Reorientations
British Women Writers Conference
June 1-4, 2021
For its virtual 2021 annual conference, the British Women Writers Association announces “Reorientations.” In the past, the British Women Writers Conference has featured panels, plenaries, and keynotes that address race and representation, but in response to the ongoing transformations of the field, the organizers seek to reorient the conference with a singular focus on the work of women of color, both from the 18th- and 19th-centuries and today. This year, the conference will be held June 1-4 over Zoom.
The 2021 conference will open with a workshop on antiracist pedagogy by Brigitte Fielder (University of Wisconsin-Madison). Days two and three will feature two panels of plenary speakers bringing innovative approaches to archival materials and women of color in the Revolutionary and Victorian periods. The plenary addresses will be delivered by Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins), Marisa J. Fuentes (Rutgers), Jazzmen Lee-Johnson (2020 Artist Fellow at the RISD Museum), Ryan Fong (Kalamazoo College), Hilary Nicholson (Video for Change, Jamaica), and Samantha Pinto (University of Texas at Austin). On the fourth and final day of the conference, participants will discuss two recently published texts centering Black women writers of the 18th and 19th centuries: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis (2020) and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Marys Seacole (2019). The Common Reads event, new to this year’s BWWC, is an opportunity to host virtually the kind of fellowship that makes the annual conference so special, while expanding the conference’s historical focus to include work by contemporary Black writers.
The organizers are grateful for the feedback they received on the initial Call for Papers. They apologize for perpetuating the institutional racism which pervades the profession and which this year’s conference seeks to counter. The revised Announcement aligns more clearly with the goals for this year’s conference. Inclusivity and equity have always been at the core of the BWWA by surfacing the work of underread women writers. This task demands continual reorientations and re-examinations, specifically to combat a history of canon formation that privileges whiteness. The organizers are aiming to stage an inclusive, antiracist virtual conference that practices a conscious engagement with the history of exclusion within the field.
Please follow the conference website for registration information at 2021BWWC.wordpress.com.