CFP for the Modernist Studies Association 2024 Annual Conference
Theme: Migration
The MSA 2024 conference on Migration, carried over from 2021, aims to highlight the creativity, energy, and inspiration that migration has brought to Chicago’s modernist culture, and also the racialized discrimination and persecution that confronted Indigenous populations, African American migrants, and immigrant populations in Chicago and other northern and western destinations. The layered history of Chicago tells a series of stories of forced removals, relocations, and displacements. The city is situated within the original homelands of the Council of the Three Fires, the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa, who were forced to relocate west of the Mississippi after the 1833 Treaty of Chicago. Under the 1956 Indian Relocation Act, Chicago became a central destination for relocated Indigenous people and communities. It was also a major destination during the Great Migration, the mass exodus of African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the industrial centers of the North from 1916-1970. Alongside such histories, the theme asks us to consider more broadly the roles and relations of deterritorialization, exile, and diaspora in literary and artistic production.
We invite participants to understand migration as a capacious term, enabling new conversations about forced and coerced relocation, the Great Migration, immigrants and the making of the city, migration from abroad, the current global migration crisis, and the impact of these demographic movements on modernist innovation in literature, drama, music, art, architecture, and design in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Taken metaphorically, the theme of migration also speaks to questions of translation, transmission, transmediality, transnationalism, transgenderism, transraciality, transhistoricism, transcription, transference, and transgression.
The 2024 conference will feature plenary speakers, film screenings, excursions, organized panels, seminars, roundtables, workshops, and streams of interdisciplinary panels arranged by the MSA’s Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and the local organizing committee.
Although the Chicago conference was postponed in 2021, previously accepted panels and papers will not be carried over, and presenters will need to submit new proposals. The conference organizers for MSA Chicago 2024 invite proposals for:
Seminars (due March 15, 2024) Workshops (due March 15, 2024) Panels (due April 5, 2024) Roundtables (due April 5, 2024) Individual Papers (due April 5, 2024)
Call for Seminar Proposals
Seminars are a central feature of the MSA conference. They are longer sessions of no more than 12 participants, designed to generate lively exchange and facilitate future collaborations. Each participant writes a brief position paper (5-7 pages) that is pre-circulated and read by all participants prior to the conference. Participants sign up for seminars on a first-come, first-served basis when registering for the conference.
Seminar Topics: There are no limits on topics, but past experience has shown that the more clearly defined the topic and the more guidance provided by the leader, the more productive the ensuing discussion. “Clearly defined” should not be confused with “narrow,” as extremely narrow seminar topics tend to exclude many potential participants. To review past seminar topics, go to the Conference Archives on the MSA website, click the link to a prior conference, and then click on “Conference Schedule” or “Conference Program.” You will find seminars listed along with panels and other events.
Click here to submit Seminar Proposals by Friday March 15, 2024. Please provide a 300-word description of the seminar purpose and format. Seminar leaders’ bios are limited to 100 words.
Call for Workshop Proposals
Workshops can take the form of discussions, presentations, and hands-on demonstrations. Past workshops have focused on topics such as collaboration, book making, publishing, teaching, the job market, mid-career challenges and opportunities, research and the liberal arts college, and alternative/non-academic jobs, and how best to ensure the future of the profession. Participation in a workshop does not preclude participation in other aspects of the conference.
Workshops are participatory in format and can be either 90 or 120 minutes in length. They may be led by one person or by a panel of experts. Participants will register for workshops at the same time as conference registration.
Click here to submit Workshop Proposals by Friday March 15, 2024. Please include a 300-word description of the workshop purpose and format. Participants’ bios are limited to 100 words.
Call for Panel Proposals
Panels are designed to expand research and debate on a topic or theme and present a clear rationale for the papers’ collective goal. Keep in mind that topics are not limited to the conference theme. Please be sure to characterize in your proposal what each paper contributes individually and how it fits into a cohesive session.
