The Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Society will sponsor a panel at the 36th Annual
Conference of the American Literature Association, May 21- 24, 2025, at the Westin
Copley Place in Boston, MA. Our focus this year will be “Freeman’s Historicisms.” The
Society welcomes submissions related to this topic, including proposals that bring
Freeman’s work into substantive conversation with that of her contemporaries.
Possibilities include:

• Freeman’s representation of regional, national, and international histories
• Freeman’s historical fiction
• Queer temporalities and historicity, including but not limited to erotohistoriography
  (E. Freeman 2010), intimate historicism (Lockwood 2015), and the queer child
  (Stockton 2009)
• Freeman’s work in relation to the constellation of nineteenth-century racial
  concepts tied to theories of history, including heredity, character, blood, legacy,
  etc.
• New historical contexts for Freeman’s works
• New archival findings that expand our understanding of Freeman’s oeuvre within
  its rich and intersecting historical contexts
  Please send proposals of no more than 250 words to Samaine Lockwood,
  jlockwo3@gmu.edu by Monday, December 2, 2024, and put MEWF ALA Proposal in the
  subject line. Conference details and information about hotel reservations are available
  through the web site of the American Literature Association, https://
  americanliteratureassociation.org/.