CFP: Afterlives of Early and Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers 

Deadline: 2/20/2025

2025 SSAWW Conference

Nov. 6-9 Philadelphia, PA

Early and nineteenth-century American women writers are hardly a thing of the past. Contemporary readers encounter them again and again in the twenty-first century, as writers and artists reanimate both these earlier works and the lives of the women who penned them. Some, including Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s 2020 poetry collection The Age of Phillis and Greta Gerwig’s 2019 Little Women adaptation, engage with formal innovations that enrich archival records or refashion canonical texts. Others, like the 2020 visual art exhibition “Kehinde Wiley: The Yellow Wallpaper,” find in the archives of American literature a frame for portraying contemporary lives. As scholars and teachers, too, we draw on historical insights to make sense of the present moment, and we can leverage our twenty-first century perspectives to illuminate the obscured contours of the past. In light of the SSAWW 2025 conference theme “Understanding Histories, Imagining Futures,” this panel will attend to the lingering presence of early and nineteenth-century American women writers within contemporary culture.

Topics may include:

• Invocations, representations, and citations of early and nineteenth-century American women writers in contemporary art and literature
• Presentist approaches to early and nineteenth-century studies scholarship and recovery
• Pedagogical methods of bringing early and nineteenth-century American women writers to bear on contemporary culture in the classroom

Please submit an abstract (250–300 words) along with a brief bio (max. 100 words) to Jess Libow (jlibow@haverford.edu) by February 20, 2025.