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Time, Memory, and the Western (CFP)

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Call for Papers: Time, Memory, and the Western

Two-Day Symposium | 10–11 September 2026 | University of Essex, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

To be held at the University of Essex, Wivenhoe Campus, CO4 3SQ

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.”— Louis L’Amour, Lonely on the Mountain.

The Western functions under great temporal pressure: it is a historical genre untethered from history; a compendium of stories of personal struggle that insists on the mythological interchangeability of their characters; a mythological cycle that purports to stand for the legal basis of a nation. The Western’s myths take place at the end of time, at the start of time, upon a timeless and momentary temporal plane. How can we catalogue the types of time in the Western?  How can we theorise their interrelation? What durational spaces do other voices open up in the monolithic clock-time of the official Western? What time is High Noon?

This two-day symposium aims to bring together scholars working across literature, film and media studies, history, Indigenous studies, gender and sexuality studies and the environmental humanities to explore how time and memory structure the Western as a genre and cultural formation. We are especially interested in work that approaches the Western as a mutable form, continually revising its own histories through formal experimentation and political critique.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

  • Transnational, comparative, and global Westerns and their distinctive approaches to temporality
  • Memory, recollection and forgetting in Western narratives
  • Flashback, retrospection and unreliable testimony
  • Native Slipstream and Indigenous Temporalities
  • Historical rupture, revision and counter-history
  • Speculative, non-linear or alternative temporalities
  • Indigenous and decolonial approaches to time and history
  • BIPOC re-tellings and revisions of the Western
  • Women’s Westerns and feminist temporal critique
  • Representations of gender variance and queer memory
  • Nostalgia, anti-nostalgia and settler-colonial memory
  • Contested Western histories and archival practices
  • Landscape as temporal archive or mnemonic space

We welcome papers on literary and cinematic Westerns, as well as work engaging television, digital media, graphic narratives and cross-cultural or transnational approaches to “the West.”

Fifteen-minute paper proposals, panels, five-minute position papers and creative interventions are all welcome.

Further details regarding submission guidelines, presentation formats, and venue information will be circulated in due course.Please address all enquiries to richard.parker@uc.cl

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2026 Western Literature Association Conference Submission Deadline Extended

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The 2026 Western Literature Association Conference 
August 26-29, 2026
The Graduate by Hilton Hotel in Eugene, Oregon

Deadline for Submissions: extended to April 15, 2026

Deadline for Registration Payment: July 15, 2026

Nestled along the banks of the Wilamut River in the central Willamette Valley, the city now known as Eugene has long been a gathering space for Kalapuya and other Indigenous peoples and a home to a diverse ecology of oak savannahs, camas fields, wapato habitats, salmon fisheries, managed forests, and more than human relations. From the opening of the Oregon Trail in the 1830s to our present moment, the valley and its peoples have experienced dramatic social, cultural, economic, and ecological change, much of it captured in the multiple expressive forms of the peoples and communities who now call Kalapuya ilihi home. Though much of this history is inflected with conflict, violence, exploitation, and dispossession, these lands and waters also have been centers of Indigenous resistance and resurgence, environmental activism and stewardship, union and worker organizing, countercultural politics, LGBTQ activism, and anti-racist, anti-fascist, and anti-authoritarian resistance. 

Reflecting these complexities, WLA 2026 welcomes proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, lightning rounds, structured conversations, and other formats on any aspect of literary and cultural productions of the “American West” (broadly conceived and complicated), with particular interest in the following topics: 

  • Indigenous literary and cultural productions, ecological knowledge, philosophies of kinship and responsibility; and theories of land, water, and interrelationality, especially those grounded in Kalapuya ilihi and the Pacific Northwest (PNW). 
  • Black, Asian, and Latinx histories of presence and influence 
  • Travel, mobility, and exchange across and between Oceania and the PNW 
  • Hmong, Basque, and Central and South American Indigenous communities/literatures
  • LGBTQ community building, activism, and creative practice in Eugene and the PNW
  • Black, Indigenous, and Women-of-Color feminisms and literatures
  • Environmental policy/activism, resource (co)management, and national parks and public lands 
  • Memorialization, commemoration, and archival practice
  • Possibilities and limitations of genre, media, and literary/aesthetic form 
  • Panels, roundtables, or lightning rounds on recently published anthologies, edited collections, or other collective projects
  • Presentations related to the work of our Distinguished Achievement Award recipients—Elizabeth Woody (DinĂŠ, Warm Springs, Wasco, Yakama; enrolled Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs) and Esther Stutzman (Yoncalla Kalapuya; enrolled Confederated Tribes of Siletz)—and our featured artists—Steph Littlebird (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde) and Arigon Starr (Kickapoo Nation).

