Dear colleagues, friends, and fellow travelers,

It is my great privilege to welcome you to MELUS 2026 in Austin, Texas. Whether you are arriving from across the country or the world, returning to a community you have helped build, or joining us for the first time, we are glad you are here. Over the next four days we will gather at two of Austin’s most striking venues — Hotel ZaZa from Wednesday through Friday, and the W Austin on Saturday, just two blocks south — to do what this Society has done for more than five decades: take seriously the full breadth of what American literature has been, is, and might yet become.

This year’s theme, Beyond the Page: Storytelling Across Media and Borders in Precarious Times, asks us to consider what becomes of literary study when we follow our objects of inquiry into film, television, comics, performance, the digital, and beyond — and what becomes of those forms when we read them with the rigor and care our field has long brought to the printed word. The panels, plenaries, and workshops gathered here take up that question from a remarkable range of vantage points: speculative aesthetics and Afrofuturism, transpacific poetics and Latinx fashion, Indigenous futurities and Asian American performance, ecological imagination and ethical archives, and much else besides. The program reflects both the depth of our field and its capacity to keep moving.

The phrase “in precarious times” is no decoration. We meet at a moment when ethnic studies programs are under direct attack in Texas and elsewhere, when book bans and curriculum restrictions have become routine, when the lives and livelihoods of many in our communities — students, colleagues, the writers we study — are subject to renewed forms of state violence. That MELUS continues to grow, that this conference is among our largest yet, that scholars have traveled here from across the United States and from abroad: these facts are themselves a form of answer. We are not retreating. We are gathering.

I am deeply grateful to our two extraordinary keynote speakers, Cathy Park Hong and Hanya Yanagihara, whose work in poetry, essay, and the novel exemplifies the imaginative reach this conference celebrates. I thank our host institutions — Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas at Austin — and the local site committee whose tireless work has made this gathering possible. I thank the program committee for the care with which they shaped this year’s offerings, and the MELUS Executive Council for stewarding the Society through a year of growth and challenge. And I thank Frederick Luis Aldama, whose partnership at every stage has been indispensable.

Finally, I thank you. Without your scholarship, your teaching, your travel, and your willingness to spend four days in a hotel ballroom in the Texas heat with strangers who become friends, none of this would matter. Welcome to Austin. Welcome to MELUS 2026. Let us get to work.

MELUS 2026 takes place on the ancestral and traditional lands of the Carrizo & Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Caddo, Tonkawa, Comanche, Lipan Apache, Alabama-Coushatta, Kickapoo, Tigua Pueblo, and all the American Indian and Indigenous peoples who have lived, traveled, traded, and made their lives across what is now called central Texas. We acknowledge that these lands were taken through colonization, dispossession, and violence, and that the histories we gather here to study are not separable from those longer histories of removal and survival. We acknowledge as well that Indigenous peoples remain present in this region today — as scholars, writers, organizers, neighbors, and members of sovereign nations whose claims to these lands precede and exceed the institutions that now occupy them.

For a society devoted to the study of multi-ethnic literatures of the United States, this acknowledgment is not a preface to be performed and set aside. It is an orientation. The literatures we read, the categories we work with, the borders we cross in our scholarship — all are shaped by the foundational and ongoing fact of settler colonialism on this continent. We commit, in this gathering and beyond it, to keeping that fact at the center of our work: in our citations, our syllabi, our research questions, and our institutional advocacy. We support Indigenous-led scholarship, sovereignty, and self-determination, and we recognize our responsibilities — as scholars, teachers, and members of this Society — to the lands and peoples among whom we are gathered.

The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) was founded in 1973 to expand the study of American literature to include the literatures of all ethnic groups in the United States — African American, Asian American, Latinx, Native American, Jewish American, Arab American, and others. For more than five decades, MELUS has been a central venue for scholarship that takes seriously the full breadth of American literary production across racial, ethnic, and cultural lines.

MELUS publishes the journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., currently edited by Gary Totten, in partnership with Oxford University Press. The journal appears quarterly and has been one of the field’s anchor publications since its founding. Special issues, recent essays, and submission guidelines are available through the Oxford Academic platform.

The Society holds an annual conference each spring — this year in Austin, Texas, hosted by Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas at Austin — and presents annual awards recognizing distinguished scholarship in multi-ethnic American literary studies.

The phrase “beyond the page” carries a deliberate ambiguity. It points outward — to the films, television series, comics, performance pieces, podcasts, social-media artifacts, video games, and digital archives that have become inseparable from how stories now move through American culture. It points inward — to the longer history of how multi-ethnic literatures have always exceeded the printed page, drawing on oral tradition, music, ritual, embodied practice, and visual art in ways that the institutional category of “literature” has often been slow to recognize. And it points across — to the borders, both geographic and disciplinary, that our scholarship has long been concerned with crossing.

To gather under this banner in 2026 is to ask what storytelling does in a moment when the conditions for telling stories — and the conditions for the people who tell them — are increasingly precarious. Ethnic studies programs are under legislative attack. Books are banned from school libraries. Faculty face threats to academic freedom that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago. Our students arrive in classrooms shaped by surveillance, displacement, and uncertainty about whether the institutions that house our work will remain hospitable to it. In such a moment, “beyond the page” is not only a methodological provocation. It is a description of where the urgent work of our field is increasingly being done: in community archives, in digital exhibits, in independent presses, in performance spaces, on social-media platforms, in the spaces between formal scholarship and public-facing intellectual life.

The conference theme also asks us to think carefully about borders: the U.S.-Mexico border that runs through so much of the scholarship gathered here; the transpacific and transatlantic crossings that have shaped Asian American and Black diasporic literatures; the borders between high and popular culture that our field has always been willing to cross; the borders between disciplines that comparative ethnic studies has always exceeded. Borders are sites of violence and of generative possibility, often at the same time. Multi-ethnic literary studies has long been a discipline that takes seriously what happens at borders rather than what happens despite them.

Our two plenary speakers — Cathy Park Hong, whose poetry and essays have redefined what Asian American letters can do, and Hanya Yanagihara, whose novels span centuries and continents to interrogate the costs of cultural encounter — model the theme’s range. So do the more than seventy panels that follow. Whether you are working on nineteenth-century Black periodicals or contemporary Latina horror cinema, on Indigenous sound studies or Italian American foodways, on the speculative imagination or the political economy of literary form, you will find in this program colleagues asking adjacent questions and a community that takes those questions seriously. That, finally, is what MELUS is for.