibule of Another World.” American Literary History, vol. 30 no. 1, 2018, pp. 157-165.
• Posmentier, Sonya. “Lyric Reading in the Black Ethnographic Archive.” American Literary History, vol. 30 no. 1, 2018, pp. 55-84.
• Wolff, Nathan. “The Weather in Dawson’s Landing: Twain, Chesnutt, and the Climates of Racism.” American Literary History, vol. 30 no. 2, 2018, pp. 222-248.

American Literature

• Conrad, Jessica. “Polluted Luxuries”: Consumer Resistance, the Senses of Horror, and Abolitionist Boycott Literature.” American Literature, vol. 90, no. 1, Mar. 2018, pp. 1-26.
• Hale, Mary B. “The Political Procedural: The Novel’s Contribution to the Rise of Nonpartisanship and the Abandonment of Reconstruction.” American Literature, vol. 89, no. 4, Dec. 2017, pp. 669-695.

 CLAJ

• Teutsch, Matthew. ‘Our Women. . . are Ladies’: Frank Yerby’s Deconstruction of White Southern Womanhood in Speak Now.” CLAJ 3 (March 2017): 334-347.

Cormac McCarthy Journal

• Bellamy, Brent Ryan. “The Reproductive Imperative ofThe Road.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, vol. 16 no. 1, 2018, pp. 38-54.
• Brown, Lauren. “Existing Without Consent: American History and the Judge in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, vol. 16 no. 1, 2018, pp. 73-94.
• Luce, Dianne C. “Projecting Interiority: Psychogenesis and the Composition ofOuter Dark.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, vol. 16 no. 1, 2018, pp. 2-37.
• Ploskonka, Mitchell. ““See the Wild Man Two Bits”: James Robert, Disability, and Personhood inBlood Meridian.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, vol. 16 no. 1, 2018, pp. 55-72.

 Early American Literature

• Jones, Douglas A., Jr. “Slave Evangelicalism, Shouting, and the Beginning of African American Writing.” Early American Literature, vol. 53 no. 1, 2018, pp. 69-95.
• Mazzaferro, Alexander. “”Such a Murmur”: Innovation, Rebellion, and Sovereignty in William Strachey’s “True Reportory”.” Early American Literature, vol. 53 no. 1, 2018, pp. 3-32.

Edgar Allan Poe Review

• Grech, Philip. “The Science of Psychopathy and Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 19 no. 1, 2018, pp. 53-75.
• Ibáñez, José R.”Poe’s Unity of Effect Called into Question: Revisiting Cortázar’s Translation of “The Tell-Tale Heart”.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 19 no. 1, 2018, pp. 76-87.
• Marvick, Louis. “M. Manet Declines to Illustrate the Invisible.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 19 no. 1, 2018, pp. 28-38.
• Redmond, Matthew. “If Bird or Devil: Meta-Plagiarism in “The Raven”.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 19 no. 1, 2018, pp. 88-103.
• Rigal-Aragón, Margarita & González-Moreno, Fernando. “Poe and the Art of Painting: Tales to Be Seen—the First Spanish Illustrated Edition.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 19 no. 1, 2018, pp. 7-27
• Waters, Charlene. “The Color of Amontillado: The Influence of Blackface Minstrelsy in “The Cask of Amontillado”.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 19 no. 1, 2018, pp. 39-52.

Eudora Welty Review

• Brown, Carolyn J.”Sister Act: Margaret Walker and Eudora Welty.”Eudora Welty Review, vol. 9, 2017, pp. 29-53.
• Cabau, Jacques & Gros, Emmeline. “Preface toThe Optimist’s Daughter, Bibliothèque du Temps Présent, Editions Rombaldi, 1977.” Eudora Welty Review, vol. 9, 2017, pp. 21-28.
• Patterson, Laura Sloan. “Triangulation and an Outsider’s South in Eudora Welty’s “No Place for You, My Love”.”Eudora Welty Review, vol. 9, 2017, pp. 75-82.
• Spoth, Daniel. “Welty on the Interstate: Mobility and Mass Culture on I-55 and the Natchez Trace.”Eudora Welty Review, vol. 9, 2017, pp. 55-74.
• Trefzer, Annette. “”Something Inarticulate”: Sexual Desire in the Fiction of Eudora Welty and Hubert Creekmore.”Eudora Welty Review, vol. 9, 2017, pp. 83-100.

