On March 14, 2024, we gather in Pasadena at the 2024 C19 Eighth Biennial Conference for a roundtable organized by the Margaret Fuller Society on “Refusing Foreclosures and Endings: 19C Women Writers’ Defiance, Persistence, and… More
CFP: Margaret Fuller, Women in the 19C, and Resilience
Panel for the Thoreau Gathering in Concord, MA, July 10-14, 2024
Margaret Fuller both overcame odds and recognized the virtue of resilience in others. “Resilience” is the theme of this year’s Thoreau Gathering, and the organizers suggest four categories for considering this strength: ecological, cultural/political, personal/spiritual, and legacy. With some major differences from Thoreau, these same categories are helpful with Fuller, and in our annual contribution to the Gathering we invite presentations approaching her and likeminded women writers in her circles that also draw on one of these kinds of resilience.
–Ecological: any particular encounter by Fuller with nature in the U.S. or Europe, expressed in prose or poetry; interpretation of the American West as a scene of new energy for settlers and/or possible defeat for Native Americans in Summer on the Lakes.
–Cultural/political: Fuller’s self-education in response to gendered limits placed on institutional schooling; leadership of Conversations as a result of this learning or lesson to women in attendance; any particular mythic or historic example of resilience in Conversations or Woman in the Nineteenth Century; encounters with new social realities in New York City or Europe; possibilities of victory beyond defeat in the Italian Revolution.
–Personal/spiritual: reflections on her experience of mourning and its overcoming; the burdens of a daughter in her family; illness and health; love lost and gained; the search for vocation in a gender-constricted world; religious doubts and epiphanies; personal belief as expressed in published or personal writing.
–Legacy: Fuller’s presence and power of inspiration in the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement or the circles around her; recovery in the 1960s and since as a voice within contemporary feminism or the canon of Transcendentalism. Examples of the costs of resilience or survival might also be considered. Comparison of Fuller with another writer in her circle, or personal statements of her value for one’s own resilience, are also welcome. Early career scholars and graduate students are especially encouraged to apply, and inquiries are encouraged by any applicant.
Proposals are due by December 8, 2023—please send to Phyllis Cole (pbc2 [at] psu [ dot] edu) and Christina Katopodis (katopodis [dot] christina [at] gmail [dot] com).
CFP for C19: “Refusing Foreclosures and Endings: 19C Women Writers’ Defiance, Persistence, and Resilience” (Pasadena, CA)
The Margaret Fuller Society seeks to form a panel for the March 2024 C19 conference in Pasadena, CA: “Refusing Foreclosures and Endings: 19C Women Writers’ Defiance, Persistence, and Resilience.”
We invite abstracts of no more than 250 words that engage with Fuller and/or other 19C women writers (American and otherwise) as well as the conference theme—”The End.” Papers might consider the following topics, among numerous possibilities:
- untimely ends
- refusing endings
- playing with traditional narrative or poetic endings
- various means to—or around—an end
- reform efforts as well as their imperfections and limits
- failed revolutions
- critiques of “resilience,” as theorized and applied
- finishing schools or crossing finish lines
- finishing as orgasm
- abortion, broadly conceived
- ways around, through, or under seemingly insuperable barriers—including structural racism
- ways in which this new generation of students and faculty are challenging us to change the ends or goals of American literature syllabi
Early career scholars are especially encouraged to apply. Please send proposals and questions via this form by August 26.
Join us at MLA 2024 for a Social Justice Pedagogy Panel on “Mutual Transformation”
The Margaret Fuller Society is sponsoring a panel on “Mutual Transformation: The Social Justice Classroom in the Nineteenth Century and Today,” organized by the MFS Racial Justice Committee. The presider for the panel will be Dr. Christina Katopodis (City University of New York), co-author with Cathy N. Davidson of The New College Classroom (Harvard UP, 2022). We have an exciting lineup of panel presentations:
“From Self-Reliance to Self-Care: Transcendentalism and Social Justice in the Classroom,” Jess Libow (Haverford C)
“Breath-taking Pedagogy and the Practice of Hope: Course Design and Teaching a BLM Literature Course,” Shermaine Jones (Virginia Commonwealth U)
“Fuller-Inspired Conversations on School Curriculum Battles and Wheatley-Linked Public Humanities,” Sarah Ruffing Robbins (TCU)
“A Mind Afire: Marie Duclos Fretageot and a Forgotten Frontier of American Progressive Education,” Diane Baia Hale (Independent Scholar)
Featured image via Hidden City
Happy Birthday, Margaret Fuller! A Fundraiser
Happy Birthday Margaret!
