Call for Papers: “Reorientations: The British Woman Writer and Antiracist Thought”

For its virtual 2021 annual conference, the British Women Writers Association is pleased to announce “Reorientations: The British Woman Writer and Antiracist Thought.” The pandemic has encouraged us to reorient and significantly scale back the conference for a virtual meeting in 2021. We hope to return to a traditional conference format in 2022. This year, we are planning a several-day event from June 1-4 over Zoom. We will open the 2021 conference with a retrospective discussion of teaching over the last year; the related call for shorter flash papers appears below.  Across days two and three, we will have two panels of three plenary speakers each examining women of color and innovative approaches to archival materials in the Revolutionary and Victorian periods. On the fourth and final day of the conference, we will discuss Common Reads from contemporary Black writers who are reorienting our relationship to the archives on which we work. The Common Read is an opportunity to stage virtually the kind of fellowship that makes BWWC so special; we are excited to discuss with you both Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis (2020) and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Marys Seacole (2019).  For the opening day of the conference, the organizing committee is excited to welcome proposals for short flash papers of 5 to 8 minutes on virtual and/or antiracist teaching during the pandemic. How have our pedagogies adapted to the emergencies of the pandemic and the deaths of Black citizens like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor? What texts, assignments, and other pedagogical strategies have worked (or fell short) for you? How have the catastrophes of the last year invited us to reimagine our disciplines, our archives, and our courses?  Please find the CFP online at 2021BWWC.wordpress.com and note that the deadline for proposals is March 15, 2021.