The Society will be putting on two exciting panels at this year’s American Literature Association meeting in Chicago, IL.
Thursday, May 23, 10 to 11:20 a.m.
Session 2-L
Antebellum Reckonings with the Plantationocene (Salon 8)
Organized by the William Gilmore Simms Society
Chair: Sam Lackey, Great Basin College
1. “Saproxylic History; or It was Over before It Started: The Historical Romance and The Plantationocene,” Joe T. Carson, Longwood University
2. “William Gilmore Simms and the Supernatural: Cultural, Magical, and Religious Aspects of the Edisto River Valley Plantations,” Dylan Kobus, University of South Carolina
3. “’It was what we call plantation manners which drove peaceable forgiving New England to emancipation without phrase’: Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Gilmore Simms, and the competing ideologies of civilization in the plantationocene,” Michael C. Weisenburg, University of South Carolina
Thursday, May 23, 11:30 a.m. to 12:50 p.m.
Session 3-L
New Directions in William Gilmore Simms Scholarship (Salon 8)
Organized by the William Gilmore Simms Society
Chair: John Miller, Longwood University
1. “Harboring the Past, Materializing the Future: Traumatic Erasure and Material Reconstruction in Simms’s The Cassique of Kiawah,” Kathleen Crosby, Elon University
2. “The Historical Knowledge and the Predicament of South: Simms’s Revolutionary Novels and his Advocacy of ‘Americanism,’” Mei Xiaohan, Fudan University
3. “’Of course, every one knows what is meant by a barbacue’: Simms and the Public Ritual of BBQ,” W. Matthew J. Simmons, Sr., University of South Carolina
Please come join us in the Windy City for some Simms scholarship at the end of May! Information on registration, the conference hotel, and the full program is at https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-annual-conference/
We hope to see many of y’all in Chicago!