Faulkner Journal

• Lurie, Peter. “The South Rises: Revenance, Region, and the Idea of Place in Us Literary History.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 30, no. 1, Spring2016, pp. 63-78.
• Moreland, Richard C. “Forward Movement: William Faulkner’s “Letter to the North,” W. E. B. Du Bois’s Challenge, and the Reivers.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 30, no. 1, Spring2016, pp. 79-104.
• Thomas, Sara Gabler. “Queer Formalism: Synesthetic Storytelling in Monique Truong and William Faulkner.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 30, no. 1, Spring2016, pp. 39-61.
• Zeitlin, Michael. “Faulkner and the Royal Air Force Canada, 1918.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 30, no. 1, Spring2016, pp. 15-38.

Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art

• Turner, Daniel Cross. “A True Dead Ringer for Something Like You Ain’t Never Seen: Subrealism in The Band and Charles Wright.” Edited by Mike Mattison and Ernest Suarez for “Hot Rocks: Song and Verse” series in Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art16:3 (2015): 117-145.

 Global South

• Brown, Kimberly Juanita. “At the Center of the Periphery: Gender, Landscape, and Architecture in12 Years a Slave.” The Global South, vol. 11 no. 1, 2017, pp. 121-135.
• Dischinger, Matthew. “States of Possibility in Colson Whitehead’s:The Underground Railroad.” The Global South, vol. 11 no. 1, 2017, pp. 82-99.

 Journal of American Studies

• Aitken, Robbie. “Embracing Germany: Interwar German Society and Black Germans through the Eyes of African American Reporters.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 52, no. 2, 2018, pp. 447–473.
• Chrisman, Laura. “American Jubilee Choirs, Industrial Capitalism, and Black South Africa.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 52, no. 2, 2018, pp. 274–296.
• Duck, Leigh Anne. “Commercial Counterhistory: Remapping the Movement in Lee Daniels’ The Butler.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 52, no. 2, 2018, pp. 418–446.
• Engel, Elisabeth, and Nicholas Grant. “Going South: Tracing Race and Region in the Post-Emancipation Black Atlantic.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 52, no. 2, 2018, pp. 269–273.
• Engel, Elisabeth. “Southern Looks? A History of African American Missionary Photography of Africa, 1890s–1930s.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 52, no. 2, 2018, pp. 390–417.
• Jones, Jeannette Eileen. “‘The Negro’s Peculiar Work’: Jim Crow and Black Discourses on US Empire, Race, and the African Question, 1877–1900.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 52, no. 2, 2018, pp. 330–357.
• Rinehart, Nicholas T. “Native Sons; Or, How ‘Bigger’ Was Born Again.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 52, no. 1, 2018, pp. 164–192.
• Urwand, Ben. “The Black Image on the White Screen: Representations of African Americans from the Origins of Cinema to The Birth of a Nation.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 52, no. 1, 2018, pp. 45–64.
• Vinson, Robert Trent. “Up from Slavery and Down with Apartheid! African Americans and Black South Africans against the Global Color Line.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 52, no. 2, 2018, pp. 297–329.
• West, E. James. “A Hero to Be Remembered: Ebony Magazine, Critical Memory and the ‘Real Meaning’ of the King Holiday.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 52, no. 2, 2018, pp. 503–527.
• Woodley, Jenny. “‘Ma Is in the Park’: Memory, Identity, and the Bethune Memorial.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 52, no. 2, 2018, pp. 474–502.

MELUS

• Accomando, Christina. “Troubling the “Beat Inevitable”: Brooks, Ellison, and the Cultural Logic of Lynching.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., vol. 42 no. 4, 2017, pp. 113-135.
• Armengol, Josep M.”Black-White Relations, in Red: Whiteness as Class Privilege in Langston Hughes’s The Ways of White Folks.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., vol. 43 no. 1, 2018, pp. 115-133.
• Phipps, Gregory. “”It Takes Its Shape from de Shore It Meets”: Creative Democracy and the Pragmatic Experience of Love in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., vol. 43 no. 1, 2018, pp. 159-182.

