Theme: Infrastructure
Boston, October 9-12, 2025
As Modernist Studies returns to Boston in 2025, we have centered on the theme of “Infrastructure” for our annual conference. Infrastructure highlights the organizational systems and resources—whether material, cultural, or affective—that underpin, connect, and define the places we live, the work we do, and the texts we study. We invite participants to understand infrastructure as a capacious term, breaking new ground for conversations about the construction and constructions of modernism’s literature, drama, music, art, architecture, design, and even its own periodicity. Papers on topics or issues outside this conceptual framework are also welcome.
As a local topic, infrastructure in Boston gestures to more than the infamously executed Big Dig. More seminally, it illuminates the palimpsest of our current urban ecosystem upon the traditional, ancestral, and unceded land of the Pawtucket and Massachusett First Nations. These Nations lived in villages that went from what is now Salem in the north, to Plymouth on the South Coast, and west towards Worcester. They were decimated in a 1616 plague, and then further displaced by the ensuing waves of European settlers. In the name of infrastructure improvements, a more recent displacement and reshaping of Boston took place with the West End Renewal project in the 1950s and ’60s, razing a neighborhood that had been home to a vibrant and politically active Black community in the early 19th century and an increasingly diverse immigrant community into the 20th century. And yet infrastructure also reminds us of the foundational nature of stories about place and people; the Massachusett tribe writes that they “continue to survive as Massachusett people because we have retained the oral tradition of storytelling just as our ancestors did.” Infrastructure recalls Boston’s role as the first publishing center of the United States and as an originary site of literary, educational, and political communities and institutions.
More broadly, we hope that discussion of material infrastructure like buildings and bridges, public utility grids, systems of technological communication, roads and highways, shipping and trade routes, large-scale environmental interventions, and climate-control schemes will interface with materialist analysis of symbolic infrastructures. Such infrastructure include networks of collaboration (i.e., salons, bookstores, magazines), broader economic development, imperial and post-imperial order, and intellectual exchange on both intimate and anonymous registers that impacted twentieth- and twenty-first century cultural production. It can be taken even more abstractly. Infrastructure speaks to questions of affective patterns, psychic organization and brain structures, historical configurations of gender, sexuality, and race, media ecologies, and the infrastructural affordances of aesthetic form as such.
The 2025 conference will feature keynote speakers, 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.
The conference organizers for MSA Chicago 2025 invite proposals for:
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 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, 2025. 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, 2025. 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, 2025. 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, 2025. 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, 2025. Please include a 300-word abstract of the paper. Author bios are limited to 100 words.
Modernism & Environment Stream
Infrastructure and Cultures of Environmental Modernity
This stream invites papers that explore the ecological dimensions of modernist infrastructures, whether material, social, or textual. From built environments and ecosystems to cyber & neural networks, energy grids to social institutions and their attendant discourses, infrastructure is key to the interconnected naturecultures that we all inhabit and in which our aesthetic objects of study emerge and circulate. How might environmental criticism enrich infrastructural understandings of modernism as entangled in and resistant to climate crisis and environmental injustice? How do modernist texts draw attention to the imbrication of modernist infrastructures with more-than-human world-making? How might modernist forms, aesthetics, and narratives provide environmentally fertile ground for understanding our infrastructural inheritance, as well as for the mapping of future systems and structures that enable more just and sustainable forms of collective life?
Modernism and Film Stream
Many modernist artists and theorists, as well as scholars of modernism today, have thought with and through film. The Film and Modernism stream invites conference participants to take up that history: to consider how cinema has shaped and been shaped by art and politics in the modernist period and to think methodologically about what the fields of modernist studies and film/media studies might teach each other. In keeping with this year’s conference theme, we especially welcome proposals that consider the ways in which infrastructures—material, social, theoretical, ephemeral—undergird film productions, film cultures, and the very activity of cinematic thought.
Modernism and Pedagogy Stream
The Modernism and Pedagogy SIG seeks papers that reflect modernist scholar-teachers coping with the infrastructure (or lack thereof) in the universities we teach in.
We'd like to hear about adapting pedagogy to classrooms or other spaces that are unconventional due to deferred maintenance; "doing more with less" teaching methods (potentially in terms of library resources being cut, department budgets for photocopies ending, etc.); curriculum innovations that underscore the need to widen one's teaching specialties; etc.
We are also hoping for success stories: unexpected adaptations in infrastructure — for example, assignments; peer observations or connections; organizing — that have led to a positive difference; a replacement in infrastructure; or, if possible...subversions, workarounds, solidarities.
And, as ever, we invite papers that address more general pedagogical concerns: teaching modernist texts across course types (literature surveys; first-year writing; basic writing; the modernist novel; etc.); modernist studies’ connections to other disciplines in the classroom, such as creative writing, composition studies, or women's & gender studies; (modernist) pedagogy and/as (modernist) 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
Feminist, Queer, and Trans Structures + Infrastructures
The IFQP SIG stream seeks papers, panels, and other presentations that explore the structural relationships among modernism and feminist, queer, and trans studies. Of particular interest are examinations of the way that the formal systems of queer and trans studies and feminism intersect and intervene within modernist studies. In other words, we might employ Lauren Berlant’s claim that "infrastructure is not identical to system or structure" but is "defined by the movement or patterning of social form" to ask: what historical, political, and theoretical affordances have resulted from the relationship between and among modernist studies, feminism, queer theory, and trans studies? In line with the conference theme of infrastructure, the IFQP SIG is particularly interested in the construction and constructions of modernism’s literary and cultural production in light of feminist, queer, and trans readings of structures and systems as well as the socialities that are materialized in and through those structures. 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.
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 2025-26 (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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