Rachel Bryan (University of Tennessee - Knoxville)
rbry@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

The Flannery O’Connor Society invites abstracts (of no more than 300 words) for open topic presentations at SAMLA 2026 in Atalanta, Georgia, November 5-7. We will accept proposals for a wide variety of topics about and/or related to Flannery O’Connor’s oeuvre, and submissions from graduate students and emerging scholars are encouraged.

Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:

· Film and media adaptations of O’Connor’s life and work, including the recent biopic, Wildcat, or O’Connor’s appearances in pop culture.
· Intra/intertextual evaluations of O’Connor’s work in relation to other authors, genres, and media, or between texts
· O’Connor and modernism/postmodernism
· Ability and disability in O’Connor’s life and work
· Class concerns and social status for O’Connor and her characters
· Place, region, and politics in O’Connor’s letters and fiction
· Aesthetic and rhetorical approaches to O’Connor’s fiction
· Approaches to teaching Flannery O’Connor’s work
· Gender and sexuality in O’Connor’s fiction, as well as evaluations of the body of criticism on gender and sexuality in O’Connor’s work
· Canonicity and O’Connor in Southern Literature
· New critical and theoretical frameworks for O'Connor studies

Further, SAMLA’s conference theme of “hospitality” is a particularly compelling lens through which we can read O’Connor’s fiction, particularly as her work withholds, denies, or otherwise complicates the uses and abuses of southern hospitality.

Please send abstracts (300 words) and presenter bios (about 100 words) to Rachel Bryan at rbryan5@vols.utk.edu by August 25th, 2026. In your submission, please include your paper’s title, your name, institutional affiliation(s), and your current email address. Participants must be members of The Flannery O’Connor Society by the time of the conference. More information about the Flannery O’Connor Society, including how to join, can be found on the website (http://flannerysociety.org/). For more information about SAMLA, including lodging and conference registration fees (variable based on affiliation, modality, and rank), please check the conference website, available here: (https://southatlanticmla.org/).