CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Thinking Continental:
Surveying, Exploring, and Inhabiting Macro Space
New scholarly collection
Editors: Susan Naramore Maher, Tom Lynch, Drucilla Wall, and O. Alan Weltzien
Indigenous cultures have, for millennia, produced a rich oral and written literature of place, one that often implies intimate connections across particular landscapes. Globally, rich traditions of environmental writing illuminate particular places. In these works, the local and the global intersect in illuminating, often poetic ways. Much ecological writing celebrates the localized place, often negotiated subjectively in what Lawrence Buell has called “the Thoreauvian pilgrimage.” On the other hand, concepts like the “butterfly effect” remind us that the localized place can have a global impact, that the microplace and macrospace intersect. And, as Ursula Heise notes, the concept of the “local” is subjective, referring even to our local group of galaxies. Her observation suggests that our notion of “nature” is too limited, typically referring only to planet Earth, when in fact nature encompasses the entire cosmos.
Thinking Continental, a volume edited by a prominent quartet of scholars and writers, seeks submissions for a collection of interdisciplinary essays and creative works that will break new ground in engaging the complexities of place, including challenges to the accepted and often unproductive perceived boundaries between the human and non-human; the concept of micro and macro space in the mapped world; and other topics that explore the movement of meaning connected to the many layers of place and being.
The collection will look at how to define these intersections. With contributions from scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars, and creative writers, Thinking Continental ranges over many questions and integrates international perspectives.
Among the salient questions that this collection will ask are: How does one envision an ecological macropoetics? How do old and new voices among storytellers, poets, and essayists chronicle and celebrate the vital connections between micro- and macrospace? How do they infuse the local with the global, the global with the local? How might geospatial analysis and digital humanities aim important new lenses onto global realities? How do deep time pathways—DNA, geological sciences, astrophysics—guide us toward a better long view of lived space? How can globally focused narrative remain personal and intimate? How might thinking continental advance bioregional agenda or address pressing issues like climate change, deforestation, industrial agriculture, species decline, heedless growth?
With a projected publication date of 2017, Thinking Continental will collect interdisciplinary voices and illuminate the multiple ways into biomes, continents, and global history.
Information for Contributors
Length of Abstract: 1-3 pages
Deadline for submission: January 15, 2015
A prospectus with accepted abstracts will be submitted to a small number of academic presses by March 1, 2015. The editors are experienced editors and scholars, whose publications and reputations are well established. We are confident in the book’s concept and its marketability. Three presses are at this point interested in the proposal.
Send Abstracts and queries via email to:
Dr Susan Naramore Maher at smaher@d.umn.edu
Or fax to:
Dean Susan Naramore Maher, College of Liberal Arts, 218-726-6386
Or mail to:
Dr. Susan Naramore Maher, College of Liberal Arts, 1208 Kirby Drive, Duluth, MN 55803
Sylvan Goldberg 
Richard 
Margaret Lundberg 
Andrew P Nelson 
Andy Meyer 
R.B. Moreno 
Nicholas Bradley 
Canadian Literature 
OSU Press 
UNM Press 
Michael Johnson 
