The Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference
Friday, March 28, 2025
Historic New Orleans Collection
and Williams Research Center
New Orleans, Louisiana
Founded in 1995, the Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference is an annual one-day meeting sponsored by the Historic New Orleans Collection and Williams Research Center. The conference is held in the historic French Quarter in conjunction with the Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival, a week-long event featuring writing workshops, theater performances, readings, literary panels, literary walking tours, music, culinary events, and more.
Call for Proposals
Deadline for submissions:
November 8, 2024
Sessions at this one-day event do not consist of traditional conference papers. Instead, panels feature scholarly conversations that spring from Williams’s work and its many contexts and futures. We invite brief proposals for topics related to Tennessee Williams writ large.
Topics might include, but are not limited to:
- conceptual casting in productions of Williams’s plays
- non-US-based productions, films, and contexts
- production history and 21st-century dramaturgy
- BIPOC representation in text and productions
- connections between Williams and the work of other artists and creative professionals, including playwrights, poets, novelists, actors, and directors
- how Williams fits into LGBTQ+ history and the present
- intersectional feminist critiques
- disability in Williams’s texts and productions
- directing and adapting Williams in the 21st century
- Williams’s influence on the cinema in the US and abroad
All sessions will be held in person in New Orleans; there are no virtual or hybrid sessions.
Proposals should include your name, affiliation (if applicable), contact information (including phone number and email), an abstract of 250 words about a proposed topic, and a 100-word bio. Submissions should specify any A/V needs.
Because the special hotel rate offered to Tennessee Williams / New Orleans Literary Festival attendees sells out quickly, those interested in staying at the festival hotel are encouraged to make their reservation as early as possible: visit the Festival website here.
Deadline: Please email proposals to margit.longbrake@hnoc.org by Friday, November 8, 2024.
Stipends of $200 will be offered to panelists who participate in person. Panelists interested in submitting an essay on their topic to the Tennessee Williams Annual Review will be invited to schedule a virtual meeting with the managing editor of the Review, to discuss possibilities.
The conference organizers and the Tennessee Williams Annual Review are committed to reflecting a wide range of experience of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and physical ability. Scholars of the global majority are especially encouraged to submit proposals.
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