Please consider proposing a panel or roundtable for sessions to be sponsored by Women in French at the 2026 Southeast Modern Language Association (SAMLA) Convention, to be held Nov. 5-7, 2026 in Atlanta. We would love to have a roundtable in particular on a topic related to Women in French at this year’s convention. There are 8 days left to send in a proposal. See below for details.
Women in French welcomes session proposals that engage with the study of women, gender, feminism, sexuality, and intersectionality in French and Francophone literatures, cultures, cinema, media, history, philosophy, linguistics, and related fields. We especially encourage interdisciplinary and transnational approaches that foreground diverse voices, critical methodologies, and emerging scholarly conversations within French and Francophone studies.
SAMLA’s theme this year is Hospitality. You are welcome to propose a panel that aligns with this theme. Please see SAMLA’s CFP description below. Proposals should include:
- Session title
- Session format
- A 250–500-word session description
- Organizer name, affiliation, and contact information
I ask that you send me the proposal for a WIF panel or roundtable before July 15.
We warmly encourage submissions from scholars at all career stages, including graduate students, contingent faculty, independent scholars, and interdisciplinary researchers. Women in French remains committed to fostering inclusive, collaborative, and intellectually vibrant spaces for scholarship in French and Francophone studies.
Below is the CFP advertised on SAMLA’s webpage.
We may imagine the act of hospitality benign: to open a door, to welcome another across a threshold, or to make an offer to a guest. Rooted in such acts, however, is an ethics of how we engage with another, whether friend or stranger. Acts of hospitality contain their own contradictions, as to serve as host is to hold power, to set terms, to guard thresholds and entry points. For this year’s SAMLA conference, we invite papers, panels, and creative works that consider the many meanings and complications of hospitality—as practice, metaphor, ethics, affect, and structure. As SAMLA begins to look forward to its centennial, and thereby backward at its near-century of fostering academic collegiality and exchange, a focus on Hospitality affords a consideration of the encounters that go, so often, undertheorized. We hope that the capaciousness of this theme will invite a wide range of approaches and voices, from literary and cultural analysis to creative works, studies in medical humanities, digital technologies, and beyond.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
· Hospitality and the ethics of encounter;
· Home, exile, unhoming, and transience;
· Borders, boundaries, and liminal or in-between spaces;
· Hosts, hostesses, guests, and power;
· Subjectivity and ipseity;
· Places of public hospitality, including hospitals, hostels, and hotels;
· Crimes of hospitality;
· Translation, language, and linguistic hospitality;
· The digital, the virtual, and non-places;
· Religious traditions of hospitality;
· Cognitive and neurobiological perspectives on openness and receptivity;
· The uncanny, ghosts, mourning, and spectrality;
· Hospitality and/as pedagogy;
· Refuge, asylum, and migration;
· Citizenship, non-citizenship, intruders, and belonging;
· Geographic or regional conceptualizations of hospitality (e.g. Southern Hospitality);
· Animal, non-human, cross-species, and posthuman hospitality;
· Tourism and the hospitality industry;
· Reading and interpretation as hospitable acts; and
· Gendered, racialized, and classed dynamics of hospitality.