As we consider our current moment of intensifying political conflict, resurgent nativism and racial and gender violence, retrenchment of anti-environmental policies, skyrocketing inequality, and attacks on public health, public lands, education, the arts, and free speech, Kalapuya ilihi offers a rich site to think collectively about the many pasts, presents, and, most crucially, future(s) that bring us together as guests and potential relatives on what was, is, and always will be Kalapuyan lands. 

For more information about submissions, registration, hotel accommodations, and other details, please visit the conference website at https://westernlit.org/wla-conference-2026/or contact 2026 WLA President Kirby Brown at wlaconference2026@westernlit.org. Skoden! Sdoodisden!

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Bohemias of the Mountain West (CFP)

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Shovels and Violins:  

Bohemias of the Mountain West  

An Edited Volume Exploring Countercultures, Arts, and Alternative Communities 

Shovels and Violins explores the cultural, economic, and political lives of creative communities in the  American Mountain West—a region typically associated with extraction, agriculture, and frontier  mythologies rather than artistic experimentation. Unlike the urban bohemias of New York or San  Francisco, Mountain West bohemia unfolds in borderlands and small towns: places marked by  economic volatility, sparse populations, and deeply rooted social contradictions.  

From queer-run performance venues in Jackson Hole, to Indigenous land-based collectives in Taos  Pueblo, to DIY music scenes in Butte, these enclaves navigate the tension between radical ideals of  freedom, mutual aid, and self-expression and the realities of gentrification, commodification, and  histories of exclusion. The land itself acts as a collaborator and a constraint, shaping the aesthetics,  politics, and material conditions of these bohemian projects.  

This collection aims to reframe “bohemia” not as a romantic escape or elite urban rebellion, but as a historically grounded, place-based, and politically complex practice of survival, resistance, and  reinvention. It seeks to document and interpret the messy, resilient, and often contradictory forms  of creativity that emerge from the Mountain West’s layered histories of land, labor, power, and cultural transformation.  

Suggested Topics  

We welcome proposals from scholars, community historians, artists, cultural geographers, creative  writers, social scientists, and others whose work engages with these complexities. Topics might  include (but are not limited to):  

Artistic Movements and Cultural Production 

• Art colonies and artists-in-residence programs (historic or contemporary)  • Literary networks, small-press publishing, and creative correspondences  • Indigenous and Hispano cultural production in relation to land, survival, and resistance  

Community and Infrastructure 

• Countercultural communes, intentional communities, and alternative infrastructures  (Earthships, arcologies, co-ops)  

• Economic sustainability of creative enclaves in rural or post-industrial contexts  • Spiritual movements, mysticism, and place-based creative practices  

Politics, Ecology, and Aesthetics 

• Gender, sexuality, and the invisible labors of bohemian life  

• Environmental and land-based art responding to climate change, wildfire, and water scarcity 

• The contradictions of bohemian ideals within settler colonial, extractive, and capitalist  systems  

• How land acts as collaborator, constraint, or antagonist in artistic practice  • Mythmaking, memory, and how Western bohemian practices challenge or perpetuate  national narratives 

Types of Contributions  

We encourage contributions in a wide range of forms and methods, reflecting the interdisciplinary  and cross-genre spirit of this volume, including:  

• Critical scholarly essays that are accessible to a broader reading audience rather than written as a  traditional academic journal article  

• Historically grounded creative nonfiction  

• Community-based research and oral histories  

• Comparative and theoretical reflections  

• Interdisciplinary collaborations bridging text, image, and fieldwork  

The book will be thematically and geographically organized, profiling distinct communities, lineages,  and movements while weaving through broader questions of power, land, labor, and legacy. It will  foreground marginalized perspectives and resist easy romanticization of “bohemia” by attending to its entanglement with structural inequities and environmental histories.  