Please join us in celebrating Margaret’s 213th Birthday!
We would like to celebrate together the enduring and strengthening presence of Margaret Fuller in our lives!
And, thanks to our baker extraordinaire, Christina Katopodis, we have a most beautiful (virtual, alas!) cake inspired by Fuller’s short story, “Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,” to do so.
For Margaret’s birthday please consider a donation to support the projects we deeply care about.
As you know, we just inaugurated our first award (the Margaret Fuller Society Awards for Racial Justice, won by Jess Libow), and your help will raise funds to support Margaret Fuller’s Neighborhood House, the MFS Award for Racial Justice, and more financial aid for early career scholars.
Gifts of all sizes are deeply appreciated, with a special preference for Fuller’s birth date, in the amount of $21.30 or its multiples ($213) and other combinations!
Please enjoy this Margaret Fuller Society bookmark. You can print it out and use it right away.
Thank you!
MFS at the 2023 Thoreau Society Annual Gathering in Concord, MA
This summer the Margaret Fuller Society is sponsoring a panel, “Margaret Fuller: Westward to the Lakes, Eastward to Europe,” at the 82nd Thoreau Society Annual Gathering in Concord, MA. Phyllis Blum Cole will be chairing the panel.
The conference theme is “Thoreau and the Politics of Extinction.” You can register for the conference here.
Below offers you a preview of the panel’s papers. We hope to see you in Concord!
Albena Bakratcheva (New Bulgarian University) will be presenting “‘Wherever the Hog Comes, the Rattlesnake Disappears,’ or ‘Sic Transit Gloria Ruris’: Fuller and Thoreau on Civilization and/as Extinction.” In her Summer on the Lakes in 1843 Margaret Fuller regretfully foresaw that the settlers’ “mode of civilization will, in the course of twenty, perhaps ten, years, obliterate the natural expression of the country.” Such would be Henry Thoreau’s concern ever since (if not even before) he set off to Walden Pond in 1845; year after year this concern would only intensify, with Thoreau witnessing how “the wild fruit of the earth disappear before civilization” and “the whole country becomes a town or beaten common,” as noted in the 1858 Journal. Both authors considered the tendency of our civilization inevitable. This paper will focus on the proto-environmental thinking/awareness indicated by Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes (her only work of the kind) and will try to envision such direction of discourse as suggesting (and itself providing) a certain immediate intellectual/literary context in which Thoreau’s own environmental imagination will very shortly thrive and triumph.
In “Margaret Fuller’s Radical Optimism: Westward to the Mexican-American War, Eastward to the Italian Revolution” Christina Katopodis (Transformative Learning in the Humanities, City University of New York) considers connections between Fuller’s response to the Mexican-American War and the Italian Revolution, looking especially at her letters from 1846-1850, as well as her commentary on abolitionists such as her 1845 review of Frederick Douglass’ Narrative. Katopodis frames Fuller’s more political writings within the context of her radical optimism, revisiting arguments about Fuller as a democratic theorist made by Charles Capper and David M. Robinson. Katopodis argues that Fuller’s radical optimism shaped the political movement that was American Transcendentalism, pushing her contemporaries further in the direction of social justice as the movement’s ultimate goal. Moreover, today, we stand to learn from Fuller’s radical optimism—optimism as a choice one must make daily in the face of adversity and oppression, a kind of early American pragmatism that is inherently activist in nature, as Katopodis contends.
Gerard Holmes (University of Maryland) in “George Sand’s Consuelo Novels and Margaret Fuller’s Improvised Work-Life” argues that Fuller’s adoption of a wandering, and ultimately revolutionary, persona as she traveled across Europe is informed by her reading of George Sand’s 1841 novel Consuelo and its 1843 sequel La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, and by meeting Sand in 1847. Long out of print in English and dismissed by English-language critics by the end of the nineteenth century, Consuelo was profoundly important to New England writers even before its first American translation in 1845. Fuller read the two novels in French, and discussed them in a January 1845 essay about contemporary French fiction. She then reviewed Consuelo in translation twice, first during its serial publication in the Brook Farm-produced periodical The Harbinger, in 1845, and when published by the prestigious Boston firm William Ticknor and Co. the next year. In the 1846 review, Fuller called Sand “the best living French writer, and in some respects the best living prose writer.” Consuelo was deemed important by Fuller and the Brook Farmers not only artistically, but also in promoting associationist social reform. Fuller wrote in 1846 that the “great influence” of Consuelo would be in recording “some of the mystical apparitions and attempts to solve some of the problems of the time.”
