CFP: American Women Writers and the Civic Humanities (Deadline: 2/7/2025)

2025 SSAWW Conference

Nov. 6-9 Philadelphia, PA

Over the past year, initiatives addressing the need for dialogue across difference have sprung up on campuses across the country. While Jonathan Haidt’s “Constructive Dialogue Institute” is perhaps one of the most well-known, numerous others have garnered attention in the last year, including programs that use the Ford Foundation’s “Difficult Dialogues” model, BridgeUSA chapters that train college students to lead discussions on hot topics, Braver Angels events that focus on civil discourse, and smaller projects like American University’s “Disagree with a Professor” series and Columbia University’s “Listening Tables.” The proliferation of these programs suggests that we’ve reached a tipping point in U.S. culture, moving from laments about our polarization and the echo chambers that feed it to pragmatic efforts to do something about these problems. While this seems like a promising shift, one can’t help but note the absence of the humanities in most of these campus initiatives. This absence prompts the question: what can the humanities offer these efforts to get people talking about difficult issues and across ideological difference? 

This roundtable will address this broad question through the specific lens of literary studies. How can the study of American women writers build new kinds of engagement—with each other, across difference, and in our communities? How can the practices of the literature classroom create generative forms of connection, conversation, and collaboration with our wider publics, ones that forge healthier democratic cultures? And how can these practices help us translate the value of higher education to an increasingly skeptical public? This work might be best described as that of the civic humanities—different from civic engagement in its attention to humanistic content and practices, on the one hand, and more specific in its civil objectives than the more diffuse field of public humanities, on the other. This roundtable seeks to explore how thinking and teaching with American women writers can inform the civic humanities, and by extension, how the civic humanities might offer new routes and methods for engaging polarization, isolation, and the disconnect between higher education and the public today. 

Possible roundtable contributions might include (but are certainly not limited to):

• Sharing projects, either completed or in-progress, that connect the study or teaching of American women writers to local communities or public audiences

• Explorations of how American women writers define, critique, or contribute to democratic cultures, from previous eras or today

• Sharing grant projects, undergraduate research initiatives, or other program- and infrastructure-building initiatives for supporting public literary studies

• Successful (or not so successful) pedagogical experiments in building civic engagement using American women writers

• Considerations of how the study of American women writers can help universities translate the value of higher education to wider publics

To leave time for plenty of discussion, each roundtable participant should prepare ~8 min. of remarks. Send a paper title and 150-250 word proposal, along with contact information and a brief bio (~60 words) to Jen McDaneld (mcdaneld@up.edu) by 2/7/25. (Turnaround will be less than one week, giving contributors plenty of time to also submit directly to SSAWW.)