Submission Guidelines  

• Abstracts of 300–500 words, outlining scope, method, and significance  • Brief biographical statement (100–150 words)  

• Submit as a single PDF or Word document  

Abstract Deadline: Dec 1, 2025  

Notification of Acceptance: December 21, 2025  

Full Chapters Due: July 30, 2026 (suggested 5,000–7,000 words)  

Submit abstracts and inquiries to: 

Shawn Bingham Nina McConigley Colorado State University Colorado State University shawn.bingham@colostate.edu nina.McConigley@colostate.edu

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Montana Historical Society Fellowships

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After a three-year hiatus, the Montana Historical Society is happy to announce that we will be hosting fellows again for summer 2026. We are offering three different fellowships.

Three fellowships are now available:

James H. Bradley Fellowship – $4,000 stipend

Established in 1983, the Bradley Fellowship supports graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars pursuing research on Montana history. Up to two fellowships are awarded annually. Application deadline: February 15, 2026 

Montana History Network Fellowship – $2,000 stipend

Launched in 2025, this fellowship enables students enrolled in history or related programs at Montana universities to conduct research at the Montana Historical Society, Montana State University, and/or University of Montana library and archives. Up to two fellowships are awarded annually. Application deadline: February 28, 2026

Dave Walter Fellowship – $1,250 stipend

Since 2009, the Walter Fellowship has supported researchers involved in public history projects focusing on local history in Montana. Up to two fellowships are awarded annually. Application deadline: April 1, 2026

For complete award criteria and application requirements, visit https://mhs.mt.gov/Research/fellowships/. Questions may be directed to mthslibrary@mt.gov.

Please share with students and faculty. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,

Roberta

Roberta Gebhardt

Library & Archives Program Manager


406-444-4702  |  mths.mt.gov

PO Box 201201, 225 North Roberts Street

Helena, MT 59620-1201

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CFP Llanera/os: The Mexican American and Central American Southern Plains since 1880

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Call for Chapters: Llanera/os: The Mexican American and Central American Southern Plains since 1880

Building upon Los Llaneros: The Ethnic Mexican Southern Plains, 1500-1900, which will be published 2026 with the University of Oklahoma Press, the editors announce plans for a second volume Llanera/os: The Mexican American and Central American Southern Plains since 1880. In the first volume, contributors from various fields uncovered a critically important borderland region between the Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo American cultural worlds. To continue that groundbreaking work, we seek contributions on the Mexican, Mexican American, Central American, and Latina/o experience on the Southern Great Plains (New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado). We welcome contributions from such fields as history, art history, archeology, literature, folklore, ethnomusicology, and cultural studies as well as art, poetry, and fiction. Please send a 200-word proposal abstract and a 1-2 page CV to the editors by January 15. If the proposal is accepted for the edition, full essay drafts will be due Sept. 15, 2026. 

Proposals should be sent to joel.zapata@oregonstate.edu with the email subject reading “Llanera/os Volume II Submission.” 

The editors will respond with a decision by January 30. 

African American West, Art, Other Conferences

CFP: “On the Edge of American: Art, Exodusters, and Expatriates, 1850-1900”

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CFP: “On the Edge of American: Art, Exodusters, and Expatriates, 1850-1900”


This conference foregrounds new scholarly writing on creativity and migration in the Victorian era with a special focus on the contributions of Black and Indigenous artists, designers, and performers.


Moderated by the esteemed Dr. Tiya Miles, with a keynote by Dr. Jennifer DeVere Brody, the symposium will focus on the many forms that creativity took from 1850-1900 as Black creatives sought freedom, opportunity, and fortune outside the formal boundaries of the United States. In her compelling analysis of the exodus of thousands of former slaves to the Kansas Territory following the civil war, the historian Nell Irvin Painter tells us that “the prospect of leaving the region entirely for truly free soil fired the imaginations of Blacks who realized that their oppression was inextricably bound up with Southern or perhaps American life.” Histories of American West such as have adopted Painter’s term “Exoduster” to describe complex settler politics of African
Americans fleeing westward to escape enslavement, violence, economic exploitation, and social exclusion.


