Biennial Conference of the Southeastern American Studies Association (SASA)
March 18-20, 2027 . Montgomery, Alabama
We will gather in Alabama to discuss the impact of Black rural cultures on American society. The biennial conference of the Southeastern American Studies Association (SASA) will convene scholars and practitioners from a variety of disciplines to consider how Black rural communities of the past, present, and future can help us think about the larger American culture and society and its global connections. Black rural communities offer a challenge to presumptions of the rural as white, as conservative, as out of touch with the mainstream. We invite scholars thinking broadly about Black rural life to join us in Montgomery, Alabama, as we think about the role of place and community.
We draw inspiration for this conference from the artists, activists, writers, poets, historians, and other culture workers who have long worked from outside the major metropolitan hubs that have so often marked American Studies as a field. In particular, we are motivated by our host state. Alabama and its communities are central to our understanding of Black rural life. It was in rural Macon County that Washington, Carver, and so many others made Tuskegee a mecca. Miners in Birmingham built radical traditions in opposition to degrading and dangerous labor structures. Organizers in Tallapoosa County formed the first union for sharecroppers and inspired militant resistance to Jim Crow oppression. Lowndes County protestors gave us the iconography of the Black Panthers. Farmers and extension agents, mineworkers and millworkers, artists and musicians across the state formed a culture that found its way around the country and across the world.
This conference will be anchored in conversation and community. For the first time in its history, the SASA conference will be held at an Historically Black University. Our primary conference sessions will be held on Alabama State University’s historic campus in the heart of Montgomery’s civil rights landscape. And we will sojourn to Tuskegee University for a plenary and tour that engages with the vision of that institution and its founders for an independent Black South. In this call, we build upon Roderick Ferguson’s observation that the rural is a “site of heterogeneous temporalities and spaces…that even the most vaunted intellectual formations have strained to appreciate and acknowledge.” Collectively, we will think through some of these formations and begin the project of appreciation, acknowledgement, comprehension.
We invite presentations, papers, and panels from a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners working in any area related to our broad theme of Black Rural Communities. While we are actively soliciting topics related to our theme, we will gladly accept proposals on other American Studies topics. Suggested topics related to our theme might include:
- Settler coloniality and Black rural identity
- Iterations of the Underground Railroad
- Plantations and their afterlives
- Isolation and international connections
- Zora Neale Hurston’s Souths
- Interplay between Harlem Renaissance and Rural Souths
- Labor mobilities and the Great Migration
- DuBois, Washington, and Black rural research
- Environmental justice at the local and global scale
- Alabama/Deep South Communism and myths of rural conservatism
- HBCUs and the making of rural culture and global connection
- Black landowning and agricultural traditions
- Contemporary labor protest traditions and rural organizing
Presentations may take several different forms, and we encourage submissions with creative presentation formats, including workshops, tours, pop-up exhibits, or arts and making sessions.
Paper proposals are due November 2, 2026. Please submit abstracts of up to 500 words (individual papers) or 1,000 words (panels, performances, and other multi-person presentations) using this form: https://forms.gle/NoVHY3715rHJQux97