Call for Papers: SOJ Society at the 2026 ALA Conference

Black and white portrait of American author Sarah Orne Jewett, reading from a book. Image from Literary Pilgrimages in New England to the Homes of Famous Makers of American Literature... by Edwin M. Bacon. New York: Silver, Burdett and Company, 1902: p. 129

Panel 1: Reading Jewett Again, Anew

Unlike other nineteenth-century women writers, Sarah Orne Jewett has never entirely left the shelves of libraries, academic or otherwise. Among the many interests of Jewett’s oeuvre is the history of its critical reception. More than 30 years after the paradigm-shifting collection New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs (1994), which revealed the darker side of her literary production, Jewett abides, and her texts resist the critical paradigms that we have productively (or sometimes unproductively) used to read them. As we are launching a Jewett society, this panel proposes to return to Jewett and assess how her work responds to the pressures of our present from a moment—the post-Reconstruction era to the turn-of-the century US—whose social, economic, political, and environmental challenges speak back to us. Doing so may require that we re-open Jewett’s corpus and head to her lesser-known stories, her uncollected work, her work for young readers, her poetry, her essays, her correspondence, her unpublished manuscripts. Doing so also invites us to venture into untested grounds or unfamiliar territory and read Jewett from the perspective of oceanic studies, Anthropocene studies, health humanities, disabilities studies, labor history, critical state studies, religious and post-secular studies, sensory studies… Because form matters in Jewett, this panel also invites us to read her texts up close and pay attention to their specific “cadences” and “deviant philology,” to their experimentation in genre-bending and their resistance to easy classifications (regionalism, realism, modernism). Because Jewett’s texts circulated widely, in English and in translations, this panel finally calls for rescaling Jewett’s works and assessing how they fit in a literary conversation well beyond New England and America.  

Please send your proposals (250 words) and short bios (100 words) to cecile.roudeau@gmail.com by February 15, 2026. Do not hesitate to send expressions of interest before that date.