Mississippi Quarterly

• Cologne-Brookes, Gavin. “Dead Man Walking: Nat Turner, William Styron, Bruce Springsteen, and the Death Penalty.” Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 1, Winter2016, pp. 9-30.
• Lackey, Michael. “Separatists, Integrationists, and William Styron’s the Confessions of Nat Turner.” Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 1, Winter2016, pp. 65-91.
• Ober Mannon, Bethany. “A Mighty Clamor to Know”: Rhetorical Power and Memoir Fiction in Styron’s the Confessions of Nat Turner.” Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 1, Winter2016, pp. 47-63.
• Watts, Linda S. “The Hidden Face of History: Styron’s Confessions and Post-1967 Voicings of Nat Turner in Fiction and Drama.” Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 1, Winter2016, pp. 93-114.
• West III, James L. W. “Yourcenar, Et Al.: Styron’s Sources for the Confessions of Nat Turner.” Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 1, Winter2016, pp. 31-46.

Modern Fiction Studies

• Darda, Joseph. “Dispatches from the Drug Wars: Ishmael Reed, Oscar Zeta Acosta, and the Viet Cong of America.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 64 no. 1, 2018, pp. 79-103.

Mosaic

• Ghasemi, Mehdi. “An Equation of Collectivity: We + You in Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices.” Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal, vol. 51 no. 1, 2018, pp. 71-86.

North Carolina Literary Review

• Reitz, Christina L. “Cold Mountain: A Journey from Charles Frazier’s Magnum Opus to Jennifer Higdon’s Magnum Opera.” North Carolina Literary Review, no. 26, 2017, p. 8-21

Poe Studies

• Chacón, Heather. “Prosthetic Colonialism: Indian Removal, European Imperialism, and International Trade in Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up”.” Poe Studies, vol. 50, 2017, pp. 46-68.
• Crosby, Sara L.”A Weird Tonic for the Anthropocene: Poe’s Use of Gardenesque Landscapes as Nature Cure.” Poe Studies, vol. 50, 2017, pp. 69-86.
• Miyazawa, Naomi. “Poe, the Portrait, and the Daguerreotype: Poe’s Living Dead and the Visual Arts.” Poe Studies, vol. 50, 2017, pp. 88-106.
• Reising, Russell. “Who Wrote the Purloined Letter?” Poe Studies, vol. 50, 2017, pp. 107-124.
• Scheckel, Susan. “Home-Sickness, Nostalgia, and Therapeutic Narrative in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”.” Poe Studies, vol. 50, 2017, pp. 12-25.
• Schlauraff, Kristie A.”Do You Hear What I Hear?: Stethoscopic Listening in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”.” Poe Studies, vol. 50, 2017, pp. 26-45.

South Atlantic Review

• Guran, Letitia. “The Travelogue as Cross-Cultural Translation: Langston Hughes in Soviet Russia.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 83, no. 1, 2018, p. 42-70.
• M’Baye, Babacar. “Cosmopolitan Critiques of Colonial Abuse in Langston Hughes’s African Travel Writings.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 83, no. 1, 2018, p. 5-22.
• Miller, Jason. “Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King, Jr.: Together in Nigeria.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 83, no. 1, 2018, p. 22-42.
• Schanfield, Lillian. “Lost in Translation: Reading Langston Hughes in Yiddish.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 83, no. 1, 2018, p. 70-83.

 South Carolina Review

• Gervin, Mary A. “Carson Mccullers’ Remembrance of Things Past: Illumination and Night Glareas Memoir.” South Carolina Review, no. 1, 2017, p. 134-145.
• Meyers, Jeffrey. “Fire and Ice: James Dickey’s To the White Sea.” South Carolina Review, vol.50, no. 1, 2017, p. 124 -134.
• Steverson, Delia. “Madness, Melancholia, and Suicide in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees.” South Carolina Review, vol. 50, no. 1, 2017, p. 108-124.
• Van Ness, Gordon. “‘A certain starstruck quality’: The Curious Relationship of John Updike and James Dickey.”South Carolina Review, vol. 50, no. 2, 2018, p. 131-144.

