[Commlist] CFP: “Miss America and Pageants: Gowns, Crowns, & Contradictions”

Rowan University, Glassboro, New Jersey

September 29, 2023

Proposals due by midnight March 12, 2023 to Dr. Katherine Turner 
(atturnerk /at/ rowan.edu) <mailto:(turnerk /at/ rowan.edu)>

Rowan University, a research university of about 22,000 students in 
South New Jersey,

will host this inaugural conference devoted to the phenomenon of beauty 
pageants and other

similar competitions. With this conference, we hope to generate public 
and scholarly

conversations about the complex social, cultural and political meanings 
of Miss America and

other pageants. The conference will also showcase Rowan’s Miss America 
digital archive, a

digital collection of documents, photos, and artifacts from the Miss 
America Organization

collection. This conference is not sponsored by or directly affiliated 
with the Miss America

Organization.

We are planning a one-day conference including keynote speaker Margot 
Mifflin, panels

and roundtable sessions, and a poster session including both physical 
and digital posters. It will

be both streamed and in-person, but we encourage in-person attendance 
when possible.

As scholars, we come here neither to praise the beauty pageant, nor to 
bury it. Our

intention is to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and understanding 
of this American

institution. We especially hope to:

• highlight perspectives from people and groups traditionally excluded 
from pageantry

• integrate the history of mainstream pageants such as Miss America with 
nontraditional

pageants (Black, indigenous, queer, etc)

• explore the dialectic between pageant organizers, participants, and 
critics

• interrogate the competition’s impact, as a largely female-organized 
institution focused on

female participants, on women’s social, cultural, and political status

• explore pageantry through theatrical, performance, and artistic lenses

We invite papers and posters or digital project entries from all 
disciplinary backgrounds,

Including:

History

Communications studies

Film and television studies

Women and gender studies

Childhood studies

Sociology

Anthropology

Literature

Cultural studies

Theatre and performance studies

Papers may be on any topic related to pageants with a United States or 
international focus.

Scholars, teachers, professionals, grad students, and others are invited 
to submit and attend.

Presentations will be delivered in person (virtual presentations may be 
possible in certain

circumstances); attendees may attend in person or virtually.

Presentations should be no more than 20 minutes in length and delivered 
in English. Individual

paper or poster proposals should consist of an abstract (not exceeding 
300 words) and an

80-100 word bio in a single Word or PDF file. Panel proposals should 
include abstracts for 3-4

papers, a brief rationale that connects the papers (100-200 words), and 
biographies of each

participant (80-100 words) in a single pdf or Word file. Please indicate 
if one of you will serve as

panel chair. Successful panel proposals will include participants from 
more than one institution,

and, ideally, a mix of disciplines/fields and career stages.

Submit proposals for papers, panels, or posters to Dr. Katherine Turner 
(atturnerk /at/ rowan.edu) <mailto:(turnerk /at/ rowan.edu)>

by midnight March 12, 2023.

*About Our Keynote Speaker*:

Margot Mifflin is an author and journalist who writes about women’s 
history and the arts. She

wrote the first history of women’s tattoo culture, Bodies of Subversion: 
A Secret History of

Women and Tattoo, and The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman. Her 
book Looking For Miss

America: A Pageant’s 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood, is the first 
feminist cultural history

of the Miss America pageant. Margot’s writing has appeared in The New 
York Times,

Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Vice, The Los Angeles Review of Books, O, 
The Oprah

Magazine, The New Yorker.com, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The 
Washington Post, and

many other publications. Margot is an English professor at Lehman 
College/CUNY and teaches

arts journalism at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.


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