Call for Proposals: Society for the Study of Southern Literature Conference

The South in the North conference will be held in Boston from March 10‐12, 2016. Some broad issues the conference hopes to explore under the rubric of “The South in the North” include:

SSSL’s meeting in Boston will be the first the organization has held in a location north of the Mason‐Dixon line. Ironically, in many ways this has never mattered less, as Southern literary studies’ formative focus on regional difference and distinctiveness has been retrained to take in a broader view of the South’s reciprocal material and imaginary relations with the US North, other regions, the nation, and transnational permutations of North/South dynamics. As scholars of a regional literature, we have been invigorated by innovative scholarship on the way the imagining of region figures in the imagining of nation, on the construction and consequences of Southern exceptionalism, on the continued expansion of analytical concepts of Southernness (and Northernness) in hemispheric, transatlantic, and global contexts. Now well‐established, the shift from east‐west to north‐south axes in cultural as well as economic, political, and other fields, invites continued exploration of its local, regional, national, hemispheric, and global manifestations.