For the 2015 Triennial Conference of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, Nov. 4-8, 2015, Sheraton Society Hill, Philadelphia, PA., the conference organizers welcome proposals on any topic related to the study of American women writers, broadly conceived. The strength of the society is rooted in the dynamic ideas and research accomplishments of its members, which the 2015 conference continues to facilitate and honor. As in the past, however, we would also like to take the opportunity that the conference affords to create discussions and conversations around a shared theme, which we have designated as Liminal Spaces, Hybrid Lives.

The terms liminality and hybridity are most familiar in post-colonial contexts; however, they suggest critical concepts that draw on multiple disciplines and privilege inclusion. Often informed by notions of crossing, intersectionality, transition, and transformation, these terms contest exclusionary practices involving class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sex, among other variables. The word “limen,” from which liminality derives, designates threshold. The threshold functions simultaneously as both an obstructive barrier and an enticing opening for the entry into unknown, perhaps unknowable states that invite exploration. Both spatial and temporal, the liminal is a site of in-betweenness enabling non-normative perspectives. It is a site where difference becomes encounter as well as a location that resists assimilation while simultaneously allowing for the dynamic possibilities of fusion that hybridity embraces and articulates.

With the theme of “Liminal Spaces, Hybrid Lives,” the 2015 Triennial SSAWW Conference aims to celebrate the multiplicity of American women’s writing across a longstanding literary tradition that continues to be dynamic in contemporary times. The conference theme of liminality and hybridity, and the wide range of implications and meanings that these expansive concepts imply, will facilitate a process of encounters, engagements, and conversations within, between, among, and across the rich polyphony that constitutes the creative acts of American women. Thus, through a focus on liminality and hybridity, the 2015 SSAWW conference hopes to present the varied ways in which women, as critics, dramatists, educators, essayists, journalists, oral storytellers, poets, novelists, short story writers, and practitioners of both older and emerging forms, invent and reinvent the American literary and cultural landscape.

Possible topics involving the conference themes may include but are not limited to such keywords and ideas as:

Alienation and/or disillusionment as states of in-betweenness

Borders and peripheries

Boundaries between/within the built environment and/or the natural environment

Child, adult and blurring boundaries

Collaboration

Crossings

Cross-species encounters: human and animal relationships

Horizontal and/or vertical paradigms of social constructs

The hyphen

In between public and private or the semi-private, the semi-public

In between resilience and vulnerability

Historical constructions of space, place, home

Liminal spaces in the home

Immigration and/or citizenship

Inside and outside—the academy, the canon, etc.

Leadership from, on, within the margins

The mainstream and/or the subversive

The margin and/or the center

Mutations

Obscurity and celebrity

Outliers

Porosity

Pressures of normalization

Technology and the human

Transatlantic

Transcontinental

Transgender

Transgressions

The conference organizers welcome and encourage complete session submissions as well as individual paper abstract submissions. The cfp for complete panel submissions can be posted on the SSAWW website in addition to other venues of your choice. For posting on the SSAWW website, please send cfp to: ssaww2015.web@gmail.com.

Please direct questions about the conference to: ssaww2015.query@gmail.com

Submissions are electronic: ssaww2015.submit@gmail.com

Please see full submission guidelines and panel cfps on the SSAWW website: http://ssawwnew.wordpress.com/2015-conference/

We look to the 2015 conference to carry forward past achievements, and to create present and future opportunities for the growth of the Society and all its members with the understanding that inclusivity, in all its forms, intellectual rigor, and supportive outlooks are the responsibility of the entire membership. We look forward to hearing from you and receiving your submissions.

Conference Organizers:

Rita Bode (rbode@trentu.ca), VP of Organizational Matters and Conference Director

Dick Ellis (r.j.ellis@birmingham.ac.uk), President

Beth L. Lueck (lueckb@uww.edu), Associate Conference Director

Miranda Green-Barteet (mgreenb6@uwo.ca), Conference Program Coordinator

Leslie Allison (leslie.allison@temple.edu), Conference Grad Assistant

Ricke-Ann Legleitner (rickie.legleitner@bhsu.edu), Conference Grad Assistant