Southern Cultures

• Bardes, John. “”Defend with True Hearts unto Death”: Finding Historical Meaning in Confederate Memorial Hall.” Southern Cultures, vol. 23 no. 4, 2017, pp. 29-45.
• Costa, Rebecca Bond. “”A Self-Inflicted Wound”: The Impact of Coastal Erosion and Restoration on Louisiana’s Oyster Industry.” Southern Cultures, vol. 24 no. 1, 2018, pp. 27-45.
• Delerme, Simone. “65th Infantry Veteran’s Park: Contested Landscapes and Latinization in Greater Orlando.” Southern Cultures, vol. 23 no. 4, 2017, pp. 116-125.
• Harcourt, Edward John. “”Would to God I could tear the page from these memoirs and from my own memory”:  Aytchand the Confederate Sensibility of Loss.” Southern Cultures, vol. 23 no. 4, 2017, pp. 7-28.
• Lechner, Zachary J.””Fuzzy as a Georgia Peach”: The Ford Campaign and the Challenge of Jimmy Carter’s Southernness.” Southern Cultures, vol. 23 no. 4, 2017, pp. 62-81.
• Moore, Vennie Deas. “The Fishing Village of McClellanville, South Carolina.” Southern Cultures, vol. 24 no. 1, 2018, pp. 83-99.
• Pitts, Shawn. “Discovering Carl.” Southern Cultures, vol. 23 no. 4, 2017, pp. 89-115.
• Wood, Sara. “Cut It Clean: Oyster Shuckers in Eastern Virginia.” Southern Cultures, vol. 24 no. 1, 2018, pp. 137-150.

Southern Spaces

• Huang, Yunte. “An Excerpt from Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History”Southern Spaces.4 April, 2018
• Stoll, Steven. “An Excerpt from Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia.” Southern Spaces. 22 January, 2018.

storySouth

• Adams, Cara Blue, and Daniel Cross Turner. “Interview with Jason Ockert.” storySouth. (2016).
• Turner, Daniel Cross. “All Flow: An Interview with Amy Wright and William Wright.” storySouth. (2016). *Solicited
• Turner, Daniel Cross. “End without End: An Interview with Rebecca Gayle Howell.” storySouth. Edited by Terry L. Kennedy. (2017). *Solicited
• Turner, Daniel Cross. “Inletting: An Interview with Hastings Hensel.” storySouth. (2016). *Solicited
• Turner, Daniel Cross. “This Strangest of All Strange Things: An Interview with Patrick Phillips.” storySouth. (2015). *Solicited

Study the South

• Gussow, Adam. “Blues Expressiveness and the Blues Ethos.”Study the South. 24 January, 2018

Texas Studies in Language and Literature

• Williams, Brian. “The Soldier-Celebrity in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 59 no. 4, 2017, pp. 524-547.

Twentieth-Century Literature

• Lawrence, Jeffrey. “Why She Wrote about Mexico: Katherine Anne Porter and the Literature of Experience.” Twentieth-Century Literature, vol. 64 no. 1, 2018, pp. 25-52.

Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

• Hubbs, Jolene. “Transnational American Studies’ Female Trouble.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 47, no. 1, January/February 2018, pp. 1-20.
• King, Amy K. “A Monstrous(ly-Feminine) Whiteness: Gender, Genre, and the Abject Horror of the Past in American Horror Story: Coven.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal,  46, no. 6, 2017, pp. 557-573.

 

Academic Presses

Cambridge UP

• Levine, Robert S. Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• West-Pavlov, Russell, editor. Global South and Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Chicago UP

• Andrews, Kehinde. Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century. University of Chicago Press, 2018.
• Bost, Darius. Evidence Of Being: the Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence. University of Chicago Press, 2018.
• Curnutt, Kirk. William Faulkner. University of Chicago Press, 2018.
• Hayes, Kevin J. Mark Twain. University of Chicago Press, 2018.
• Iglauer, Bruce, and Patrick A. Roberts. Bitten by the Blues: the Alligator Records Story. The University of Chicago Press, 2018.
• Lause, Mark. Long Road to Harpers Ferry: The Rise of the First American Left. University of Chicago Press, 2018.
• Vogel, Shane. Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze. University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Duke UP

• Best, Stephen Michael. None like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life. Duke University Press, 2018.
• Eidsheim, Nina Sun. Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music. Duke University Press, 2018.
• Gates, Racquel J. Double Negative: the Black Image and Popular Culture. Duke University Press, 2018.
• Lomax, Tamura A. Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion and Culture. Duke University Press, 2018.

