Deadline: Jan 15, 2025
Contact: Shealeen Meaney, Russell Sage College
Email: meanes@sage.edu
ALA 2025 Society for the Study of American Travel Writing CFP
CALL FOR PAPERS – Deadline, January 15, 2025
Society for the Study of American Travel Writing
American Literature Association 36th Annual Conference
The Westin Copley Place, Boston, MA
May 21-24, 2025
The Society for the Study of American Travel Writing (SSATW) seeks proposals for two panels at the American Literature Association’s 36th annual conference in Chicago, IL May 23-25, 2024.
Panel One: Blue Journeys: Water, Ecology, and Travel
Recent work in the anthropocenic blue humanities raises new questions about the human relationship to, interdependence with, and impact on aquatic environs and their inhabitants. From water cures to sea voyages of “exploration” to contemporary adventure tours, travelers have always sought out and written about watery climes. For this panel we invite scholarship that engages with questions of ecology, ethics, agency, well-being, and other issues related to travel literature about blue spaces. Proposals on any region and period of American literature welcome.
Panel Two: Travel Writing: Borders, Genres, and Futures
What is travel writing, anyway? Despite the constraints of pandemic life, 2021’s Best American Travel Writing series edited by Padma Lakshmi richly explored contemporary travel, covering everything from quarantine on the Diamond Princess cruise ship to a working journey through California’s “Weed Country.” However, it was to be the last annual installment of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s successful 22-year series, and it raises questions about both the future of travel writing and about the parameters of the genre itself. For this panel we invite scholarship that engages with travel as genre, motif, structure, and metaphor, opening the borders of travel writing itself as well as work on the future of the genre. Proposals on any region and period of American literature welcome.
Please submit abstracts of approximately 300 words no later than January 15, 2025 to Shealeen Meaney (meanes@sage.edu). Early submissions are welcome.
Posted on November 19, 2024
