Society for the Study of American Women Writers
2025 Conference | 6–9 November 2025 | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
CFP: Women, Health, and the Epistolary
The December 1856 issue of The Merchant’s Magazine and Commercial Review described the mail in strikingly embodied terms, as “the blood of the country, which resembles the arterial and venous circulation of the human system” (p. 681). This metaphor foregrounds the idea that nineteenth-century letters (like blood) circulated through vast networks according to rhythmical fluctuations to sustain life. But what were these networks, whose lives were being sustained, and by what means? How might letters transfuse life and health, not only metaphoricallybut in actuality? Alternatively, how might a blockage in the flow of mail endanger the health not only of the intended recipient, but of the nation (a nation on the brink of civil war, no less)?
In the vein of this year’s conference theme, “Understanding Histories, Imagining Futures,” this panel seeks to explore how women’s letter-writing, as “alternative forms of authorship,” participates in national networks of circulation. More particularly, how do women draw on the genre affordances of letters to construct, complicate, and communicate about health? We welcome proposals that consider these questions both in the long nineteenth century and extending into present-day modes of letter-writing. Papers for this panel could engage the following topics, among others:
- Letters in periodicals or other popular print culture
- The role of letters in health reform movements
- Letter-writing under censorship, surveillance, and other carceral constraints
- Letters and literacy
- Letter-writing and materiality: archival practices, digitization, scrapbooks, etc.
- Letter writing as performative
- How letters transcend boundaries of race, class, and geography
- Letter-writing as community-building; how letters negotiate human separation
- Letters as therapeutic practice and tool, e.g., IfYoureReadingThis.org, lettersagainst.org
- Letter-writing manuals, conventions, and etiquette
- Letter-adjacent technologies (telegram, postcard, email, etc.)
Please send proposals (250–300 words) and a brief biography to Mindy Buchanan-King (mindym@email.unc.edu) and Elisabeth McClanahan Harris (elisabeth.harris@unc.edu) with “SSAWW 2025” in the subject line by February 21, 2025.