Louisiana State UP

• Becker, Patricia Austin. Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and Her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Louisiana State University Press, 2018.
• Bledsoe, Andrew S. and Andrew Lang, editors. Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America’s Civil War. Louisiana State University Press, 2018.
• Downs, Matthew L., M. Ryan Floyd, editors. The American South and the Great War, 1914-1924. Louisiana State University Press, 2018.
• Ellis, Scott S. The Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans: A History. Louisiana State University Press, 2018.
• Glenn, John L. Progress Compromised: Social Movements and the Individual in African American Postmodern Fiction. Louisiana State University Press, 2018.
• McKee, Kathryn B. Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post-Civil War South.Louisiana State University Press, 2019.
• Montgomery, Rebecca S. Celeste Parrish and Educational Reform in the Progressive-Era South. Louisiana State University Press, 2018.
• Onuf, Peter. Jefferson and the Virginians: Democracy, Constitutions, and Empire. Louisiana State University Press, 2018.
• Ouchley, Kelby. Bayou-Diversity 2: Nature and People in the Louisiana Bayou Country. Louisiana State University Press, 2018.
• Reed, John Shelton. Mixing It Up: A South-Watcher’s Miscellany.Louisiana State University Press, 2018.
• Richardson, James M., Steven M. Sheffrin, and James Alm. Exploring Long-Term Solutions for Louisiana’s Tax System. Louisiana State University Press, 2018.
• Shockley, Megan Taylor. Creating a Progressive Commonwealth: Women Activists, Feminism, and the Politics of Social Change in Virginia, 1970s-2000s. Louisiana State University Press, 2018.
• Smith, Howard Philips and Frank Perez. Southern Decadence in New Orleans. Louisiana State University Press, 2018.
• Sternberg, Mary Ann. River Road Rambler Returns: More Curiosities along Louisiana’s Historic Byway. Louisiana State University Press, 2018.
• Usner, Jr., Daniel H. American Indians in Early New Orleans: From Calumet to Raquette. Louisiana State University Press, 2018.
• Welch, Michael Patrick. New Orleans: The Underground Guide.Louisiana State University Press, 2018.
• Wynne, Ben, The Man Who Punched Jefferson Davis: The Political Life of Henry S. Foote, Southern Unionist. Louisiana State University Press, 2018.

Pelican Publishing

• Bonner, Jr., Thomas and Judith Bonner, eds. Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles, 1926, by William Spratling and William Faulkner. Pelican Publishing, 2018. (Added introduction and biographies for the 43 caricatures)

Ohio State UP

• Blake, Felice D. Black Love, Black Hate: Intimate Antagonisms in African American Literature. Ohio State UP, 2018.

Ohio UP

• Clark, Msia Kibona. Hip-Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers. Ohio UP, 2018.
• Hoppe, Graham. Gone Dollywood: Dolly Parton’s Mountain Dream. Ohio UP, 2018.

Oxford UP

• Bernier, Celeste-Marie and Andrew Taylor. If I Survive: Frederick Douglass and Family in the Walter O. Evans Collection.Oxford University Press, 2018.
• Pettinger, Alasdair. Frederick Douglass and Scotland, 1846: Living an Antislavery Life. Oxford University Press, 2018.

U of Alabama P

• Alt, Susan M. Cahokia’s Complexities: Ceremonies and Politics of the First Mississippian Farmers. The University of Alabama Press, 2018.
• Bisbee, Saxon T. Engines of Rebellion: Confederate Ironcladsand Steam Engineering in the American Civil War. The University of Alabama Press, 2018.
• Canada, Mark, and Nami Montgomery, editors. Thomas Wolfe Remembered. University of Alabama Press, 2018.
• Chandler, Dana R., and Edith Powell. To Raise up the Man Farthest down: Tuskegee University’s Advancements in Human Health, 1881-1987. The University of Alabama Press, 2018.
• Hodge, Shannon Chappell, and Kristina A. Shuler, editors. Bioarchaeology of the American Southeast: Approaches to Bridging. University of Alabama Press, 2018.
• Hollars, B. J. The Road South: Personal Stories of the Freedom Riders. The University of Alabama Press, 2018.
• Quimby, George W. The Perfect Scout: a Soldier’s Memoir of the Great March to the Sea and the Campaign of the Carolinas. Edited by Anne S. Rubin and Stephen Murphy, The University of Alabama Press, 2018.
• Weitz, Seth A., and Jonathan C. Sheppard, editors. A Forgotten Front: Florida during the Civil War Era. The University of Alabama Press, 2018.
• Williams, Nathaniel. Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain’s America. The University of Alabama Press, 2018.

