The Chesnutt Association hosted two exciting panels at the 2025 American Literature Association conference in Boston, May 21-25 2025. In addition to these engaging and well-attended panels, there were two other papers delivered at the conference on the work of Chesnutt.

A Matter of Complexion: A Roundtable Discussion of Tess Chakkalakal’s new biography of Charles W. Chesnutt
Sponsored by the Charles W. Chesnutt Association
Moderator, Bill Hardwig, University of Tennessee
Respondents:

• Stephanie Browner, The New School
• M. Giulia Fabi, University of Ferrara
• Bill Hardwig, University of Tennessee

Followed by the presentation of the 2025 Sylvia Lyons Render Award to Tess Chakkalakal, Bowdoin University. Congratulations!

Current Conversations in Charles W. Chesnutt Scholarship
Organized by the Charles W. Chesnutt Association
Chair: Bill Hardwig, University of Tennessee

• “Contexts and Artifacts: An Intertextual and Multimedia Approach to Teaching ‘Po Sandy,’” Verna Kale, Penn State University
• “Chesnutt’s Revising: ‘The Doll’ in Draft,” Stephanie Browner, The New School
• “Revising Rena and Revisiting The House Behind the Cedars,” Amina Gautier, University of Miami

Other Chesnutt papers at the 2025 ALA

• Sawaya, Francesca, “Melancholic Historicism in Charles Chesnutt” 
• Swann, Ashley.  Transposing Medievalism: Racial Identity and Markers of Whiteness in Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars and Scott’s Ivanhoe”