[We are happy to pass along this CFP from our good friends who run the Mormon Studies Group at AAR. In my personal experience, these sessions usually include  some of the most exciting work currently being done in the field.]

The Mormon Studies Group seeks proposals for full sessions or individual papers that consider any aspect of Mormon experience using the methods of critical theory, philosophy, theology, history, sociology, or psychology. This includes the use of Mormonism as a case study for informing larger questions in any of these disciplines and, thus, only indirectly related to the Mormon experience. For 2015 we are particularly interested in proposals addressing international Mormonism and which engage questions of globalization, imperialism, and decolonization.

The 2015 Annual Meeting is November 21-24 in Atlanta, Georgia.  The full CFP can be found at https://papers.aarweb.org/content/welcome.  Proposals are due on March 2, and should be submitted through the AAR PAPERS system (https://papers.aarweb.org/?destination=/node/add/session).   You do NOT have to be a member of AAR to submit a proposal, but if your proposal is accepted you will have to join the AAR (unless your primary field is not religious studies or theology, in which case you may qualify for an exception).  Annual Meeting participants will also have to register for the meeting by June 16.

We especially encourage proposals for full sessions, since it is often difficult to fit individual paper proposals together into coherent sessions.  If you propose a full session, please do your best to make sure that the presenters (and respondent) represent a variety of institutional affiliations, scholarly ranks, and (if appropriate) methodologies.  Also please consider alternatives to the standard three- or four-papers-and-response session structure: perhaps a dialogue, perhaps a panel discussion, perhaps pre-circulated papers?

We hope you’ll share this email widely and encourage your smart friends, sagacious colleagues, and intelligent students to submit proposals.  If you have any questions, please feel free to email one of the Group’s co-chairs: Colleen McDannell (Colleen.McD@utah.edu) or Quincy Newell (qdnewell@uwyo.edu).

We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Quincy D. Newell and Colleen McDannell

Co-chairs, AAR Mormon Studies Group