This year the Margaret Fuller Society (MFS) is spending time getting to know its leaders and members who live all over the world. This month we honor the work of MFS Board Member and Racial… More
MFS at the 2024 Thoreau Society Annual Gathering
The Margaret Fuller Society sponsored a panel on “Margaret Fuller, Women in the 19C, and Resilience” at the Thoreau Society Gathering held in Concord, MA on Thursday, July 11, 2024. Read the full CFP here (opens in new tab). The panel, co-organized by MFS Past President Phyllis Cole and MFS Second Vice President Christina Katopodis, was very well-attended and followed by a robust, engaging discussion with the audience. The papers were as follows:
“The Body Resilient: Margaret Fuller’s Materialist Transcendentalism” by Johanna Pitetti-Heil
Johanna Pitetti-Heil is an American studies scholar with a specific research interest in literary studies and cultural theory, critical dance dance studies, feminist philosophy, and, most recently, transcendentalism. She is a (tenured) senior lecturer for gender and diversity studies at the English Department of the University of Cologne, Germany. She is co-editor of gender forum and she is a board member of SLSAeu. She is the author of Walking the Möbius Strip: An Inquiry into Knowing in Richard Powers Fiction (Winter, 2016), and her work in American literary and cultural studies, including critical dance studies, has appeared in journals such as Dance Chronicle, Hypatia, Amerikastudien / American Studies, WiN, the forum of J19, and in edited collections. She passed the Habilitation review process in 2024 and is currently preparing her second book manuscript “Becoming-Body: Practices of Freedom and Technologies of the Self in American Modern Dance.”
Johanna spoke about the linkage between materially real bodies (and body pains) and Fuller’s philosophy, reminding us that Fuller did not always put the soul over matter. She theorizes Fuller’s materialist transcendentalism, drawing from new materialism.
“Women Transcendentalists in the Publishing World: Margaret Fuller and Caroline Healey Dall’s Stories of Resilience” by Alice de Galzain
Alice de Galzain completed her PhD in English at the University of Edinburgh, where her dissertation focused on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s portrayal of Margaret Fuller in Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852). She is about to begin a postdoc at Sorbonne University, working on “Women Networks and Transcendentalist Utopias: Health, Gender, and Reform.” Alice is the Associate Editor of The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies and the Associate Editor of Margaret Fuller, Periodical and Other Writings, 1834-1844, The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Writings of Margaret Fuller. Her article on “Transcendentalist Women in Conversation: Margaret Fuller, Sophia Ripley, and ‘Woman’” appeared in Transatlantica: American Studies Journal in 2022, and she has two essays due to appear in Legacy and LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory later this year.
Alice spoke about how women’s overwork gets written into their sentences, notes their shortness, the integration of life and work writing in the same spaces. She spoke about the precarity and burdens of editorship, that Fuller and Dall were lied to, undercompensated, and, yet, remained committed to the written word.
“Resilience in Fuller’s Friendships with Arconati and Belgiojoso” by Patricia Richards
Patricia Lyn Richards earned her PhD in Italian literature from Rutgers University and has taught for several decades at Kenyon College in Ohio. Though her field was the Renaissance, she later moved into film, and recently discovered the intriguing complexity of the nineteenth century, while researching a paper on both the men and women Fuller was closest to in Italy.
Patricia spoke about friendship (in concept and in practice), focusing on Fuller’s friendships with two women in Italy. She detailed how these two women contemporaries offered Fuller examples of supportive friendships: they offered her solace, information, and the opportunity for action, giving reality to her philosophy of gender.
The panel was followed by a ceremony honoring MFS Past President Phyllis Cole, who was awarded the Thoreau Society Medal, the society’s highest honor, as well as a dinner at Fiorella’s Cucina organized by MFS Second Vice President Christina Katopodis.