U of California P

• Brown, Elizabeth, and George Barganier. Race and Crime: Geographies of Injustice. University of California Press, 2018.
• Driscoll, Kerry. Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Native Peoples. University of California Press, 2018.
• Jones, Nikki. The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption. University of California Press, 2018.
• Portes, Alejandro, and Ariel C. Armony. The Global Edge: Miami in the Twenty-First Century. University of California Press, 2018.
• Ransby, Barbara. Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century. University of California Press, 2018.

U of Florida P

• Capouya, John. Florida Soul: from Ray Charles to KC and the Sunshine Band. University Press of Florida, 2017.
• Charlier, Philippe. Zombies: an Anthropological Investigation of the Living Dead. Translated by Richard J. Gray, University Press of Florida, 2017.
• Ellis, Reginald K. Between Washington and Du Bois: the Racial Politics of James Edward Shepard. University Press of Florida, 2018.
• Fairclough, Adam. The Revolution That Failed: Reconstruction in Natchitoches. University Press of Florida, 2018.
• Fox, Regis M. Resistance Reimagined: Black Women’s Critical Thought as Survival. University Press of Florida, 2017.
• Frank, Andrew. Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami. University Press of Florida, 2017.
• González-Tennant, Edward. The Rosewood Massacre: An Archaeology and History of Intersectional Violence. University Press of Florida, 2018.
• Goodyear, Albert C., and Christopher R. Moore, editors. Early Human Life on the Southeastern Coastal Plain. University of Florida Press, 2018.
• Graham, Thomas. Silent Films in St. Augustine.: Thomas Graham, Author.University Press of Florida, 2017.
• Hawkins, Karen M. Everybody’s Problem: the War on Poverty in Eastern North Carolina. University Press of Florida, 2017.
• Hild, Matthew, and Keri Leigh Merritt, editors. Reconsidering Southern Labor History Race, Class, and Power. University Press of Florida, 2018.
• Lear, Ashley Andrews. The Remarkable Kinship of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ellen Glasgow. University Press of Florida, 2018.
• Littlejohn, Jeffrey L., et al., editors. The Seedtime, the Work, and the Harvest: New Perspectives on the Black Freedom Struggle in America. University Press of Florida, 2018.
• Mulroo, Margaret Race, Place, and Memory: Deep Currents in Wilmington, North Carolina. University Press of Florida, 2018.
• Salius, Erin Michael. Sacraments of Memory: Catholicism and Slavery in Contemporary African American Literature. University Press of Florida, 2018.
• Street, Joe, and Henry Knight Lozano. The Shadow of Selma. University Press of Florida, 2018.
• Watkins, Jerry T. Queering the Redneck Riviera: Sexuality and the Rise of Florida Tourism. University Press of Florida, 2018.

U of Georgia P

• Aiello, Thomas. The Grapevine of the Black South: the Scott Newspaper Syndicate in the Generation before the Civil Rights Movement. The University of Georgia Press, 2018.
• Bagley, Joseph. The Politics of White Rights: Race, Justice, and Integrating Alabama’s Schools. The University of Georgia Press, 2018.
• Baker, Andrew C. Bulldozer Revolutions: a Rural History of the Metropolitan South. The University of Georgia Press, 2018.
• Benia, Cooper Owens Deirdre. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology. The University of Georgia Press, 2017.
• Berry, Daina Ramey and Leslie M. Harris, editors. Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas. The University of Georgia Press, 2018.
• Bone, Martyn. Where the New World Is: Literature About the U.S. South at Global Scales. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017.
• Caison, Gina. Red States: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies. The University of Georgia Press, 2018.
• Cohen, Robert. Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Sit-Ins, Civil Rights, and Black Women’s Student Activism. The University of Georgia Press, 2018.
• Flanagan, Christine. Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon. The University of Georgia Press, 2018.
• Glaude, Eddie S. An Uncommon Faith: a Pragmatic Approach to the Study of African American Religion. University of Georgia Press, 2018.
• Graham, David K. Loyalty on the Line: Civil War Maryland in American Memory. The University of Georgia Press, 2018.
• Grandt, Jürgen. Gettin’ Around: Jazz, Script, Transnationalism. University of Georgia Press, 2018.
• Harris, Leslie M., James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, editors. Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies. The University of Georgia Press, 2018.
• Lechner, Zachary J. The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960-1980. The University of Georgia Press, 2018.
• McCarroll, Meredith. Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film. The University of Georgia Press, 2018.
• Seitz, Nicole, and Jonathan Haupt, editors. Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy. The University of Georgia Press, 2018.
• Swanson, Drew A. Beyond the Mountains: Commodifying Appalachian Environments. The University of Georgia Press, 2018.
• Turner, Daniel Cross. “South Unbound: A Case Study in Ron Rash’s Appalachian Fiction.” Navigating Souths: Transdisciplinary Explorations of a U.S. Region. Edited by Michele Grigsby Coffey and Jodi Skipper. University of Georgia Press, 2017. 135-150.

