Travis Foster

An engraving that offers a head-and-shoulders portrait of an African American woman (Frances Ellen Watkins Harper) in three-quarters profile. Wearing traveling clothes and her hair gathered in her signature chignon, she looks with calm determination to the viewer’s left. Originally in William Still's 1872 book The Underground Rail Road.

September will mark the 200th anniversary of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s birth. To help commemorate and celebrate, the current issue of Legacy features a forum on Harper’s life and work. This week, I’ll share each of the six essays; for now, here’s the intro: muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/artic...

Congratulations!!!

Just a reminder I've created a queer and trans studies feed to collate discussions, publications, news and academic jobs relevant to our field. Please like and pin it for easy access, use the 🌈🎓 emojis together to post to it, and share it with your colleagues!

Don't forget the deadline to apply is approaching!

APPLY TO PRESENT>> forms.office.com/e/wCQ7W9CyaD

Applications close on 28th April 2025

#AcademicSky 🌈🎓
#Conference #OpenCall #Symposium #Opportunity
#Queer #LGBTQIA2S+ #LGBT #Trans #TransLivesMatter #Trans+ #TVCE

2026 Conference CFP | C19 Society

Today is the day! Take a look at the CFP for the 2026 Biennial Conference of The Society of 19th-Century Americanists: UNDERGROUND

www.c19society.org/2026-confere...

The Conference website will go up at the end of April / early May, and submissions will be due Sept 5th.

Full-Throated Explicit Dehumanization | Paisley Currah Perhaps because, unlike the Green New Deal, they actually exist, transgender people have been especially easy to single out and harm. Signed on the day of his inauguration, Trump’s executive order “De...

My piece on Trump's executive orders targeting trans people is out now at N+1.
www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Call for papers! Legacy-backed panel (SSAWW 2025): "Trans Studies & the Tomboy". Send Travis your propositions!

The CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey has monitored the wellbeing of America’s high school students since 1991.

Since 2015, it’s been a vital source of data on LGBQ youth. In 2023, it provided the first ever nationally representative sample of transgender teens.

As of this morning, it’s gone.

CFP: 2025 SSAWW Conference
“Understanding Histories, Imagining Futures: 25 Years of SSAWW”
November 6-9, 2025 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Marriott Old City. Proposals for panels, roundtables, & individual papers due February 28th, 2025. studyamericanwomenwriters.org/events/2025-...

I am looking forward to receiving your proposals! 🚶‍♀️🚶🏿‍♀️🚶🏼‍♀️

Cover for Edinburgh companion to queer reading

How beautiful is this? Coming soon #Queer #Reading

Congratulations too to Madeline Zehnder, the second Rising Scholar Prize honorable mention.

Zehnder won for "William J. Wilson's Object Lesson: Reading Childhood in 'The Afric-American Picture Gallery," a paper included in the seminar titled Race and Age: Black Childhood in the Nineteenth Century.

Congratulations too to Annie Persons, the first of two Rising Scholar Prize honorable mentions.

Persons won for "Hawthorne and the (Ongoing) Age of Coal," a paper delivered as part of the panel titled Rocky Pasts and Uncertain Futures: Earth Science in Nineteenth-Century Literature.

Congratulations to Eagan Dean, winner of this year's Rising Scholar Prize for a paper delivered at the conference in Pasadena!!!

Eagan won for "Magnetism and the Strange Child: Spiritualist Prehistories of Transness in Cecil Dreeme," a paper delivered as part of the Trans Childhoods panel.

Call for proposals: Reading the Queer Eighteenth Century: Historiography, Epistemology, and Embodiment Edited by Declan Kavanagh, University of Kent, U.K. Reading the Queer Eighteenth Century presents essays, which explore queerness broadly conceived in the anglophone long eighteenth century. Contributors offer the latest overview of key debates in queer eighteenth-century studies by zoning in on current trends in queer historiography, multi-scalar queer epistemologies, intersections between queerness and class, race, indigeneity, as well as engaging in questions of queer pedagogical practice and future directions for the field. A connective theme of the collection will be the question of ‘presentism’ in queer engagements with the long eighteenth century period. Essays will explore trans, bi, queer, gay, lesbian and other approaches to eighteenth-century materials whilst also showcasing the period’s ramifications for present day debates in LGBTQIA+ studies.

🔔 Please share widely! A call for contributions for an edited collection _Reading the Queer Eighteenth Century_ which will be published by De Gruyter in early 2026. Submit a proposal or pass on to interested scholars! #Skystorians #18C #Queer #Disability #Ecocriticism #trans #transnational

Feminism Against Cisness from Duke University Press

Happy mail day to me! Been waiting for this one

New issue of History of the Present on Reproductive Racial Capitalism, co-edited by Jennifer Morgan and Alys Eve Weinbaum - will be available online soon!

An excerpt from the linked article: "Yet following Spillers, if the making of peoples into flesh depended on making them susceptible to a certain kind of touch, then intimacy might need reconsideration, as the flesh is both less susceptible to hegemonic categorizations and more susceptible to intimate physical violation. Consider Moonlight’s opening scene. Viewers first catch a glimpse of Chiron’s running body, as school-aged boys chase him. This scene could appear playful, a scene indicative of boyhood innocence, but the film’s dialogue makes such an interpretation nearly impossible. As the boys’ voices become more audible, audiences realize that Chiron is being hounded. 'Get him'; 'Get his bitch ass'; 'He’s scary'; 'Get his ass'; 'Get his gay ass,' the boys yell out, chasing Chiron into an abandoned drug den. Might it be appropriate to consider pursuit as nothing other than desire manifested as movement? Perhaps, under this light, smear the queer undergoes a queering itself."

congrats to Dionte Harris, winner of the GLQ/MLA's "Crompton-Noll Prize for Best LGBTQ Studies Article" for "The Smear: Vibrational Flesh and the Calculus of Black Queer Becoming in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight" — read it here, free for three months: read.dukeupress.edu/differences/...

My new essay is now out from American Literature!

“Beyond Railroads and Internment”? Japanese American Wartime Incarceration Literature and the Foundations of Asian American Literary Studies @dukepress.bsky.social

read.dukeupress.edu/american-lit...

Situation Critical is now published! Many, many thanks to
@lizault.bsky.social for all of the terrific editorial work and support. Get it from Duke and use the discount code E24CVTCH for 30% off

www.dukeupress.edu/situation-cr...

Syllabus question: short stories, poems, shortish novels, and/or essays about addiction and recovery? Any period.

(Most of the course’s students will be in recovery.)

Thank you!

Congratulations!!

Cover of Feminism Against Cisness edited Emma Heaney. White stars dot the top of the cover, contrasting the black background. A full, white moon hangs in the sky, and a dotted white line extends down diagonally to a white half-circle in the middle of the cover, which consists of blue waves. Below the waves, the cover depicts ten white spherical shapes connected by blue lines against a black background.

The contributors to "Feminism against Cisness," edited by Emma Heaney, showcase the future of feminist historical, theoretical, and political thought freed from the conceptual strictures of cisness. Read the introduction for free now!
www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMa...

CFP! We couldn't have an MLA conference in New Orleans without a Kate Chopin panel now, could we? Of course not. Send me abstracts! (E-address provided in the call.)

I'm thrilled to be getting together with Mel Chen for a conversation in the Intellectual Publics series next week! Tuesday, March 5 at 6:30 PM ET. Register at gc-cuny-edu.zoom.us/webinar/regi....

FWIW when I'm out of my current contracts I will be refusing further work for Routledge as well because of this (same issues) www.routledge.com/Sex-and-Gend...