Surfacing for the first time in a while!
Hi!
Sorry I disappeared for a while, but it was the Last Big Push to finish the manuscript for an anthology on racism and Tolkien: it was the second completed anthology in four months (the first one was Queer approaches to Tolkien, and I had two co-editors on that one which made things easier).
I am not going to put any specific information in public yet (not until peer review is over, and we’re finalizing things for publication with McFarland). But I’m happy (exhausted but happy!) to have them both off my desk! And I promise you’ll be hearing more when we get closer to really finishing!
By “finish” now, I mean finished and submitted for peer review; and while “four months” may seem hardly anytime at all, I started working on both anthologies before Covid crashed into the world, before I retired, and before we escaped from Texas. So it’s been more like seven-eight years (on and off, as these things work).
At some point I’ll try to describe the unique experience of writing introductions for these anthologies [which have many of the 27 Forbidden Words Which May Jeopardize Funding in the U.S.]1 over last few months of 2024 and the first two months of 2025. No promises when: all I can say now is that I had to revise drafts in ways I’ve never had to before!
I now have more time to work on my other projects (posts about those will be coming soon), but first some reminders of online conferences that I highly recommend for those interested in writing about Tolkien. Even if you have not presented before, both these are great “first conferences” to start with.
Mythopoeic Society:
You can still submit a proposal to present at OMS 2025, but you can also register now for the [Online] Mythopoeic Society’s Online Midsummer Seminar: More Perilous and Fair: Women in Mythopoeic Fantasy!
Overview (Information); Call for Papers; Registration
As one of the three organizers, I can say we’re getting amazing proposals! Deadline for submitting your proposal is March 31, 2025.
Tolkien Society:
You can also submit a proposal (deadline March 28, 2025) for the Tolkien Society’s free online seminar 2025, “Arda’s Entangled Bodies and Environments,” which I posted about earlier. The first link leads to the Tolkien Society page, the second to my post here on Subtstack.
Well, we’re almost all humanities types, so rarely get federal funding anyway! I am not saying this to make light of the full-out catastrophically fucked over death march tearing through the federal government, education, and even private businesses (so much for “corporate personhood), but “woke” “humanities” research and teaching has been under attack in the U.S. from the various iterations of the neo-fascist right-wing regimes since at least the 1980s and has only gotten worse in this century. I am taking refuge in some gallows humor. I am lucky to be retired. I worry about my friends still teaching. ↩