While we understand them as Americans, Exodusters and their white settler peers understood themselves as emigrating outside the United States when they entered the territories. “On the Edge of American” explores parallel experiences of these “Exodusters” to the expatriate artists who traversed the Atlantic to build careers abroad. It seeks to describe the interrelation of America’s edges in communities as far-flung as the American West, the Caribbean, and Western Europe.


Within the fine arts, presenters are invited to discuss the work of artists such as James Presley Ball, Robert Duncanson, Edmonia & Samuel Lewis, Edward Mitchel Bannister, Grafton Tyler Brown, Taylor Gordan, and Nelson A. Primus. However, we also encourage scholars to consider the more ephemeral aspects of cultural production in which itinerant artists engaged, such as music and performance.


This approach is prompted in part by theater historian Joseph Roach’s influential “circum-Atlantic” framework for decentralizing the United States as the focal point of studies about the ‘New World,’ instead, placing all histories and cultures of the Americas on equal footing to facilitate comparative work across national boundaries. Roach places particular emphasis on the performance, broadly construed, of culture, politics, and identity as sites for the reproduction and recreation of culture in the face of profound loss.


Please submit a 300-word abstract, a paper title and an up-to-date CV by January 1, 2026 to 

melissa.ragain@Montana.edu and regee@montana.edu

Selected speakers will be notified on March 1, 2026 and are expected to accept or decline the offer within one week of notification. Accepted papers will be presented in 20 minutes, followed by Q&A discussions. We welcome submissions from a variety of disciplines, including fine art, art history, visual studies, media and cinema studies, history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and political science.


The symposium will take place on Oct 23-24, 2026, in the Hagar Auditorium of the Museum of the Rockies in celebration of the exhibition “Chisel & Razor: The Artistic Lives of Edmonia & Samuel Lewis.”

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Romeo and Juliet Ride the Range

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At the end of spring semester, I traveled to London to see the 2025 theatrical production of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at the Globe Theatre. As a fan of Shakespeare, and as someone who frequently writes about the genre of the western, I couldn’t resist a production that transposes Shakespeare’s Verona setting to the American West. Shakespeare’s characters are outfitted in jeans and cowboy hats. They wear gun belts and carry guns, and the tragic story of two young lovers plays out on stage set with a pair of bat-wing saloon doors through which characters enter and exit the stage.

The stage set for Romeo and Juliet.

Opened in 1997, the Globe Theatre in London is a replica of the original Globe Theatre (established in 1599). The theater is open air, with a thatched roof that covers the balconies, but not the main area.

The main floor is standing only, and you can see the “groundlings” here starting to gather before the play starts. In mid-May when I saw the play, it was still a little chilly in London, especially after the sun went down, which is why some folks are wearing coats and others rented a red blanket to wear for the duration of the play.

And you might be thinking that the door above the swinging doors that looks a bit like it goes to a hay loft is where Juliet (Lola Shalom) will famously appear for the balcony scene, but that is not the case. The production had an original score (composed by Grant Olding) that was performed live, with five musicians. The hay loft doors would open to reveal them playing. In keeping with the setting, the instruments played included harmonica, banjo, and guitar, and drew on country and western and bluegrass traditions. An arrangement of the bluegrass song “Sail Away Ladies” (the link here is to a live version of the song—but not the one from the play) provided the music for the ballroom scene where Romeo (Rawaed Asde) and Juliet first meet.

The western setting contributes to the humor of the play’s first half. The “Sail Away Ladies” dance was a kind of funny square dance. Lord Capulet (Colm Gormley), wearing jeans and sporting a cowboy hat, came across as a kind of parodic version of the type of despotic patriarch familiar to soap operatic ranch-set westerns. That the actor’s western drawl seemed reminiscent of Kevin Costner’s delivery as John Dutton in Yellowstone might not be accidental.

At one point, Mercutio vocalizes Ennio Morricone’s famous whistled melody from the classic Sergio Leone Italian-made western The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, a moment that produces a laugh of recognition in the audience. This direct reference to the cinematic tradition of Western all’italiana (aka spaghetti westerns) also playfully evokes the play’s traditional Italian setting.