We encourage interdisciplinary panels and generally discourage panels on single authors. In order to allow for discussion, preference will be given to panels with three participants (20 minutes each), though panels of four will be considered (15 minutes each). Panels composed entirely of participants from a single department at a single institution are not likely to be accepted. The MSA encourages panels comprising scholars from a diverse range of institutions and of various ranks, including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, contingent faculty, and independent scholars. Please elect an appropriate chair for your panel if possible and include this information as part of your proposal. Otherwise, the program committee wil help recruit a chair for you.
Click here to submit Panel Proposals by Friday April 5, 2024. Please include a list of participants, paper titles, and a 300-500-word abstract of the session. Author bios are limited to 100 words.
Call for Roundtable Proposals
All topics will be considered for roundtable discussions. Unlike panels, which generally feature a sequence of 15-20-minute talks followed by questions, roundtables gather a group of participants around a shared concern in order to generate discussion among the participants and with the audience. Instead of delivering full-length papers, presenters are asked to deliver short position statements (5-8 minutes) that respond to questions distributed in advance by the organizer, or to take turns responding to prompts from the moderator, or take a more experimental approach to the format. The bulk of the session should be devoted to discussion. No paper titles are listed in the program, only the names of participants and an abstract describing the goals of the session.
Please bear in mind these guidelines:
Roundtables may feature as many as 6 speakers but are more likely to be accepted if they include 4 or 5. Roundtable organizers should discourage participants from writing formal papers and to be as brief and concise as possible, ideally speaking for no more than 5 minutes at a time in order to facilitate discussion. We particularly welcome roundtables that include participants from multiple disciplines, and we discourage roundtables on single authors. The MSA encourages roundtables comprising scholars from a diverse range of institutions and of various ranks, including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, contingent faculty, and independent scholars. Roundtables composed entirely of participants from a single department at a single institution are not likely to be accepted. Roundtable organizers should identify a chair and include this information with their proposals.
Click here to submit Roundtable Proposals by Friday April 5, 2024. Please include a list of participants and a 300-500-word abstract of the session. Participants’ bios are limited to 100 words each.
Call for Individual Paper Proposals for MSA Panel Streams
Individual paper proposals must speak directly to one of this year’s streams, described below. The MSA program committee and MSA Special Interest Groups in charge of the streams will compose panels and roundtables from the individual papers.
Click here to submit individual Paper Proposals for panel streams by April 5, 2024. Please include a 300-word abstract of the paper. Author bios are limited to 100 words.
Modernism and the Environment Stream: Migration, Modernization, and Environmental Change
This stream invites papers on the intersections of migration, modernization, and environmental change in modernist literatures and aesthetics. How do modernist aesthetic practices register, illuminate, or obfuscate the role of environmental degradation and injustice in human migrations of the long twentieth century? How do the environmental aesthetics of migrant or transnational authors enrich or unsettle Eurocentric modernist frameworks? How do modernist ideologies, infrastructures, or aesthetics inform current representations of climate migration? How has ecocritical modernist scholarship migrated across media and beyond traditional methodologies to engage with environmental history, decolonial studies, or critical studies of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and beyond?
Modernism and Film Stream: Cinema and Modernism
The advent of cinema coincided with the rise of modernism in the arts; yet film historians and modernists have generated their own genealogies of the modern grounded in different, sometimes conflicting theoretical and historical traditions. Informed by this interdisciplinary background,the Film and Modernism stream will explore the history and theory of cinema through its interconnections with other media while remaining anchored in the aesthetics of moving images and the generic specificity of film art.
Critical Race Studies Stream: Displacement, Transplantation, and Finding Home
We seek to demonstrate the ways in which people of color and colonized peoples have resisted white supremacist “un-homing” and found agency in constructing new homes and forging new communities. How does modernism reflect the historical and contemporary experiences of coerced migration for indigenous, Black, and colonized peoples? How do writers, artists, and thinkers from marginalized communities depict the reclaiming of original homelands, imagine the formation of new homelands, the generation of–and reconstruction of–communities and kinships, and conceptualize the “home,” “homelessness,” and “re-homing”?
