The Hemingway Letters Project, under the direction of General Editor Sandra Spanier and Associate Editor Verna Kale, invites proposals for the panel "The Hemingway Letters Project: Emerging Research" to be presented at the 21st Biennial Hemingway Conference, July 20-25, 2026 in Toronto.
Six volumes of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway have been published to date, spanning 1907-June 1936. This scholarly edition has allowed access to the author's comprehensive outgoing correspondence, approximately 85% of which is previously unpublished. In its first six volumes the project has made available more than 2000 letters from over 100 repositories and private collections. The editors invite paper proposals from scholars who have made significant use of the Letters in their work in order to highlight the emerging research that the Letters Project has facilitated.
We are especially interested in interdisciplinary engagement with the volumes and welcome proposals from a range of fields and subfields, including but not limited to, bibliography and history of the book, biography and life writing, creative writing, digital humanities and humanities computing, literary criticism, modernist studies, pedagogy, periodical studies and print culture, textual and documentary editing, and popular culture and fandom.
To be considered for the panel, please submit to the panel organizers a short (500-1000 words) description of your project as well as a short professional bio. Your project description should describe your work as a whole, how the Letters have facilitated your research, and what topic or approach your conference presentation will explore. Please indicate if your work is a finished project or a work in progress. In your bio, please include your professional affiliation and, if applicable, your student status or academic rank. We especially welcome proposals from graduate students, postdocs, and early-career scholars, as well as researchers outside the academy whose work reaches a wide general audience.
To ensure fullest consideration, please submit your proposal and bio to Verna Kale (vlk123@psu.edu), cc-ing Sandra Spanier (sxs74@psu.edu), by October 1, 2025. This deadline will allow papers not selected for the Letters Project panel to be resubmitted for consideration for the conference's general call for papers. Proposals already submitted to the general call for papers are still eligible for consideration.