U of Illinois P

• Doubler, Michael D. Dixie Dewdrop: the Uncle Dave Macon Story. University of Illinois Press, 2018.
• Ewing, Tom. Bill Monroe: the Life and Music of the Blue Grass Man. University of Illinois Press, 2018.
• Wilkerson, Jessica. To Live Here, You Have To Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice. University of Illinois Press, 2018.

U of North Carolina P

• Averbeck, Robin Marie. Liberalism Is Not Enough: Race and Poverty in Postwar Political Thought. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Berry, Jason. City of a Million Dreams: a History of New Orleans at Year 300. The University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Brown, Karida. Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Carmichael, Peter S. The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies. The University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Cashin, Joan E. War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era. The University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Dorr, Lisa Lindquist. A Thousand Thirsty Beaches: Smuggling Alcohol from Cuba to the South during Prohibition. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Greene, Kevin D. The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Harker, Jaime. The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Haywood, D’Weston. Let Us Make Men: the Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Johnson, E. Patrick.  Queer. Southern. Women.: an Oral History. The University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Lowery, Malinda Maynor. The Lumbee Indians: an American Struggle. The University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Matthews, Scott L. Capturing the South: Imagining America’s Most Documented Region. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Murphy, Mary-Elizabeth B. Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920-1945. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Nichol, Gene R. Faces of Poverty in North Carolina: Stories from Our Invisible Citizens. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Ownby, Ted. Hurtin’ Words: Debating Family Problems in the Twentieth-Century South. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Parsons, Anne E. From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945. The University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Purdy, Michelle A. Transforming the Elite: Black Students and the Desegregation of Private Schools. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Quiros, Ansley L. God with Us: Lived Theology and the Freedom Struggle in Americus, Georgia, 1942-1976. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Schneider, Elena Andrea. The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World. Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2018.
• Silber, Nina. This War Ain’t over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Sommerville, Diane Miller. Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Staub, Michael E. The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence between Brown and The Bell Curve. The University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Strang, Cameron B. Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850. The University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Taylor, Amy Murrell. Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Tuuri, Rebecca. Strategic Sisterhood: the National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. The University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
• Wall, Cheryl A. On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: the Art of the African American Essay. University of North Carolina Press, 2019.
• Wallach, Jennifer Jensen. Every Nation Has Its Dish: Black Bodies and Black Food in Twentieth-Century America. University of North Carolina Press, 2019.
• White, Monica M. Freedom Fighters: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

U of South Carolina P

• Bailey, Candace. Charleston Belles Abroad The Music Collections of Harriet Lowndes, Henrietta Aiken, and Louisa Rebecca McCord. University of South Carolina Press, 2019.
• Bennett, Barbara. Smoke Signals from Samarcand: the 1931 Reform School Fire and Its Aftermath. The University of South Carolina Press, 2018.
• Brannon, Rebecca, and Joseph S. Moore, editors. The Consequences of Loyalism: Essays in Honor of Robert M. Calhoon. The University of South Carolina Press, 2019.
• Cameron, Louisa Pringle. Charleston: City of Gardens. University of South Carolina Press, 2018.
• Curran, Robert Emmett. For Church and Confederacy: the Lynches of South Carolina. The University of South Carolina Press, 2019.
• David, Huw T. Trade, Politics, and Revolution: South Carolina and Britain’s Atlantic Commerce, 1730-1790. University of South Carolina Press, 2018.
• Deutsch, David. Understanding Jim Grimsley. University of South Carolina Press, 2018.
• Floyd, Minuette B. A Place to Worship: African American Camp Meetings in the Carolinas. University of South Carolina Press, 2018.
• Grady, Timothy P. and Andrew H. Myers, editors. Recovering the Piedmont Past, Volume 2: Bridging the Centuries in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1877-1941. University of South Carolina Press, 2018.
• Mangum, Bryant. Understanding Alice Adams. University of South Carolina Press, 2019.
• Ognibene, Terri Ann, and Glen Browder. South Carolina’s Turkish People: a History and Ethnology. University of South Carolina Press, 2018.
• Penrose, Nancy L. A Dream and a Chisel: Louisiana Sculptor Angela Gregory in Paris, 1925–1928. The University of South Carolina Press, 2019.
• Roberts, Giselle and Melissa Walker, editors. Southern Women in the Progressive Era: A Reader. University of South Carolina Press, 2018.
• Roper, L. H., editor. The Torrid Zone: Caribbean Colonization and Cultural Interaction in the Long Seventeenth Century. University of South Carolina Press, 2018.
• Smith, Eric C. Order and Ardor: The Revival Spiritually of Oliver Hart and the Regular Baptists in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina. University of South Carolina Press, 2018.
• Stubbs, Tristan. Masters of Violence: the Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. University of South Carolina Press, 2018.
• Taylor, Kieran Walsh. Charleston and the Great Depression: a Documentary History, 1929-1941. University of South Carolina Press, 2018.
• VanderHaagen, Sara C. Children’s Biographies of African American Women: Rhetoric, Public Memory, and Agency. University of South Carolina Press, 2018.