Congratulations to MFS Past President, Phyllis Cole, Thoreau Society Medal Awardee
On July 11, 2024, at the 2024 Thoreau Society Annual Gathering, MFS Past President Phyllis Cole was awarded the Thoreau Society Medal, the society’s highest honor. MFS Second Vice President Christina Katopodis read a statement honoring Dr. Cole:
The Thoreau Society confers its highest honor, the Thoreau Society Medal, in recognition of “sustained, essential contributions to the legacy and vitality of Thoreauvian studies and ideals through extraordinary scholarship or service.” This year, we are delighted to extend this award to Dr. Phyllis Blum Cole.
Dr. Cole has had a distinguished career as a ground-breaking researcher, writer, editor, organizational leader, and professor. Her book, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History altered the landscape of Transcendentalism. In Bob Gross’s words, it is “a triumph of archival investigation” that “altered scholarship in several fields at once – Transcendentalism, New England’s religious and intellectual history, and women’s history.” Her discoveries in the archives reading Mary Moody’s “Almanacks” resulted in a book providing graceful translation of those works for a public audience and restored “Mary Moody Emerson “to the canon of the early republic.” Dr. Cole’s expert scholarship on women has shown us that, “In many ways Transcendentalism was a women’s world, both in the Thoreau household and in Concord and Boston” (Gross).
In awarding the Thoreau Society Medal to Dr. Cole, we celebrate not only the gifts she has brought us through her research and writing but also her trail-blazing leadership as a woman in academia. Her editorship, mentorship, and colleagueship—for example, her co-edited collection (with Jana Argersinger) Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism—has attracted the attention of early career women and gender nonconforming scholars, ringing a bell to announce that scholarship by women, and for women, and about women—including queer, trans, and nonbinary women—is not only welcomed but also essential to understanding Transcendentalism. Without Dr. Cole, I would not have seen a place for me here. It wasn’t until attending one of her panels at MLA in 2018, that I felt I had found my people, the people who make an academic life joyful and worth the struggle. Dr. Cole has served as President of the Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller Societies, as well as on the Board of Directors of the Thoreau Society, where she helped organize Annual Gatherings and guide the Society’s collections and fellowship awards. She has contributed to modernizing these important institutions through which we gather, learn, and commune.
It is impossible to convey all the ways in which Dr. Cole is deserving of recognition and the many scholars and writers she has influenced, so I mention just a few. (And I’ve collected pages and pages more from your colleagues and friends who share a glittering of admiration, love, gratitude, and congratulations, that I will share with you after the gathering.) Megan Marshall writes of Phyllis’s [quote] “extraordinary skill and brilliance as a writer of scholarly prose . . . incomparable in her ability to write with both urgency and insight.” Noelle Baker emphasizes Dr. Cole’s influence as [quote] “a role model, a kind mentor and fierce advocate, a cherished friend, and invaluable colleague,” noting that her scholarship is [quote] “foundational to new feminist directions in several fields, including but not limited to transcendentalist studies, Emerson studies (now also populated by women, in large part inspired by her work), Margaret Fuller studies, Thoreau studies, and woman’s suffrage studies.” Finally, Jana Argersinger captures Dr. Cole’s openheartedness when she says, [quote] “Generosity is, for me, the shining through line in Phyllis’s way of walking through the world–generosity of heart and intellect for anyone who crosses her path.”
Dr. Cole, we thank you for your trail-blazing research and leadership, and your profound ability to build communities and connections that will sustain us for generations. You are both a pillar and a dear friend to the Thoreau Society, and we are honored to share this award with you.
Following the award ceremony, MFS members gathered for dinner at Fiorella’s Cucina held in honor of Dr. Cole.
Happy 214th Birthday, Margaret Fuller!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARGARET!!
Let’s honor Margaret Fuller’s 214th birthday (May 23, 2024) by celebrating intellectual community, social reform, and the transcendent processes by which individuals grow into themselves.
The Margaret Fuller Society encourages FB posts and listserv messages sharing your actions in these areas. AND we encourage you to donate $21.40, $42.80, $214, or any amount to the Margaret Fuller Society. Donations for the fundraiser will be used to fulfill the mission of the Society, including supporting a new Research Award (2025). We also will donate 25% from the fundraiser to the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House, in recognition of their ongoing community service.
