Call For Papers: Melville Society Panels at the 2026 American Literature Association Conference
The Melville Society is sponsoring two panels at the 2026 American Literature Association Conference, which will be held in Chicago, IL, May 20-23, 2026.
Submission guidelines for each panel’s call are below.
Both panels have a submission deadline of January 11, 2026.
Leisure, Laziness, Labor in Melville and His Contemporaries
Ivy Wilson’s essay in Ahab Unbound (2022) contributes a necessary observation about the way Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855) limns the intricate global network that imbricates leisure, labor, and commodity and demonstrates how the leisure-labor dyad comes to stand in, in part, as a metonym for the “metropole-colony structure of international capitalist regimes” that complicates Marx’s perspective on the base-superstructure relationship (371). However, theorists like Roland Barthes have characterized leisure’s kissing-cousins, idleness, laziness, and sloth, as effective, political responses to the injunctions of a capitalist society to, as Corey Pein conceives it, live, work, work, work, die. This guaranteed Melville Society-sponsored panel seeks papers that interrogate the relationship of laziness and leisure to labor in the works of Melville (particularly beyond “Bartleby”) and his contemporaries.
Topics might include:
Class-based, gendered, and racialized dimensions of leisure/laziness in Melville
Work stoppages and strikes before the US Civil War
Geographic tensions between leisure/laziness
Transcendental idleness
Bartlebyan ethics in other works by Melville or his contemporaries
“Unproductive” knowledge and idleness
Imaginative and plastic arts and/as laziness/leisure
The poetics of US flânerie
Please submit a 300-word maximum abstract and brief bio to Schuyler Chapman (schuyler.chapman@glenville.edu) by Sunday, January 11, 2026.
Melville & Justice
There is no folly of the beast of the earth
which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of man.
– Herman Melville
Until the rightless thing receives its rights,
we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of ‘us’.
– Christopher D. Stone
At the heart of Melville’s writing is a concern for justice. So capacious are his figurations of justice, so layered his anatomies of styles of governing animate and inanimate matter that this concern arguably goes to the heart of the century-plus revival of all things Melville too.
We invite proposals that consider justice in Melville across a broad array of topics—including law, labor, sexuality, race, empire, and class, as well as animal studies, the Anthropocene, the nonhuman and more-than-human worlds. We also invite proposals that operate within and/or across different scales in Melville—from the microscopic to the macroscopic, the social to the environmental, the extrasensory to the sensory, the affective to the atmospheric, to name a few—and that seek to understand the relationship between these scales and their horizon(s) of justice. Finally, we invite proposals that put Melville in conversation with queer, Indigenous, and decolonial approaches for evaluating harm, obligation, interdependence, repair, and associated topics such as multispecies justice.
In other words, this CFP might call to you if you are drawn to questions like:
– What vision of justice do we find in Melville?
– Do different domains demand different forms of justice?
– And where, exactly, is justice to be found?
You might frame these questions in terms of injustice too—all the better to consider how Melville’s works seek to interrupt the historical present’s production of racial capitalist futures that ongoingly render the majority of lives and life disposable and extractable.
Finally, since Melville is famous for breaking down simplistic, powerfully entrenched binary distinctions, how does his work constitute an alternative to antebellum rhetorics of justice founded on distinctions between a higher law and the law? And how does it constitute an alternative for contemporary debates in literary studies, philosophy, identity-based post-1968 fields, and elsewhere?
To rethink justice in Melville, to think with Melville about justice, please send your 250-word abstract and a brief bio to Jonathan Schroeder (jschroed@risd.edu) by January 11, 2026. This is a guaranteed panel.
For more details on the American Literature Association Conference, see https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-annual-conference/