U of Virginia P

• Blatty, J. T. Fish Town: down the Road to Louisiana’s Vanishing Fishing Communities. University of Virginia Press, 2018.
• Clitandre, Nadége T. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. University of Virginia Press, 2018.
• Graves, Lee. Virginia Beer: a Guide from Colonial Days to Craft’s Golden Age. University of Virginia Press, 2018.
• Harless, Richard. George Washington and Native Americans: “Learn Our Arts and Ways of Life.“University of Virginia Press, 2018.
• Nelson, Louis P., and Claudrena N. Harold, editors. Charlottesville 2017: the Legacy of Race and Inequity. University of Virginia Press, 2018.
• Spencer, Hawes. Summer of Hate: Charlottesville, USA. University of Virginia Press, 2018.
• Thompson, Mary V. “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret:” George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon. University of Virginia Press, 2018.

UP of Mississippi

• Carriere, Marius M. The Know Nothings in Louisiana. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Cushman, Susan, editor. Southern Writers on Writing. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• DeShazo, Richard D., editor. The Racial Divide in American Medicine: Black Physicians and the Struggle for Justice in Health Care. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Fraunhar, Alison. Mulata Nation: Visualizing Race and Gender in Cuba. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Hilpert, John M., and Zachary M. Hilpert. Campaigns and Hurricanes: a History of Presidential Visits to Mississippi. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Hoerl, Kristen. The Bad Sixties: Hollywood Memories of the Counterculture, Antiwar, and Black Power Movements. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Horigan, Kate Parker. Consuming Katrina: Public Disaster and Personal Narrative. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Lawrence, David Todd, and Elaine J. Lawless. When They Blew the Levee: Politics, Race, and Community in Pinhook, Missouri. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Lawson, William H. No Small Thing: the 1963 Mississippi Freedom Vote. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Lechtreck, Elaine Allen. Southern White Ministers and the Civil Rights Movement. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Loza, Steven. The Jazz Pilgrimage of Gerald Wilson. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Meacham, Ellen B. Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Müller, Timo. The African American Sonnet: a Literary History. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Royals, Tom, editor. Conversations with Will D. Campbell. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Rutter, Emily Ruth. Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Sacré, Robert, editor. Charley Patton: Voice of the Mississippi Delta. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Scodari, Christine. Alternate Roots: Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Genealogy Media. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Spottswood, Richard K. The Blue Sky Boys. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Toulouse, Teresa, and Barbara C. Ewell. Sweet Spots: in-between Spaces in New Orleans. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Tucker, Jeffrey A., editor. Conversations with John A. Williams. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Vaz-Deville, Kim, editor. Walking Raddy: the Baby Dolls of New Orleans. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Waggoner, Catherine Egley, and Laura Egley Taylor. Realizing Our Place: Real Southern Women in a Mythologized Land. University Press of Mississippi, 2018.
• Wierich, Jochen, editor. Picturing Mississippi, 1817-2017: Land of Plenty, Pain, and Promise. University Press of Mississippi, 2017.

Xavier Review Press

• Bonner, Jr. Thomas. Parterre: New and Collected Poetry and Prose. Xavier Review Press, 2018.