Volume III, Issue 1 (Summer 2025) CFP

Ampersand: An American Studies Journal

Volume III, No. 2 (Summer 2025)

Disrupting Forms  

Ampersand: An American Studies Journal at Boston University invites scholarly and creative contributions for our next issue, “Disrupting Forms.” Following our emphasis on contingent workers’ narratives of disruption in the university in Vol. III, No. 1, our next volume solicits papers on rupturing, deconstructing, and recreating boundaries of assumed forms within American Studies. Rather than think of form as fixed, this issue embraces the multivalence and elasticity of “form,” and terms related to form such as “formlessness,” “formalism,” and “uni-form” as generative. 

Our volume is in response to the crisis we face in the university and more broadly what we face most urgently in the United States. We believe disrupting concretized modes of thinking can possibly enable coalition building and solidarity. In tandem, American Studies is at the intersection of many departments and already disrupts disciplines, methods, ontologies, and canons. We are inspired by scholars and theorists across many disciplines and eras both within, outside of, or adjacent to American Studies, whose work questions how we frame the world: Victor Shklovsky’s “defamiliarization” as an artistic disruption of the everyday; Susan Sontag’s exploration of camp and the construction of high/low; Ramzi Fawaz’s engagement with queer forms; Octavia Butler’s suggestion of an “open-coalition” as a mode of community construction.

We encourage submissions that consider form as a verb or noun (or something between the two), mode of knowledge production, physical object, style of expression, performance, or approach to research. The historical period, disciplinary approach, method, and topic remain open for contribution, provided the work addresses our theme broadly construed. We prioritize essays from emerging scholars; we believe that fields only move forward and remain relevant when we put graduate students and emerging scholars’ scholarship first. 

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

  • Reflections on the generic forms of scholarship, including the essay, the review, the chapter, the conference paper, etc.
  • Analysis of new forms such as podcasts, social media posts, video essays, etc. or essays, visual, or oral works that refuse assumed or canonized forms 
  • “Conventional” scholarly projects presented in unconventional forms 
  • Interrogations of the role of the academic, disrupting the form of the solitary thinker or small cohort
  • Reviews of recent exhibitions or books that engage with disruption and form

Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words and a short bio (100-150 words), along with your CV, to https://airtable.com/appXyQg3pQrEZnm2T/shrQyIzeRx3Vce6wo.  All abstracts are due by April 1, 2025. Selected contributors will be asked to send completed submissions by early June.