The professional association for language and literature.


MPA 2025: Legacies and Futures

February 28 - March 1, 2025

​Oxford, MS

 
The Mississippi Philological Association is accepting proposals for its 2025 annual meeting hosted by the University of Mississippi in the Ford Ballroom at Inn at Ole Miss. MPA 2025 welcomes proposals in creative writing, critical discussions of literature, film, and music, and pedagogical approaches to linguistics and the humanities. While the 2025 meeting continues the tradition of an open call for papers from a wide range of topics, this year’s meeting will include some changes. MPA 2025 has a theme and two featured panels that will be comprised of relevant submissions from the open call for papers.

 MPA 2025 is especially interested in presentations that address the meeting theme: legacies and futures in works of southern literature, especially in the works of Mississippi writers. Mississippi writers of interested might include (but is not limited to): William Faulkner, Jesmyn Ward, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Hubert Creekmore, John Grisham, Catherine Lacey, Donna Tartt, Barry Hannah, Margaret Walker, Willie Morris, Katy Simpson Smith, Thomas Harris, Kiese Laymon, Larry Brown, Ellen Douglas, Richard Ford, Jim Whitehead, Chris Offutt, Beth Henley, Tennessee Williams, Tom Franklin, Beth Ann Fennelly, C. T. Salazar, Thomas Richardson, W. Ralph Eubanks, Steve Yarborough, Exodus Brownlow, and so many more. How does the literature from Mississippi’s past still shape writing in the present? What does the future of literature from Mississippi look like? Where does it (and where should it) go next?

 Additionally, MPA 2025 will host two featured panels:

  •  The Benjamin F. Fisher Panel on 19th-Century American Literature – all proposals for critical presentations on works from 19th-century American literature will be considered for inclusion on this panel. Dr. Fisher, professor emeritus at the University of Mississippi, has given many presentations on gothic literature, 19th-century literature, and, most specifically, Edgar Allan Poe in his many years of affiliation with MPA.
  • The Robert Hamblin Creative Writing Panel – all creative writing proposals will be considered for inclusion on this panel. Dr. Hamblin, a native of Booneville, MS, and professor emeritus at Southeast Missouri State University, received his doctoral degree from the University of Mississippi before embarking on a long career as a professor at SEMO in Cape Girardeau, MO, where he founded and led the Center for Faulkner Studies. He has published numerous volumes of poetry as well as novels and memoirs chronicling the world of the Midsouth and lower Mississippi Valley. He was also the keynote speaker at MPA 2022 hosted by Blue Mountain College.


Individual proposals as well as full panel proposals are welcome. Panels formed from graduate seminars are welcome; MPA offers a wonderful opportunity for up-and-coming scholars and writers to experience a welcoming academic conference environment.

 For more information or if you have any questions, please email: MPA25@olemiss.edu


Submission deadline is December 15, 2024.