Willa Cather Special Issue

Unsettling Willa Cather’s West 

A special issue of Western American Literature 

Guest edited by Emily J. Rau 

Contact email: erau2@unl.edu or waljournal@gmail.com 

As the recently unveiled statue in National Statuary Hall and the extensive media coverage of her  150th birthday illustrate, Willa Cather endures as a powerful representative of Nebraska and the  Great Plains. She continues to be rightfully celebrated for her intimate and compassionate  portrayal of the lives of women and immigrants in the region and for her compelling life story.  However, many popular and scholarly discussions of Cather’s work still fail to reckon with her  erasure of Indigenous peoples in the Great Plains and with her embeddedness in the settler  colonial project. Recent work on Cather has begun to take up these topics and others, and this  special issue of Western American Literature will bring some of that work together in one  volume.  

We seek proposals that productively critique Cather for her silences, put her in new  conversations and contexts, and unsettle traditional readings of her representations of the US  West. Slated for publication in Summer 2025, we invite essays from new and emerging voices in  Cather studies that address one or more of the following or related topics: 

• Cather and settler colonialism  

• Cather’s treatment of Indigenous peoples in her work 

• Cather’s silences 

• Cather and other literary representations of the Great Plains 

• Ecocritical readings of Cather’s western works 

• Comparative studies of Cather’s Great Plains and Southwest works 

• Cather as a queer figure in western literature 

• Cather’s representation of immigration and diversity on the Great Plains 

Submit proposals of up to 500 words to guest editor Emily Rau at erau2@unl.edu or  waljournal@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is April 1, 2024. If a proposal is accepted,  manuscripts of 10 to 25 pages will be due October 1, 2024.  

Publication date: Summer 2025

CFP: WLA at ALA

Call for Papers for WLA’s “Gateways, Crossroads, and Turning Points to and from the West” panel at the 2024 American Literature Association Meeting (Chicago, May 23-26) 

The West is a region shaped by movement. Manifest Destiny’s call for westward expansion and popular rejoinders like “Go West, young man” have created lasting associations with the frontier, adventure, and national growth. To borrow Jodi Byrd’s phrase, this “transit of empire” also witnessed the continuous and violent encroachment onto Indigenous lands in North America and beyond. Today, cities like St. Louis and Omaha (both nicknamed “Gateway to the West”), Salt Lake City (“Crossroads of the West”), and Fort Worth (“Where the West Begins”) claim some kind of stake in narratives of western movement. But this region associated with boomtowns and boundless growth is increasingly subjected to the stark realities of climate change: increasing temperatures, drought, and fire. Broadly, this panel invites papers that consider where the West might yet be heading and at what costs. 

Proposals for presentations working outside of single disciplines are especially encouraged, as are those that embrace an expansive definition of “texts.” All proposals will be considered, but specific interest will be shown to those that address one or more of the following: 

● Cities marketed as passageways to the West: St Louis, Salt Lake City, El Paso, etc ● The Great Migration to western cities like Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, Los Angeles, and Seattle ● Forced removals and Indigenous diasporas, such as the Trail of Tears or Navajo Long Walk ● The frontier as a shifting boundary 

● Transnational connections between the West and U.S. empire 

● Effects of climate change on the Western ecosystems 

● Genre approaches to climate crisis in Western literature and film 

For consideration for this panel, please submit an abstract (250-400 words) to Travis Franks (travis.franks@usu.edu) by DECEMBER 31, 2023. Current membership with WLA is not required in order to submit a proposal, though all presenters must be current members by the time of the conference. 

The Western Literature Association is an affiliated organization of the ALA, and I will be proposing that the panel be submitted as the WLA’s guaranteed panel for the meeting. 

The American Literature Association’s 35^th Annual Conference will meet at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago from May 23^ththrough May 26^th, 2024 (Thursday through Sunday of Memorial Day weekend). For further information about the American Literature Association conference, please consult the ALA website at https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-annual-conference/

CFP: Latinx Visions (Edited Volume)

CFP 

Latinx Visions: 

Speculative Worlds in Latinx Literature, Art, & Performance 

Co-Edited by Matthew David Goodwin, Cathryn Merla-Watson, Taryne Jade Taylor, and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez 

We invite submissions for an edited volume entitled Latinx Visions: Speculative Worlds in Latinx Literature, Art, & Performance. This edited volume will feature scholarship, interviews, and reflections/manifestos engaging the burgeoning field of Latinx speculative literature, art, and performance. Submissions may engage specific works of Latinx science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative genres, as well as offer visions and theories of the field as a whole. We are particularly interested in contributions that highlight the unique political aesthetics of Latinx speculative fiction in addition to those that employ comparative and hemispheric lenses. We are also seeking a broad and diverse group of scholarly contributors, and we especially welcome submissions exploring Latinx speculative worlds in relation to Indigenous, Afro-Latinx, and Latinx Caribbean speculative fiction. Moreover, we invite essays, interviews, and reflections/manifestos dealing with, but not limited to, the genres of cyberpunk, solarpunk, utopias and dystopias, alternate histories, alien invasions, apocalypse, horror, ghosts, magic, epic fantasies, and surrealism. 

