"Love, All": Tending the Tradition

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Call for Papers

Throughout her career, Deborah E. McDowell has stewarded knowledge production pertaining to Black women’s writing and Black Studies scholarship, more broadly. As a scholar, editor, teacher, mentor, and institution builder, McDowell has, in no small part, contributed to the shape of the fields of African American Literary Studies and Black Feminism, through her own intellectual production, pioneering scholarship in areas of Black feminism, literary historiography and scholarly editing, as well as anticipating new trends and fields like memory studies, affect studies, and auto-theory. Her mentorship of students spans all levels of education from high school to undergraduate to post-graduate and doctoral (sometimes continuing to mentor students through each of these phases). As an institution builder, Deborah McDowell transformed the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, inclusive of its residential fellowship program and undergraduate program in African American and African Studies. In no uncertain terms, the Carter G. Woodson Institute would not be what it is today without Deborah McDowell. During her 13-year tenure, McDowell faculty ranks expanded fourfold from 1.5 FTE to 14 core faculty. Under McDowell’s leadership, the undergraduate program in African American and African Studies achieved departmental status. The research Institute garnered competitive grant awards and hosted major symposia on pressing issues such as the prison industrial complex and reparations. As Director of the Woodson Institute, McDowell cultivated a thriving, internationally recognized fellowship program for pre- and post-doctoral fellows, directly supporting an estimated 75 emerging scholars from 2009 to 2022. 

McDowell often remarks that “the work is its own reason for being”, and “the proof is in the pudding.” This conference seeks to enumerate and itemize, amplify and acknowledge, recognize and appreciate the plentitude of “the work,” McDowell’s work, namely the devotion and care to the life reading and teaching. “The work” involves recognizing that the publication of a book itself does not ensure the book will remain in print; the incorporation of Black women’s writing into more traditional academic fields as well as commercial publishing enterprises does not immunize the work from “threat or total extinction,” languishing in obscurity; the presence of a research institute committed to Black Studies at a major southern University does not, in itself, guarantee that research and teaching about the lives and experiences of people across the global African Diaspora will be recognized as significant, as meriting the attention and investment needed to preserve its longevity.     

In a 2024 article “Tending the Tradition: Gayl Jones and the Beacon Black Women Writers Series,” Deborah E. McDowell details the vital work of publishing literature by Black women writers in the 1980s, focusing on the reprinting of Gayl Jones’s first two novels in the Beacon Black Women Writer Series. McDowell foregrounds the intellectual labor and transformative vision of a committed cohort of Black feminists, of which McDowell herself is a part, for whom the oft touted “Black women’s literary renaissance” was in no way guaranteed. Detailing the political and cultural stakes of keeping Black women’s writing in print, in curricula, and in public discussion, McDowell brings to attention the largely absented work of Black women critics and scholars whose intellectual labor was essential to the widespread popularization of writing by Black women in academia and the publishing industry alike. The act of “Tending the Tradition” foregrounds “tending” as a perennial process that find expression in the five concepts that organize the article’s section headers: “devotion,” “care work,” “reading,” “teaching,” and “afterlife.” These themes suggest common scholarly activities (reading and teaching), the way intellectual activity itself channels an ethos (devotion and “care work”), and the activity of mining/minding history, even the recent past, as an “afterlife” that influences the present. 

To steward a Black literary, intellectual, and feminist tradition, as Deborah E. McDowell has done so carefully, is to practice a salvaged love—not as sentimentality but as a mode of attention and form of ethical engagement that refuses erasure, embraces complexity without resolution, and tends to the wounded archives and living textures of Black life with an ethic of care that is at once rigorous, insurgent, and tender; and in return, such stewardship is to be held in a reciprocal embrace by those who recognize, across time and struggle, the quiet, radical devotion of a life spent loving this tradition into continued existence. That recognition and love are felt from all corners (Love, All).

McDowell grew up Bessemer, Alabama, a steel town in the segregated South. At age ten, she stood out as a precocious public speaker, winning ‘recitation’ competitions for which she memorized long literary passages and orations. The first member of her family to attend college, Deborah’s love of words and literature carried her through a B.A. in English at Tuskegee Institute and graduate school at Purdue University. In her first teaching position, McDowell developed some of the first and only courses on Black Women Writers offered by the liberal arts college in Maine, a commitment she continued as a professor of English at the flagship public University of the Commonwealth of Virginia. During her 39-year tenure at the University of Virginia, McDowell’s influence has been transformational. As she moves from distinguished chaired professor to Professor Emerita, this conference provides a venue to recognize, give thanks, and celebrate all of the ways Deborah McDowell has kept the tradition alive. 

We invite papers that address McDowell’s wide-ranging and interdisciplinary contributions to the field of Black feminism, African American Literary criticism and theory, Black Studies scholarship, scholarly publishing, and critical university studies. We also invite proposals for creative “interludes” that foreground dramatic readings, music and/or performance. We plan to create eight thematic panels that each address one aspect of Deborah’s multi-faceted career:

*Deborah E. McDowell as Scholar

*Deborah E. McDowell as Institution-builder

*Deborah E. McDowell as Teacher

*Deborah E. McDowell as Mentor

*Deborah E. McDowell as Editor

*Deborah E. McDowell as Activist

*Deborah E. McDowell as Friend & Colleague

*Deborah E. McDowell as Local Community Member

Sponsorships and Organizers

To contribute sponsorship funds to this event, please contact mcdowell2026@virginia.edu

Organizers:

The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies

The Department of English

Program Committee:

Sandy Alexandre, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (program committee co-chair)

Robert Trent Vinson, University of Virginia (program committee co-chair)

Nicole Burrowes, Rutgers University

Mary Ellen Curtin, American University

Benjamin Fagan, Auburn University

Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton, University of Virginia

Tera Hunter, Princeton University

LaTasha, Levy, Howard University

Timothy Lovelace, Duke University

Rosemary, Millar, University of North Carolina, School of the Arts

Bryan Wagner, University of California, Berkeley

Local Arrangements Committee:

Mrinalini Chakravorty, University of Virginia

Susan Fraiman, University of Virginia

Sandhya Shukla, University of Virginia

Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia

Lisa Woolfork, University of Virginia