Society for the Study of
Southern Literature 2026

Society for the Study of Southern Literature (SSSL) 
2026 Biennial Conference: Building Spaces of Freedom
28-31 March 2026
Fisk University, Nashville, TN

Panel Proposal: “Reckoning with Faulkner’s Civil Rights Legacy”
Organized by the William Faulkner Society

William Faulkner’s complicated and contradictory relationship with civil rights has sparked much debate in the field. Faulkner’s oeuvre, from his short stories, novels, screenwriting, essays, and speeches, provides countless examples of his criticism of
white supremacy, southern race relations, slavery, and segregation. Yet, as the Civil Rights movement built momentum in the 1950s, Faulkner adopted a more regressive stance, often apologizing for the south’s opposition to integration. In his 1956 Life article, “Letter to a Northern Editor,” Faulkner condemns the “forces outside the South which would use legal or police compulsion” to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education
ruling that “separate but equal” was illegal. Admitting that he does not “believe [integration by force] will work,” Faulkner begs civil rights activists and federal authorities to “‘Go slow now. Stop for a time, a moment.” Moreover, in his 1956 The Reporter interview with Russell Warren Howe, Faulkner speaks for Black Mississippians suggesting that he has known them “all my life. . . I know how they feel,” claiming that they think poorly of the Civil Rights Movement as “trouble.” Such moments reveal
profound tensions within Faulkner’s racial politics and that his own imagination could not fully escape the limits of his historical moment.

In line with SSSL’s conference theme, “Building Spaces of Freedom,” the William Faulkner Society (WFS) seeks submissions for a guaranteed session panel that investigates the relationship between William Faulkner and civil rights. The WFS invites papers about Faulkner (biography, politics, philosophy, relationships, etc.) and his oeuvre as they relate to themes, theories, and/or ethics of civil rights and racial equality.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Faulkner the public figure; the literary giant; the representative of the US South; his evolving political identity
• His correspondence with other writers, leaders, intellectuals, activists, or politicians.
• Themes in his oeuvre, including:
• Progressive sentiments, politics, stances, rhetoric, ethics.
• Lost cause, pro-segregation, gradualist, or other regressive sentiments, stances, rhetoric, ethics.
  • Civil rights discourse.
  • Race relations, racial uplift, racial violence.
  • Interracial relationships, kinship, intimacy.
  • Representation, especially of Black people, agency, autonomy, and/or resistance.
  • Education, progress, regression.
  • Civil unrest, protest, organizing, placemaking.
  • Federal, state, and local politics or activism.
  • The role of law, policing, and/or (extra)legal violence.
  • Space, place, segregation.
  • Memory, nostalgia, historical revisionism.
  • Teaching Faulkner’s complex legacy; teaching Faulkner in context of Civil Right history.
  • Ethical considerations for teaching, editing, publishing on, and/or curating Faulkner’s oeuvre.

Please send a 300-500 word abstract and a short bio (150 words max) to the William Faulkner Society by Tuesday 30th Dec. 2025.

Modern Language Association 2026

Modern Languages Association (MLA)
2026 Convention: Family Resemblances
8-11 January 2026
Fairmont Royal York, Toronto, Canada

Guaranteed Session: “Faulkner’s Families / Family in Faulkner”

Featuring papers by Connor Bennet, Nicholas Adler, Srimati Mukherjee, and Jennifer Cranfill

American Literature Association 2026

ALA Annual Conference
20-23 May 2026
Palmer House
17 East Monroe Street
Chicago, IL 60603

Panel Proposal: Faulkner and Colors
Organized by The William Faulkner Society

In Faulkner’s writing, colors constitute an artistic and compositional device through which aesthetic and poetic effects are achieved; they engender motifs loaded with symbolism. The transposition of colors onto the written page allows Faulkner to fully engage our senses, in particular, the visual, thus emphasizing the connection between Faulkner’s work and the visual arts. More generally, rendering colors with words raises questions of (un)translatability, ekphrasis, and interdisciplinary vocabularies. In turn, the charged historical context in which Faulkner wrote reflects upon his representation of skin colors and racial representation.

This call thus seeks papers that examine William Faulkner’s treatment of colors from various perspectives, including but not limited to:

• Faulkner’s engagement with visual arts: the Impressionists, decadent and aesthetic movement, painting, film, photography,
• Faulkner’s drawings and use, or lack thereof, of color
• Color and race
• Color and the body
• Colorblindness and visual sensory experience
• Faulkner in color, i.e., through paintings, colorized photographs
• Color on the page i.e., the color coded Folio edition of The Sound and the Fury
• Describing color, translating colors

Interested participants should submit abstracts of 250-350 words and a brief biographical statement (100 words) to the William Faulkner Society by Thursday 15 Jan. 2026.