In her presentation on “Heroes, Legends, and Sex: Narrative Structure in Fuller’s Sumer on the Lakes,” Megan Spring (Florida Atlantic University) will argue that traditional narrative structure is inherently phallic, mimicking the sexual experience of a heterosexual man while Fuller’s narrative structure in Summer on the Lakes is reminiscent of the female orgasm. Through this argument, Spring analyzes Fuller’s unsystematic style in Summer, most often a point of contention for many literary scholars and a reason why she isn’t better known. Thus, Spring asserts that through Fuller’s narrative structure in Summer, she subverts an inherently patriarchal America by asserting an American cultural identity specifically for women in the 19th century prior to her most famous work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century.
Join us in Boston for ALA!
The Margaret Fuller Society is pleased to announce we are sponsoring two exciting panels at this year’s American Literature Association conference in Boston, MA. Both panels will take place on Saturday, May 27, 2023.
Foundations for the “World at Large”: Women Authors and Their Homes I (Chair: Jana Argersinger) [Session 18-E at 1:00pm – 2:20pm]
Phyllis Cole, “The Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House: Our Author’s Birthplace as a Social Service Center”
Anna De Biasio, “A Crowded House: Family Ties, Independence, and Authorship in L. M. Alcott”
Jan Turnquist, “Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House—Where Creativity, Hope, and Inspiration Abide”
Jennifer Daly, “(Re)Claiming Women’s Intellectual Space: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s Book Room”
Katherine Lynes, “‘a policeman he wanted me / to behave’: Gardens and Home in Black Ecopoetics”
Foundations for the “World at Large”: Women Authors and Their Homes II (Chair: Sonia Di Loreto) [Session 19-F at 2:30pm – 3:50pm]
Marco Sioli, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s House and the Women’s Rights National Historical Park at Seneca Falls, N.Y.”
Ariel Silver, “‘The Center of the Rebellion’: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Her New York Homes”
Divya Nair, “168 Brattle St., Swami Vivekananda, and Sara Chapman Bull’s Cambridge Conferences”
Summer Hamilton, “Locating the Discursive Impetus behind June Jordan’s Construction of Home in Soldier”
Annika Berry, “maybe I could be @home: Untangling the Archive of S. Paige Baty (1961-1997)”
A Margaret Fuller Society business meeting will be held on the same day at 5:30pm.
You can register for the conference here.
Image via Wikimedia.
Call for Papers for MLA 2024: A Social Justice Pedagogy Panel
Deadline for Submissions: March 1, 2023
Contact: argerj@gmail.com
The Margaret Fuller Society will sponsor a panel at the 2024 Modern Language Association Convention in Philadelphia, to be held 4-7 January 2024. Please send 250-word proposals (indicating AV needs), along with brief biographical statements, to Jana Argersinger, First Vice President, at argerj@gmail.com. Submissions from graduate students are most welcome.
For conference details, click here (opens in new window).
Mutual Transformation: The Social Justice Classroom in the Nineteenth Century and Today
The Fuller Society’s Committee for Racial Justice invites paper proposals on social justice pedagogies past and present—from approaches developed in early schoolhouses to the strategies of teacher-scholars in today’s classrooms. The panel especially invites proposals that connect theory and practices of antiracist pedagogy so named to earlier theories and practices that have been labeled progressive, feminist, queer, social justice, or active learning. It is important to remember these progressive pedagogies as we work to transform American literary studies and make the university more equitable and just in support of social change.
Rather than dictating or lecturing in her 1839–1844 Boston Conversations, Margaret Fuller led open dialogues among women meant to empower them to think for themselves, practicing an early form of social justice pedagogy. Her purpose was to discover “what we [she and her pupils] may mutually mean.” Today, her forward-thinking feminist methods resonate with the progressive pedagogies of June Jordan and Felicia Rose Chavez, among others. Her model of “mutual meaning,” or co-learning, whereby participants arrive at conclusions through an open-ended process of self-discovery, anticipates Maria Montessori and John Dewey. But it is often forgotten that Fuller’s Conversations were themselves anticipated by conversational pedagogies in such associations for mutual “improvement” as the African-American Female Intelligence Society of Boston and the Female Literary Association of Philadelphia, where Sarah Douglass recommended that the group reading, conversation, and writing “be altogether directed to the subject of slavery.”