And, by casting Afro-British actors in several important roles, the production acknowledges a fact of western history that is often obscured by western film: the existence of Black cowboys. Having a Black actor (Michael Elcock) play Mercutio was a nod to the real history of the American West. It’s also appropriate that the Black cowboy Mercutio is the one to evoke spaghetti westerns. The casting of Black actors in lead and supporting roles was a particularly notable feature of European-made westerns in the 1960s and 1970s, with actors like Woody Strode, Fred Williamson, and Jim Brown featured in European westerns at time when there were fewer roles in American-made westerns for Black performers.

The staging of the balcony scene was particularly clever. The balcony was rolled onto the main floor from beneath the theatre’s balconies. A group of stagehands shooed groundlings out of the way so they didn’t get run over by the wheeled balcony. And, thus, while Romeo was onstage, Juliet delivered her lines from the middle of the audience.

The staging of the play was a lot of fun, but it is still a tragedy. In keeping with the western setting, the characters carry knives (rather than swords) and sometimes carry guns. The gun violence when it comes is loud, surprising, shocking, and disturbingly realistic.

In this production of the play, Tybalt’s death is caused by a gunshot to the stomach. The scene seems to reference the Clint Eastwood film Unforgiven. In that film, the young “The Schofield Kid,” who has romantic notions about gunfighters, joins up with the more hardened Bill Munny (Eastwood). The Kid’s first kill is a man he ambushes in an outhouse, shooting him in the stomach, and leaving him to die (which takes several excruciating hours). Listening to the agonized death cures the Kid of his romantic notions about gunfighters and gun violence.

If you scroll back to the first picture of the stage (or look at the one below), note the second chair from the left, and you’ll see bloody stains on the wall behind it. That’s Tybalt’s blood (or his stage blood) on the wall. As the scene continued on stage, Tybalt slowly made his way back to the chair, where he sat slowly dying throughout the continuation of the scene.

In a play that has a lot of young men posturing and swearing revenge, the death of Tybalt works the way the scene with the Kid does in a revisionist western like Unforgiven. It punctures romantic ideas about violence, and it helps make the transition from first half of the play (which plays a bit like romantic comedy) to the bloody and tragic events of the play’s conclusion.

Cross-posted from the UMF English Blog.

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New Book on the Black West

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The University of Oklahoma Press is pleased to announce the release of Black Wests: Reshaping Race and Place in Popular Culture by Sara Gallagher.

Book Details:

194 Pages, 20 B&W Illus.

$45.00 Hardcover

9780806195438

Vol. 2 in The Popular West series

Publication Date: July 8, 2025

About the Book:

The story of settlers in the American West, with its tales of cowboys, prospectors, and frontiersmen, is often overwhelmingly white. Black Wests brings to light the pivotal and largely overlooked contributions of Black Americans to the western narrative. Tracing Black Western storytelling through a range of media across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Sara Gallagher offers a unique perspective on the Black Western—its history, its critical texts and moments in print and cinema, and the singular experiences of Black creators in the American West.

Significantly, different media presented particular opportunities, and particular limitations, for Black creators. Gallagher explores how visual mediums, especially film, played a vital role in countering negative portrayals of Black characters in popular Western cinema. In this light, she examines the likes of Oscar Micheaux, a homesteader-turned-visionary film director, and Herb Jeffries, the famed singer whose role as the Black “singing cowboy” earned him stardom in Hollywood. Her reading encompasses the well-known—like Nat Love, legendary cowboy whose life has become an enduring symbol of the Black American West; Pauline Hopkins, a journalist and novelist whose works introduced Black America to the dime Western; and the lesser known, such as Jennie Carter, a frontierswoman who wrote about her experience in California. Concluding with a nod to modern artists like BeyoncĂŠ and Lil Nas X, Black Wests illustrates how this imaginative form continues to flourish.

An enlightening and entertaining journey through the history of the Black Western, Gallagher’s work restores Black storytelling to its critical place in the making of the American West in popular culture.

About the Author:

Sara Gallagher is Professor in Liberal Studies at Durham College in Oshawa, Ontario.

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60 Years of Western American Literature

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In 2025 Western American Literature celebrates its 60th year! We are proud to be the preeminent journal for literary and cultural studies of the US West and look forward to setting the trail for the next 60 years! Please help us on our journey by submitting your cutting edge scholarship and encouraging your colleagues and students to do so as well. Share the attached graphic far and wide!

Onward and Westward!

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