If you have questions about donations, please contact Lisa at lisa.west@drake.edu
The featured image for this post is of a pistachio cake with American buttercream frosting, decorated with a fondant magnolia flower, made by Christina Katopodis.
“Refusing Foreclosures and Endings: 19C Women Writers’ Defiance, Persistence, and Resilience” MFS-organized Roundtable at C19 in Pasadena, CA
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 Resilience.” We have an impressive lineup of papers. Below you will find their titles, authors, and author bios.
“Margaret Fuller and the Ends of Immigrant Inclusion” by Leslie Eckel (Suffolk University)
“Feminist Kill(ed) Joys: Woman’s Health and Feminist Resistance in The Una (1853-55)” by Alice De Galzain (University of Sussex)
“Going Beyond: Cross-cultural Literary Adventure of Rebecca Rush and Lydia H. Sigourney” by Rowshan Chowdhury (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
“Mirrored in Miranda: Margaret Fuller’s Intertextual Dialogues with Paternal Legacies and Male Discourses in ‘The Great Lawsuit'” by Manzar Feiz (University of Texas, Dallas)
“‘Still-Born Aspirations:’ Mothers of Stone in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Story of Avis” by Maddie Olley (Syracuse University)
“Defiant Friendship: Female Intersubjectivity in the 19th Century Asylum” by Elisabeth Harris (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
2025 MLA CFP: “Imperfect Women Writers” sponsored by the Margaret Fuller Society
“Imperfect Women Writers” sponsored by the Margaret Fuller Society
Modern Language Association 2025 | January 9–12, 2025, New Orleans
In Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, the editors cite an anonymous correspondent of Fuller’s, who writes, “Margaret was one of the few persons who looked upon life as an art, and every person not merely as an artist, but as a work of art. She looked upon herself as a living statue, which should always stand on a polished pedestal, with right accessories, and under the most fitting lights. She would have been glad to have everybody so live and act. She was annoyed when they did not, and when they did not regard her from the point of view which alone did justice to her. No one could be more lenient in her judgments of those whom she saw to be living in this light. Their faults were to be held as ‘the disproportions of the ungrown giant.’ But the faults of persons who were unjustified by this ideal, were odious.”
Plenty of Fuller’s best and most sensitive readers would disagree with this appraisal. Still, it is useful for thinking about the ways readers and critics continue to render women writers works of art upon pedestals. How do we chip away at that penchant? What responsibilities do we have as critics to remove women writers from the pedestals predecessors or previous readers may have made?
How should we write and teach women writers in ways that document their flaws, failures, shadows, perceived imperfections, or positions on “wrong” sides of history?
How d0 women writers—and their readers—contend with criticism or with pressures not to speak up and out during their time?
How do censorship and/or recovery scholarship affect the ways we study women’s writing in our own difficult moment, especially amidst increasingly racist and misogynist currents within/against academia?
How should critics handle violence in nineteenth-century women’s views/voices and writing?
Submissions about Margaret Fuller are, of course, welcome, but proposals need not be limited to Fuller’s life or work. The Margaret Fuller Committee for Racial Justice encourages submissions to all panels to address anti-racist approaches to scholarship, pedagogy, and community engagement. Early career scholars are—as always—especially encouraged to apply.
Please send 250-word proposals or questions to Mollie Barnes at mbarnes2@uscb.edu with “MLA 2025 Proposal” in the subject line by March 22, 2024.
CFP for the 2024 American Literature Association (ALA) Conference
Margaret Fuller Society
American Literature Association 2024 Conference CFPs
Deadline Extended: January 22, 2024
Contact: argerj@gmail.com
The Margaret Fuller Society will sponsor two panels on relationality at the 35th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association, to be held 23–26 May 2024 at The Palmer House Hilton in Chicago. Please help circulate our CFPs far and wide across your circles of shared interest.
