Call for Papers

Join us in Los Angeles for the 39th annual MELUS conference!

April 3-6, 2025

Hosted by Cal State LA

Conference Theme: MELUS Outside

Deadline for Abstracts: November 15, 2024

Los Angeles is a metropolis of diverse cultures and ethnic communities, shaped by racial histories and shaping narratives of race, ethnicity, culture, and diaspora.  Cal State LA, the host institution for MELUS 2025, has played a historic role in the rise of Ethnic Studies as an academic discipline, including the historic participation in the East L.A. Walkouts of 1968 and the birth of Chicano Studies as well as the creation of the second oldest Black Studies department and the second College of Ethnic Studies in the nation.  As California was the major entry point for immigration from Asia since the nineteenth century, Los Angeles includes some of the largest and oldest Asian American neighborhoods in the United States, including Chinatown, Koreatown, and the Little Tokyo Historic District, among others. Cal State LA and the Los Angeles basin are held in unceded Tongva land, and the presence of Tovaangar resides in all spaces of Los Angeles.  

This year’s conference theme, MELUS Outside, reflects the public and community action that gave rise to Ethnic Studies in the United States, the commitment to public good central to Cal State L.A.’s mission, and the shape of Los Angeles itself.  Los Angeles is a city of ocean, desert, and mountain, and a city of ethnic enclaves and urban sprawl.  Los Angeles is a city marked by homelessness and public pain, and it is a city known for glittering reflections, surfaces, and screens.  Los Angeles is a city of cultural creation and racial violence, soaring uplift and ongoing suppression.  We invite you to join us in this city of contradiction and complexity, to contribute to it and engage with it as academics and as people of practice, inside academic forums and in the communities outside.

We welcome proposals for panels, papers, and roundtables connected to the conference theme of “MELUS Outside” in the areas of multiethnic literature, culture, and performance broadly imagined; critical analyses, theoretical explorations, and pedagogical and community engaged approaches are all welcome.

Proposed topics may include but are not limited to:

OUTSIDE is…

Community engaged

Public humanities

Freedom

& Expansive joy

Out/side and unconventional

Queer, punk, neurodivergent, nonconforming

Nonbinary, multiracial, pansexual, polyamorous

diasporic, transnational, global

Space, time, and mobility

Nature, climate, environment, and terrain

& Outside is physical, visual, exterior, and aesthetic

Skin, surface, tactile, texture, textile

Color, colorism, fashion, decoration

Hypertext, network, and link

Extraplanetary, fantastical, otherworldly

& Outside is public protest and public pain

Encampments, uprisings, street violence, war

Homelessness, displacement, and disenfranchisement

Uncertainty, precarity, marginalization, and fear

Ecological crisis and climate change

Outside is tangible and intangible, joy and dismay, aesthetic and political.

Submission Guidelines: 

• Paper abstracts should be no more than 250 words and must include a title as well as author name(s), institutional affiliation(s), and email address. 

• Panel proposals should include a 150-word overview of the panel theme, abstracts of no more than 250 words each for each of the 3-4 papers included in the panel, and a list of participants with their institutional affiliations and email addresses.  

• Roundtable proposals should include an abstract of 250-400 words describing the roundtable topic and a list of participants with their institutional affiliations and email addresses.

• Please submit paper abstracts and panel/roundtable proposals in Word or PDF format via email to MELUS2025@calstatela.edu by November 15, 2024. 

• Notifications of acceptance will be sent out in January 2025. 

The Katharine Rodier Graduate Student Travel Award; The MELUS Graduate Student Travel Award; and the MELUS President’s Contingent Faculty Award

• Anyone who wishes to be considered for a graduate student award or contingent faculty award must copy Kiedra Taylor on their submission: kiedra.taylor@uconn.edu.  

MELUS Membership

Note that all those participating in the conference must be MELUS members in good standing by February 1, 2025. If you need to join or renew your membership, please do so by clicking here: http://www.melus.org/members/membership/

For more information about MELUS, The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, visit www.melus.org. For more information about the MELUS journal, visit https://academic.oup.com/melus. For more information about the Cal State LA’s English department, and its Engaged English curriculum, please visit https://www.calstatela.edu/al/english.