About the Conference

The Southern Writers/Southern Writing Conference (SW/SW) is an interdisciplinary graduate student conference, featuring both critical and creative explorations of U.S. southern culture and expression. It will be hosted by the University of Mississippi from 26-27 July 2024. 

SW/SW seeks to foster a multi-disciplinary environment, featuring graduate students, creative writers, activists, and community members with an interest in the US or Global South from all departments and fields of study. In addition to academic research presentations (papers, posters, and roundtables), we welcome creative submissions (poetry, short stories, novel excerpts, photography, film excerpts or shorts, etc.), and activist roundtables.

The work of New Southern Studies (NSS) of the early 2000s and contemporary southern studies scholarship have challenged and revisioned the field. In the Routledge Companion to the Literature of the U.S. South (2023), Kathryn McKee explains that one central premise of NSS was “the idea of the U.S. South as an invention…one that the nation would do better without.” NSS scholars theorized that "the guiding concerns and methodologies of New Southern Studies might be more durable than the [‘South’] itself." The malleability of the term and meaning of 'south' has since created something of an explosion of souths: instead of reifying the seeming monolith of the “South,” scholars have used NSS to illuminate a plethora of souths ad infinitum (queer souths, border souths, tacky souths, swamp souths, etc.).

The 27th SW/SW Conference calls for scholarship, art, and activism that asks, answers, or troubles the question: What are the many legacies that southern studies contends with today?

The conference committee invites critiques and assessments of what the study of “south(s)” and/or “southern” culture(s) looks like today–either in directly discussing 21st-century topics and/or what it means to investigate “southern” histories in contemporary scholarship. Submissions on various forms of cultural production or media from the precolonial to the modern era are welcomed, especially those that address how people reckon with legacies of violent, colonial histories and their aftermaths within the U.S. and/or Global South(s). We are including and encouraging the submissions of writing and scholarship often excluded from consideration in a former Southern Studies that had been characterized by exclusionary histories and politics and are eagerly interested in including people from all backgrounds and scholarship of all types of souths.

Extended submission deadline: Friday, March 15th, 2024