Modernism and Pedagogy Stream
We invite papers that address pedagogical concerns: approaches to teaching modernist texts in all types of courses (literature surveys; first-year writing; basic writing; modernist novel, etc.); how modernist studies connects to other disciplines in the classroom, such as creative writing, composition studies, or women's & gender studies, to name a few; the pedagogies in and of modernist texts/artists; as well as modernism’s place(s) in the history of pedagogy/education. We are also very interested in revealing the connection between pedagogy and scholarship -- how do we articulate this relationship? Lastly, we hope papers will address the lived conditions of our teaching labor, with institutional pressures and constraints both demanding creativity in our pedagogy as it potentially creates limits.
Intersectional Feminist and Queer Praxis Stream: Queer, Trans, and Feminist Intersections + Interventions
This stream will feature papers, panels, and other presentations exploring the relationship among feminism, queer studies, and modernism. Of particular interest are examinations of how queer studies and feminism intersect and intervene within modernist studies in a moment when such approaches are under surveillance, threat, and attack. Possible topics may include new readings of key feminist, queer, and/or trans modernist figures and works; queer, trans, and/or feminist contributions that revisit and revitalize more traditional texts; methodologies and theoretical approaches informed by feminist, queer, and/or trans positionalities and politics; and embodied queer, trans, and/or feminist representations within modernist studies and/or the academy.
Chicago Stream: Modernism/Modernity's Chicago
This stream invites papers that deal with any aspect of modernism or modernity as it relates to the midwestern metropolis. Home to continually new waves of migrants, Chicago was (and is) a place marked by constant change and multitudinous movements. As the birthplace of important modernist magazines like Poetry and The Little Review, early 20th-century Chicago was at the center of literary and artistic innovations in music, art, theatre, film, activism, and architecture -- and attracted well-known figures such as Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Charlie Chaplin, Ida B. Wells, Jane Addams, Floyd Dell, and Frank Lloyd Wright, who all lived and worked in Chicago for parts of their careers. Papers for this stream may consider the importance of Chicago as a site of modernist transformation and exchange, but also as a locus of modernity. From skyscrapers to settlement houses, from railroads to community organizations, the city of Chicago has been shaped by infrastructures of modernity, which have in turn exerted an influence on city inhabitants, writers, and artists alike. Approaches to this stream could derive from many directions, including aesthetics, science, journalism, testimony, psychology, economy, urban planning, public health, and sociology.
Participation
So as to involve as many people as possible as active participants, the MSA limits appearances on the program to one in each category below:
Seminar, either as leader or as participant Panel or roundtable, as participant (you may also chair a different panel or roundtable)
In other words, you may organize a seminar, present a paper on a panel, and register for a workshop, but you may not present two papers on panels or roundtables.
MSA rules do not allow panel or roundtable organizers to chair their own session if they are also presenting a paper or making substantive remarks in the session; the session chair must be someone who is otherwise not presenting.
All who attend the MSA conference must be members of the organization with dues paid for 2024-25 (MSA membership runs from July 1 until June 30 each year) and with any past dues paid in full. For information on MSA, please check the Association website.
Conference Access
The MSA is committed to ensuring that all conference registrants will be able to participate in conference events. We ask that all conference attendees give thought to questions of access and work with the conference organizers to create an event that is welcoming to the entire community of participants. Participants will upload copies of their papers to a secure drive prior to the conference to ensure equal access to materials for all participants.
Statement on Inclusion
The Modernist Studies Association supports the rights and dignity of all persons associated with our organization and conference. We hold that inclusivity, diversity, access, and equality are critical to the strength of our organization and the effectiveness of our academic mission. In the spirit of maintaining a welcoming and inclusive organization, we urge our participants to use individuals’ preferred names and pronouns when introducing speakers and in citing their work or ideas.
Contact Information
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