Send 250-word proposals (indicating AV needs) that respond to the calls below, along with brief biographical statements, to Jana Argersinger, 1st Vice President, at argerj@gmail.com. Submissions from graduate students and folks in non-academic fields are very welcome.
For conference details, go to http://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala- conferences/ala-annual-conference/. To learn more about the Fuller Society, visit https://margaretfullersociety.org/.
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“Matters of belonging,” to quote two theorists of affect—matters of integration and dis-integration, to echo the founder of interpersonal neurobiology—run through all branches of relationship science, a discipline with “growing coherence and influence . . . on myriad scholarly fields” in both soft and hard sciences (Annual Review of Psychology, 2017). Belonging, being in secure relation, it seems increasingly clear, is at the core of human nature. And as the 2017 report points out, “poets, novelists, and philosophers have long recognized the centrality of relationships to human existence” (383), while scientists lag behind. According to Robin Wall Kimmerer, who dances gracefully across these disciplinary boundaries, “All of our flourishing is mutual” (Braiding Sweetgrass).
Both of our ALA panels will explore this topic in relation to Margaret Fuller and other women of the nineteenth century—the second panel focusing on pedagogy.
1) “Matters of Belonging” I: Relationality and Feeling in Fuller and Other 19C Women Writers and Reformers
Margaret Fuller, the much-acclaimed intellectual and supposed loner, lived and wrote throughout her years in the ambit of relationality and feeling. Her Autobiographical Romance constricts with complex grief in remembrance of her lost father and thrums with the travails of young friendship, the sting of alienation, the joys of attunement. Letters agonize over what she feels as her friend Emerson’s coldness and proclaim, “All the souls I ever loved are holy to me.” Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony speaks to her of the “tearful sweetness of the human heart.” The record of her Conversation series for women sets collaborative learning at its foundation. As a foreign correspondent and active witness to Italy’s Risorgimento, she sees “deeds of brotherhood” and a “spirit” that “cheers and animates” her own—in transatlantic relation to a “spoiled” US that may reawaken to its founding vision. And she writes, at length, with protective tenderness of her partner Giovanni Ossoli and their small son just months before drowning with them in shipwreck off Fire Island.
The Fuller Society invites ideas about these and other movements of relationality and feeling in the work of Fuller and other 19C women both within and beyond her cohort. Among an abundance of possibilities, papers could address the following:
- Reciprocity, competition
- Rupture, reconciliation
- Family bonds, romantic partnership
- Collaboration toward social justice
- Indigenous experience
- Lived experience of race, gender, economic condition
- Applications of relationship science (attachment theory, interpersonal neurobiology, interdependence theory, affect theory, affection exchange theory)
- Interpersonality in the process and products of writing
- Collective experience of art, music, literature
- Community storytelling
- Autobiography in relation
- Aesthetics/matters of form
- Relationship with other-than-human beings
- Health/well-being
- Surprising/non-traditional kinships and alliances
- Intellectual relation
- Hierarchies, lateral relation
- Varieties of feeling in relation:
- feeling in common with others as fomenting collaboration/revolution
- feeling the body-in-transcendence
- feeling as fact/knowledge
- affect (feeling before cognition)
- feeling as in physical sensation
- feeling and spirituality
2) “Matters of Belonging” II: Learning and Teaching in Relation—Fuller’s Conversations and Beyond
What do Fuller (in her Conversations, journalism, varied reform projects) and other women educators of her era suggest to us about modes of relationality and feeling in our efforts to teach and learn together, both inside and outside the classroom?
Potential points of contact:
- Feeling as medium and/or content of learning
- Building community in the learning environment
- Learning collectively, challenging hierarchies
- Conversation as an often-neglected learning outcome—and as urgent civic education
- Perspective of grad student teachers
- Public humanities
- Social justice pedagogy
- Restorative justice practices, including circle work
- Community engagement and service learning
- Learning venues outside the traditional classroom (for example: prisons, websites, museums, nature centers)
- Marginalized populations reclaiming their stories
- Mentoring
- Autobiographical elements
- Role of technology
- Fertile challenges and problems
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!
