Author Archives: melus

John Wharton Lowe, III Short-term Research Stipend

The University of Georgia Special Collections Libraries is providing two travel stipends of up to $1,000 for researchers whose work would benefit from access to the collections held at the Libraries related to American, Southern American or Multicultural (Ethnic) American Literatures defined as the United States American South (18th-21st centuries), including circum-Caribbean literature, or literature that emerges out of the involvement of Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados and the regions around the Caribbean Sea such as Panama and Belize in transatlantic slavery, the United States slave trade, and/or United States colonialism. This Stipend also shall support research in 18th-21st century African American (including Gullah), Native American, Asian American (including South Asian and Pacific Islander), American immigrant, and Latinx written and/or oral literatures, defined as Multicultural American Literatures or Ethnic American Literatures.

Please visit https://www.libs.uga.edu/scl/programs/internships for eligibility and application information.

Announcement: MELUS Book Award Winners

The MELUS Book Award Committee—Fred L. Gardaphé (chair), Amy Gore, Gary Totten, and Wenying Xu—is pleased to announce the winners of the first biennial MELUS Book Award.

The competition was open to academic monographs, published during the 2023-2024 period, that aligned with the mission of MELUS as articulated in its Constitution, and primarily focused on multiple ethnicities, comparative ethnicities, or mixed identities. (No edited collections, anthologies, or creative writing were considered.) The monograph had to be single-authored or co-authored, and published by a university or trade press. Eligible books focused on literature, culture, rhetoric, theory, or biography and contained a significant literary component or clear applicability to ethnic literary study.

The prize will be awarded at the 2026 MELUS conference (Thursday, April 30 – Saturday, May 2, 2026) in Austin, Texas.

Winner:
Alexander Manshel, Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon (Columbia UP, 2024)

Honorable Mention:
Glenda R. Carpio, Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy (Columbia UP, 2023)

Short List:
Christopher T. Fan, Asian American Fiction after 1965: Transnational Fantasies of Economic Mobility (Columbia UP, 2024)

Ryan Sharp, Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black US Persona Poetry and the Archive (U of North Carolina P, 2024)

Cristina Stanciu, The Makings and Unmakings of Americans: Indians and Immigrants in
American Literature and Culture, 1879-1924 (Yale UP, 2023)

Roberta Wolfson, Refiguring Race and Risk: Counternarratives of Care in the US Security State (Ohio State UP, 2024)

Announcement: New Book Review Editor


Due to his election as MELUS president, Dr. Christopher González is stepping down from his role as book review editor for MELUS. Dr. González is a renowned scholar and professor of English at Southern Methodist University, where he holds the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Endowed Chair. With expertise in twentieth-century American literature, multiethnic literatures, film, comics, and narrative theory, Dr. González is the author, coauthor, and editor of numerous books, including Reel Latinxs: Representation in U.S. Film and TV (U of Arizona P, 2019), which won the 2020 International Latino Book Award, and Permissible Narratives: The Promise of Latino/a Literature (Ohio State UP, 2017), awarded Honorable Mention for the 2019 Perkins Prize for the most significant contribution to narrative studies. His commitment to diversity and representation in literature and media is reflected in his work, research, and teaching. He earned his PhD from the Ohio State University, where he was affiliated with the world-famous Project Narrative. His expertise and professionalism have been a significant asset to the book review section, and we thank him for his service to the journal.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Lesley Larkin will be assuming the MELUS book review editor role. Dr. Larkin is a professor of English at Northern Michigan University, where she teaches courses in African American literature, American literature (1865-present), literary and critical theory, and gender studies, and where she was the 2020 recipient of NMU’s Distinguished Faculty Award. She is the author of two books, Race and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett (Indiana UP, 2015) and Reading in the Postgenomic Age: Race, Discipline, and Bionarrativity in Contemporary North American Literature (Ohio State UP, 2025), and the coeditor of The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction, 1980-2020 (Wiley, 2022). Her scholarship has also been published in a variety of academic venues, including Callaloo, The Hastings Center Report, and MELUS; in 2013, her essay on Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters received the Katharine Newman MELUS Best Essay Award. Dr. Larkin has contributed to numerous diversity initiatives at NMU, including the development of the University’s first Diversity Officer position and the creation of a Diversity Common Reader Program, now in its thirteenth year. She earned her PhD at the University of Washington, where she attended her first MELUS Conference in 2002. She is thrilled to take on this new role with MELUS!

    1921 Prize Winners for 2024 from MELUS

    The 1921 Prize is awarded by the American Literature Society (established in 1921) to the best scholarship of the year in American literary studies. We would like to congratulate all following 2024 MELUS winners from the 1921 prizes! You can access and read the winning research below at https://academic.oup.com/melus/pages/1921-prize-winners-2024

    Contingent/Non-TT:

    Honorable Mentions:

    • Susan Cooke Weeber, “Black Radicalism after the Haitian Revolution: Langston Hughes’s Emperor of Haiti,” MELUS (49.3, Fall 2024)
    • Haley M. Eazor, “Imagining Aerial Surveillance: (Eco)Poetics and War in Solmaz Sharif’s Look,” MELUS (49.2, Summer 2024)

    Tenure Track:

    Co-Winner

    • Allison N. Harris, “Indian Removal and the Plantation South: Cherokee Present-Absence in Three Neo-Slave Narratives,” MELUS (48.4, Winter 2023, published Jan. 2024)

    Honorable Mention:

    • Rebecca Foote, ” ‘I Am Unhide-able’: Conditions of Visibility in The Poet X,” MELUS (49.1, Spring 2024)

    Tenured:

    Winner:

    • Stephen Knadler, “Fugitive Figurations of Chronic Disability: Reconstructing Black Disability Politics in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy,” MELUS (49.1, Spring 2024)

    Honorable Mention:

    • Megan Cole Paustian, “Laughing through the Mask in Invisible Man,” MELUS (49.3, Fall 2024)

    Represent MELUS at ALA!

    Submit for possible inclusion in our guaranteed panel for our affiliation with the ALA

    at their conference in May

    American Literature Association

    36th Annual Conference

    May 21-24, 2025

    The Westin Copley Place

    10 Huntington Avenue

    Boston, MA 02116

    Theme: Reading Multiethnic Literature as Guidance in Times of Trouble

    Abstracts due: Dec. 6

    When in Morrison’s Beloved Paul D leans over and says to Sethe, “[W]e got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow,” his words gesture to Sankofa, the Akan symbol which indicates that the past contains the wisdom that we need to move forward. Here and now in US history, this panel applies Sankofa as symbol in literatures of historically excluded populations. MELUS invites individual paper proposals that examine multicultural literatures of the US for what readers may glean as guidance for how to move forward after a time of trauma. Specifically, we are interested in papers that consider how the works of multiethnic creators illustrate the ways in which traumas–historical or contemporary -help to envision better futures.

    Please send abstracts of 250 words, a CV, and a short bio to Sherry Johnson at johnsshe@gvsu.edu by December 06.

    MELUS Essay wins ALS 1921 Award

    Alyssa A. Hunziker’s Essay “Chinese Exclusion, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonial Refusal in C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold,” MELUS, vol. 47, no. 4, winter 2022, pp. 22-48. Free to access here. (This essay was also awarded an Honorable Mention for the Don D. Walker Prize from the Western Literature Association for best essay in Western North American literary and cultural studies!)

    This American Literature Association award is named for the year the ALS was organized, and this year’s theme was “Democracy, Difference, and the Question of Belonging.”