Scholarly essays should be 4,000-6,000 words, including the bibliography and notes, and should be formatted in Chicago style. Interviews, reflections, and manifestos should be no more than 2,000 words. Please also send a brief bio of no more than 200 words. 

All submissions are due by January 1, 2024. Send your submission and bio to the editors at latinxvisionsanthology@gmail.com. We plan for the edited volume to be released in 2025. Please feel free to contact the editors for further details.

Virtual Event (Idaho Women Writers)

Please join the Western Literature Association on June 6^th for a virtual reading and conversation featuring three of north Idaho’s most talented writers! Kim Barnes, Mary Clearman Blew, and Joy Passanante will share some of their work and discuss how calling Idaho—and the West—“home” shapes their writing. This online engagement event is Part I of a two-part series celebrating Idaho Women Writers. Part II will be held in person at the Fort Hall, Idaho conference in October, where CMarie Fuhrman, Stacy Boe Miller, Alexandra Teague, and Bethany Schultz-Hurst will participate in a roundtable discussion on Friday, October 13. 

Part I will be broadcast on June 6th at 3pm (PDT) / 6pm (EDT).  

See the attached flier for more information; click here to register. A Zoom link will be sent to registrants ahead of the date. 

CFP: Panel

Hello! WLA has an affiliation with the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA), which means WLA co-sponsors a guaranteed panel at the annual PAMLA conference. Please consider submitting a proposal to present on WLA’s co-sponsored PAMLA panel “Literature of the American West” at this year’s PAMLA conference in Portland, OR! Alternately, please pass this message along to anyone you know who might be interested.

The full panel description and portal for submitting abstracts can be found at https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/18925; all submissions must be proposed via the pamla.ballastacademic.com submission system (email submissions will not be accepted).

I’m happy to answer any questions you may have, otherwise thanks for considering this!

Cheers,

Anne

Anne Mai Yee Jansen, PhD (she/her)Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies & Literatures

Director of US Ethnic Studies

Diversity Intensives CoordinatorUniversity

of North Carolina at Asheville

Resignifying Space through Transformative, Multigenerational Storying

We would like to invite you to a really exciting WLA “engagement event”—an online panel titled “Resignifying Space through Transformative, Multigenerational Storying” that will take place on Thursday May 25th at 12:00-1:30 PM (Eastern Standard Time)- 6:00-7:30 PM (Madrid).

This panel is part of a larger symposium, North American Ethnic Literatures in the 21st Century: Transatlantic, Intersectional Perspectives, hosted by Universitat Jaume I, in Spain, and organized by the research group LENA (North American Ethnic Literatures in a Global Context) at Universitat de València. The panel will be chaired by Amaia Ibarrarán-Bigalondo and includes on-site presentations by Amaia, Karen R. Roybal, and Meredith Harvey that will be broadcast via MEET.

This is the link to the symposium’s official website: https://nael.uji.es

Attached, please find the invitation flyer which includes the MEET link to follow the panel on Thursday 25th. If you are near Valencia, Spain you are also welcome to attend the panel in person!

Thanks so much to Jennifer Ladino, Amaia Ibarrarán, and Mike Lemon for their help in putting this together.

If you have any questions, let me know.

Kind regards,
               Anna

********************************
Anna M. Brígido Corachán
Profesora Titular (Associate Professor)
Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemana – Universitat de València

Research group coordinator: North American Ethnic Literatures in a Global Context – https://www.uv.es/lenaval

Inter/Desert Dialogues

Join us for the second virtual roundtable of the Inter/Desert Dialogues series on Wednesday, June 14 from 3-5 pm (AZ-MST). The four-part series brings together artists, scholars, writers, activists, land managers, and others to inspire respect for deserts and the people, animals, plants, literature, art, histories, and geologies that make them up.  

Dialogue #2–Energy and Infrastructure considers deserts as sites of extraction, energy generation, infrastructure development, healing, and transformative justice. Dialogue leaders include Joni Adamson (Arizona State University), Lauren Redniss (MacArthur Fellow and Parsons School of Design), Kyoko Matsunaga (Hiroshima University), and Elizabeth Tynan (James Cook University).  

In an effort to generate active engagement, participation will be limited to 25 attendees. To join us, please submit the registration formby Monday, June 5. Participants will receive confirmation, a Zoom link, and a small collection of “desert artifacts” to review before the event. 

