CFP: 2025 SSAWW Conference
“Understanding Histories, Imagining Futures: 25 Years of SSAWW”
November 6-9, 2025 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Marriott Old City
For the 2025 SSAWW Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, we invite proposals on the theme “Understanding Histories, Imagining Futures” as we commemorate twenty-five years of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers.
“Understanding Histories, Imagining Futures” celebrates the first twenty-five years of SSAWW and its mission to promote and advance the study of American women writers through research, teaching, and publication, while also looking ahead to our plans for the future. As a community, we engage with the creative work of women across the Americas who foster change and build networks that sustain us through difficult times. The past 25 years have shown us that historical precedence cannot be assured for collective futures. As we write this, we acknowledge the tension of our current moment alongside our desire to celebrate the accomplishments of our community of activists, allies, feminists, scholars, students, teachers, and writers. We invite proposals that reflect not only on how our organization’s impact has opened up the study of so many different women writers but also how we offer new definitions for what a writer is and what a writer does. How have the writers we study experienced similar times of tension? How have such times affected our scholarship? What do alternative forms of authorship look like both then and now? How did nineteenth-century women write about, promote, and critique organizations and organizational thinking in moments of crisis? How did they mentor one another or represent mentoring relationships in their work? How do we honor our commitment to these authors, our organization, and these enterprises more broadly in the face of limited resources and structural changes within academia? And finally, how do we nourish one another and our work through such times?
Our conference embraces the capacity of creative work to engage with and represent the past and to imagine limitless futures. We welcome proposals that focus on class, disability, gender, race, and sexuality. While we encourage papers, panels, roundtables, and workshops that explore our theme, however, our 2025 conference is not restricted to them. As we return to Philadelphia, we welcome contributions that highlight the city’s women writers and artists, organizers and organizations. And as always, we encourage panel proposals from affiliated societies.
In the spirit of celebrating the past(s), present(s), and future(s) of the study of American women writers, the 2025 conference will offer numerous opportunities for community-building and personal and professional flourishing: workshops, mentoring, and brainstorming sessions for that colleagues at all stages, from graduate students to retirees; meetings with journal editors; roundtables and discussions about teaching and learning.
Proposals for panels, roundtables, and individual papers are to be submitted no later than February 28th, 2025. Details on proposal submissions can be found below. Please check the SSAWW listserv and website for updates on our 2025 Conference.
Proposals are welcome on subjects from early American literature to the literature of the present. Proposals might engage with these topics but are not limited to them:
I. The Role of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers
- for the larger academic community of scholars
- as a space of support, mentorship, alliances, and solidarity
- as a partner in recovery
- as an organization of affiliated societies
- in showcasing, supporting, and creating regional reading groups
- in honoring its founding (i.e., members, their scholarship, and their vision)
- in preparing new scholars for the future, including for the job market
II. The Implication(s) of the Society’s “AWW”
- what we mean by “American,” “Women,” and “Writers”
- how these definitions have traditionally shaped the scholarship supported by the organization
- who might be included by expanding definitions of these terms
III. The Relationship between Content and Community
- interplay between historical genealogies of women and women-identifying writers
- mentoring relationships between women authors
- explorations of the historical genealogies of SSAWW and/or our affiliate societies with a focus on the exchange across generations of scholars
IV. The “Study” and/or “Recovery” of American Women Writers
- the history of this work (finding and studying “new” pasts)
- what it means to do this work today
- the future(s) of this work
- recovery, regrounding, regrouping, reshaping
- the limits and complexities of recovery
- how the field has changed (especially in the last twenty-five years)
- why we continue to study American women writers
V. Past(s) and Future(s) in American Women’s Writing
- (re)writing the past
- understanding histories within American women’s writing
- imagining futures
VI. Future(s) of the Humanities: Public, Digital, Medical, Environmental
- digital humanities and new media
- the public humanities and engagement with local communities
- medical humanities
- environmental humanities, the anthropocene, and changing climates
VII. Teaching and Pedagogy
- AWW in the classroom
- what it means to teach in the shadow of political pressures and restrictions
VIII. Professional Development
- navigating the academic world in 2025
- how scholars respond to increasing service workloads at their institutions and in the profession
- moving into administration to enact positive change
Please send your submissions as PDFs to ssaww.conferences@gmail.com
Deadline: February 28th, 2025
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
KBS (January 11, 2025). CFP: 2025 SSAWW Conference. The Kay Boyle Society. Retrieved May 18, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/132c1





