Call for Papers-39th annual MELUS conference

Join us in Los Angeles for the 39th annual MELUS conference!

April 3-6, 2025

Hosted by Cal State LA

Conference Theme: MELUS Outside

Deadline for Abstracts: November 15, 2024

This year’s conference theme, MELUS Outside, reflects the public and community action that gave rise to Ethnic Studies in the United States, the commitment to public good central to Cal State L.A.’s mission, and the shape of Los Angeles itself. Los Angeles is a city of ocean, desert, and mountain, and a city of ethnic enclaves and urban sprawl. Los Angeles is a city marked by homelessness and public pain, and it is a city known for glittering reflections, surfaces, and screens. Los Angeles is a city of cultural creation and racial violence, soaring uplift and ongoing suppression. We invite you to join us in this city of contradiction and complexity, to contribute to it and engage with it as academics and as people of practice, inside academic forums and in the communities outside.

We welcome proposals for panels, papers, and roundtables connected to the conference theme of “MELUS Outside” in the areas of multiethnic literature, culture, and performance broadly imagined; critical analyses, theoretical explorations, and pedagogical and community engaged approaches are all welcome.

MELUS Membership

Note that all those participating in the conference must be MELUS members in good standing by February 1, 2025. If you need to join or renew your membership, please do so by clicking here: http://www.melus.org/members/membership/

For more information about MELUS, The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and to submit an abstract, visit http://www.melus.org. For more information about the MELUS journal, visit https://academic.oup.com/melus. For more information about the Cal State LA’s English department, and its Engaged English curriculum, please visit

https://www.calstatela.edu/al/english.