Much of today’s higher education descends from the nineteenth century—not from progressive educators but from the industrial revolution and eugenicists who made the modern university a training ground for factory workers through the passive “banking model” of education (in Paulo Freire’s terms). Cathy N. Davidson and Christina Katopodis, in their recent book The New College Classroom (Harvard UP, 2022), argue for the crucial role that active learning plays in structuring equity into our classrooms, going beyond inclusion to antiracist praxis. This panel takes up the book’s invitation to change by uplifting progressive pedagogues and calling for presentations that seek to transform us.
Possible topics:
- Literary representations of learning
- Literary products of progressive or radical pedagogy
- Early historical examples of social justice pedagogies (e.g., African American literary associations, Boston Conversations, Hull House)
- Antiracist teaching, including course and/or assignment design inspired by Fuller (or her limitations) or by contemporary writing that helps us to be in dialogue with her
- Women’s education and issues of race
- Black Panther Party Liberation Schools
- Talks to teachers (e.g., William James, James Baldwin)
- Teaching diaries (e.g., Audre Lorde’s)
- Progressive pedagogical theories (from Elizabeth Peabody to Maria Montessori to bell hooks) put into practice
- Practical examples of lessons learned from the antiracist classroom
- Specific activities that have been particularly effective in structuring equity into a class
- Trauma-informed pedagogies of care
- Culturally responsive teaching methods
Note that while we, of course, welcome proposals that engage with Fuller’s work, Fuller need not be included for your proposal to be considered.
“Conditions of Exile in the Nineteenth-Century and Beyond” at MLA 2023 (Event Recap)
In early January 2023, we gathered in San Francisco for the MLA convention where the Margaret Fuller Society sponsored a panel on Conditions of Exile in the Nineteenth-Century and Beyond. (Read the original call for papers here.)
Dr. Christina Katopodis presided the panel, which included papers by Marlas Yvonne Whitley, who is a graduate student at North Carolina State University; Sabrina Evans is an ABD PhD candidate in the English and African American and Diaspora Studies Dual-Title Program at Penn State University; Thomas W. Howard, who is a Ph.D. candidate in English and American Literature at Washington University in St. Louis; and Dr. Stephanie Peebles Tavera, who is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University–Central Texas.
In her presentation on “Trying to Transcend: Black Escape and Transnation from The Colored Conventions to the Harlem Renaissance,” Whitley worked toward a rhetorical and aesthetic genealogy of Black transcendence of racism and white supremacy, and what it means to theorize such a concept as we continue necessary conversations on racism and anti-Blackness in the U.S. (Read the full paper abstract here.)
Evans, focusing primarily on Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells in “Exile and the Perils of Travel: The Challenges Behind Nineteenth-Century Black Women Organizers’ Fight for Dignity,” argued that in exploring the tensions between their public activism, the perils of travel, and exile within their published and private writings, Black women organizers challenged and redefined what dignity meant for Black women. (Read the full abstract here.)
In “Du Bois in Berlin, Du Bois in Atlanta: The Affect of Exile in The Souls of Black Folk,” Howard examined Du Bois’s later writings and influences from Germany and Ghana, showing that Du Bois does not simply reveal international influences, but rather he writes from within the tradition of the
German aphorism (Aphorismus), especially within his passage on “double-consciousness.” His
unique vision as an African American returning from Germany thus allows him to see how
African spiritual traditions co-create “American culture” alongside the white “other world.” (Read the full abstract here.)
Dr. Tavera in “Exile’s Persistence: Margaret Fuller and the Public Trauma Culture of Expat Paris” located the evolution of a public trauma culture in the traditions of women’s travel writings, especially those of Margaret Fuller who served as a foreign correspondent and hospital volunteer during the Risorgimento (circa 1847-49). Dr. Tavera showed that just as Fuller re-formed American audiences’ perceptions of Italy from an arcadian landscape to a site of Republican values using wartime trauma as an opportunity for grieving, women writers of high modernism re-formed audiences’ perceptions of Paris as the site of a decade-long soiree where anything goes in the wake of a grieving postwar generation. Women writers of high modernism capitalized on the transatlantic tradition of turning grief into grievance against a culture that refused to reconcile with difference. (Read the full abstract here.)
The papers encouraged us to see the self-determination and individualism in American Transcendentalism(s) as reliant on collectivity, collaboration, and friendship, being in conversation. Discussion included parallels drawn between the AME church and Unitarian communities; exile as relief and as a self-constructed place or self-determined location; the environment as an internal reality (James Baldwin); William Jamesian stream of consciousness as a movement between individual thought to collective thinking and back; and tenderness with ourselves and with others in public trauma narratives.