*Funded by a Seed Grant from Arizona State University’s Institute for Humanities Research with additional support from ASU’s Desert Humanities Initiative, Environmental Humanities Initiative, and College of Integrative Sciences and Arts 

European Western Studies

Dear scholars, educators, artists, creators, activists, and friends,

As the co-founders of the newly-created research network of the EAAS—”West of the Rest”—we would like to extend a heartfelt invitation to join our corral of scholars.

Aiming to cross-fertilize local and regional subjectivities with hemispheric and transnational critical appreciation, our network seeks to attract not only scholars of the West who are based in Europe (through the EAAS and partner organizations), but also—thanks to the network’s US-based partners—American colleagues with a view to growing an exchange ecology which is predicated on close, interdisciplinary collaboration.

You may check out the full mission statement of our network here: https://www.eaas.eu/eaas-networks/west-if-the-rest

Please also give us a “like” on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/west.oftherest.eaas

At this point, we actively solicit ideas and suggestions for collaboration, outreach, and knowledge transfer activities which are geared toward helping the network grow.

Recent and upcoming activities of network members include:

1) Agnieszka Kotwasínska introduced and led a discussion on the 2021 documentary film Bitterbrush as part of the Państwowe Muzeum Etnograficzne’s HER Docs initiative.

2) John Wills’ and Heather Wright’s highly anticipated collection Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth, and Violence in the Video Game West has recently been published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

4) Stefan Rabitsch gave a public talk titled “West of the Rest: Cowboy hats, the Sheridan-verse, and (Western) American Studies” as part of the University of Olso’s ILOS Academy.

5) Network members have organized a thematic panel—“West of the Rest: (Dis)continuities in very old, old, new, and digital Wests”—at the upcoming Biennial Conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies (NAAS) in Uppsala at the end of May. If you happen to be on-site and would like to learn more about the network, please talk to us.

Anyone who is interested in joining our “corral” of scholars of the West should contact us at west.oftherest.eaas@gmail.com. Membership is free and entirely based on voluntary participation. Please provide us with your full name, email address, institutional affiliation (if applicable), and your research interests in the American West (e.g. a few descriptive keywords/phrases).

We aim to hold our inaugural network meeting at the 2024 EAAS conference in Munich next year.

We look forward to hearing from you and having you join us on Western trails, headed in all directions.

West wishes,

The West of the Rest co-founders

Stephen Aron ⏐ The Autry Museum of the American West

Alex Hunt ⏐ West Texas A&M University

Agnieszka Kotwasínska ⏐ University of Warsaw

Patricia N. Limerick ⏐ University of Colorado Boulder

Stefan Rabitsch ⏐ University of Oslo

John Wills ⏐ University of Kent

Esther Wright ⏐ Cardiff University

Inter/Desert Dialogue

Please join us for the first virtual roundtable of the Inter/Desert Dialogue series on Wednesday, April 19 from 4-6 pm (AZ MST). The four-part series brings together artists, scholars, writers, activists, land managers, and others to inspire respect for deserts and the people, animals, plants, literature, art, histories, and geologies that make them up.  

Dialogue #1–Desert Attunements considers how humans attune themselves to deserts in the broadest sense, including via sensory engagements, land management practices, attachment to place and ancestral homelands, sound mapping, and other modes of intimate human-environmental interaction. Dialogue leaders include Celina Osuna (ASU), Serena Ferrando and collaborators (ASU), Cam Juárez (Saguaro National Park), and Libby Robin (Australian National University).  

In an effort to generate active engagement, participation in Dialogue #1 will be limited to 25 attendees. To be considered, please email your name, position, affiliation, and a brief statement of interest (100 words or less) to InterDesertDialogues@gmail.com by April 5. Participants will be sent a Zoom link and a small collection of “desert artifacts” to review before the event. 

*Funded by a Seed Grant from Arizona State University’s Institute for Humanities Research with additional support from ASU’s Desert Humanities Initiative, Environmental Humanities Initiative, and College of Integrative Sciences and Arts 

Call for Papers (critical anthology)

The Llaneros: The Ethnic Mexican Southern Great Plains, 1540-1880

The Llaneros collection seeks to correct a historical gap and cultural silencing of the ethnic Mexican and Spanish-speaking presence and influence on the Southern Great Plains region from the time of Coronado’s journey to Quivira until the cattle ranching era. We seek essays on the subjects of plains indigenous and genizaro/Hispanic relationships; lifeways and economics including trade, hunting, farming, and grazing; cultural relationships to landscape and animals in the region; topics related to ethnic removals and historical silencing in the region; and other cultural activities in areas of present-day eastern New Mexico, northwest Texas, southwest Kansas, southeast Colorado, and western Oklahoma. This project is supported by the West Texas A&M NEH Forgotten Frontera grant for Hispanic Serving Institutions. Please send 500 word abstracts to Alex Hunt. (ahunt@wtamu.edu) by May 1, 2023.