Dear all,
Please consider submitting abstracts for a guaranteed stream of panels on Early American Environments to be held at next year’s Society of Early Americanists conference (March 18-20, 2027, Chicago; https://www.societyofearlyamericanists.org/conferences/upcoming). We are interested in scholarship that considers questions of environment and ecology in the early Americas, broadly defined to include the transatlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific worlds. How are concerns such as climate change, extractivism, and environmental justice or methodologies such as ecocriticism shaping our reading of early American texts and materials? How might conversations in early American studies contribute to the expanding field of the environmental humanities? Listed below are brief descriptions of proposed panels, but please feel free to submit if your work leans toward the environmental but falls outside of these topics.
Early Indigenous Environments
This panel asks how early American literatures conceptualize Indigenous environments as dynamic, relational, and contested domains, foregrounding Indigenous epistemologies of land while remaining attentive to broader environmental approaches within the field. We welcome work on both Indigenous-authored texts and settler archives that engage, represent, or attempt to theorize Indigenous environments as sites of knowledge, survival, dispossession, and relation. More broadly, the panel seeks to connect Indigenous environments to early American literary study across diverse geographies, archives, and methodological approaches.
Plantation Agricultures and Settings
In “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Sylvia Wynter draws a dichotomy between the plantation, where exchange value and market forces posited “Man” as the aliened master of “Nature,” and the plots of land on which enslaved people grew their own food, sites of alternative, “autochthonous” environmental relations that resisted those of the plantation system. Building off of this distinction, this panel seeks to consider the environments of early American plantations, asking what other environmental practices shaped possibilities for control and resistance within these spaces. We welcome papers that take a variety of approaches to environmental aspects of the plantation broadly defined, extending from, for instance, Bradford’s settlement at Plymouth to the Caribbean.
Industry and Extraction
This panel considers the intersection of industrialization and environmental change. Rather than viewing industrialization as antithetical to agrarian economies, this panel positions industrialization in the Early Americas as a driving force behind plantation monoculture and colonial extraction. We welcome papers which examine the many forms of infrastructure, technology, and trade which shaped the plantation industrial complex. Proposals might consider, for example, New England deforestation and the molasses trade, the life-cycle of the cane plant and its influence of architecture, textiles, shipping ports, the sugar mill, soil, timber, and, of course, writing.
Plants, Animals, and Forms of Life
This panel seeks to explore the presence of non-human life in early American environments. What role do plants and animals play in the literature and history of the early Americas? What are the forms of life that interact with, ignore, or decenter the human in early American writing? Topics discussed might include natural histories, the global trade of plants and animals, scientific or philosophical theories of life, animal studies, ecologies, and non-human worlds, among others.
Please send a 250-word abstract to Sheila Byers (sheila.byers@ell.ox.ac.uk); Antonia Halsted (Antonia_Halstead@brown.edu); or Lloyd Sy (lloydkevin.sy@yale.edu) by April 27, 2026. Because we would like each panel to include scholars from a variety of backgrounds and career paths, please also include, if applicable, your institutional affiliation and position.