Calling for Papers for the 2023 American Literature Association Conference in Boston
Deadline for Submissions: 10 January 2023
Contact: argerj@gmail.com
The Margaret Fuller Society will sponsor two panels at the 34th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association, to be held 25–28 May 2023 at The Westin Copley Place in Boston. Please send 250-word proposals (indicating AV needs), along with brief biographical statements, to Jana Argersinger, First Vice President, at argerj@gmail.com. Submissions from graduate students are most welcome.
For conference details, click here (opens in new window).
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TWO SESSIONS
Foundations for the “World at Large”: Women Authors and Their Homes
“No home can be healthful in which are not cherished seeds of good for the world at large.”
— Margaret Fuller, New-York Tribune, 12 December 1844
The Fuller Society invites ideas for a panel that will explore the historic residences of female US authors and leaders of thought. Our author’s childhood home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has for 120 years served as a neighborhood center that provides empowering community services (https://margaretfullerhouse.org/), a mission in close keeping with Fuller’s own commitments—and one that also invites us to study how her contemporaries and inheritors have worked toward antiracist justice in ways her writing only begins to imagine.
What, we would like to ask, are the possible meanings and uses of the former dwelling places of women authors and intellectuals—whether maintained as museums, recognized with historic markers or street names, preserved as National Historic Landmarks and run as active public institutions like the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House, held in private ownership, or still standing only in text and memory? How does lack of property rights for married women and people of color in the nineteenth century bear on the matter? What of indigenous and enslaved or formerly enslaved writers for whom habitation could be troubled, impermanent, or simply modeled on a different—non-Western—concept of home?
We welcome proposals from folks associated in any way with an author’s house in any region of the US: directors and staff of houses themselves, members of societies that honor the authors who lived there—or who left only textual traces of home—and others with scholarly interest in the subject. Scholars and society members might team up with house representatives for joint presentations. Indeed, as part of our antiracist work, the Fuller Society is learning how to partner with other author societies and institutions that honor the legacies of nineteenth-century women intellectuals and reformers. Houses of interest include those of Anna Julia Cooper, Charlotte Forten Grimke, Louisa May Alcott, Frances E. W. Harper, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Jane Addams, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Laura Ingalls Wilder—and of course Margaret Fuller—among numerous others.
Possible topics:
- the public-facing work undertaken by historic author houses, and its relation, if any, to the work of the author
- factors influencing whether an author’s house is preserved as such or not
- the work of recovering houses and places associated with women intellectuals, in relation to literary scholarship
- the meanings of home to writers for whom experiences of residence are troubled
- archaeological recoveries associated with enslaved women’s homes or places of refuge
- threats to home and neighborhood (e.g., Africatown, Alabama, and its preservation foundation)
- the diversity of forms that habitation can take, and how that can inform, enable, or inhibit writers’ work (e.g., boardinghouses, shelters, asylums, orphanages)
- personal places of residence memorialized in authors’ texts, whether treated autobiographically or fictionally
Original image was contributed to Wikimedia Commons by Boston Public Library as part of a cooperation project. The donation was facilitated by the Digital Public Library of America, via its partner Digital Commonwealth. DPLA identifier: 11f2d8aa0c9e86a401387524f30f986aBoston Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98785749
The Margaret Fuller Society Announces a Teaching Award to Support Racial Justice
Teaching to Racial Justice with Margaret Fuller
The Committee on Racial Justice welcomes entries that:
–outline a syllabus including writing by Margaret Fuller and explain how Fuller’s work fits into the semester’s aims, including support of racial justice.
–describe a classroom activity or series of exercises that use Fuller’s writing to teach to issues of racial justice.
–detail a paper assignment that focuses on racial justice and engages Fuller’s writing.
–plan a community project that addresses racial justice and Fuller’s writing.
–propose a nontraditional pedagogical approach to racial justice issues through Fuller’s writing.
We especially encourage entries that engage critical race theory. We welcome submissions from both members and non-members of the Society and urge graduate students to consider submitting.
Submission Requirements
Submissions should be limited to one page.
The winning submission, as judged by the Society’s Committee on Racial Justice, will receive a small monetary award and publication in Conversations, the newsletter of the Margaret Fuller Society. The award will be presented at the annual conference of the American Literature Association.
Send submissions to avallone000@gmail.com. Deadline: 10 April 2023
