CFP: “Monuments and Racial Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century American Poetry”

I am seeking papers for a proposed Special Session at the 2025 MLA Convention in New Orleans, January 9-12.

Please see the description below. If you’re interested, please email a 200-word paper proposal and a 100-word biography detailing your expertise and scholarship to me at elissa.zellinger@ttu.edu by Monday, 3/18. Thanks for considering it!

“Monuments and Racial Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century American Poetry” examines poems written about monuments erected in the nineteenth-century United States. While scholars have extensively discussed the racist and racialized imagery of these physical monuments, considerably less attention has been paid to their supporting literature—the dedication programs, speeches, letters of support and, crucially, occasional poems surrounding their unveiling. This panel will focus on commemorative poems as endeavors to correct the institutional forms of racism encoded within the monuments and, in so doing, change the meaning of what audiences to the memorials “see.” Through attention to such occasional poems, the panel hopes to make evident how memorialization in the United States always has a raced and racialized rationale.