HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARGARET!! Let’s honor Margaret Fuller’s 216th birthday (May 23, 2026) by celebrating intellectual community, social reform, and the transcendent processes by which individuals grow into themselves. The Margaret Fuller Society encourages FB posts and… More
The Margaret Fuller Society announces a teaching award to support racial justice: Teaching to Racial Justice with Margaret Fuller The MFS Committee for Racial Justice welcomes entries that: Submissions should be limited to one page.… More
In collaboration with the Margaret Fuller Society, the Thoreau Society, Transcendental Concord, and a range of public thinkers and scholars, we invite you to adopt and share texts that are being censored or threatened. This… More
Members of the Fuller Society gathered in Toronto, Canada to give a variety of presentations. On the first day of the convention, Christina Katopodis (Second Vice President) presented on Thursday, January 8, “Unfurling Taxonomies: Margaret Fuller’s Responses to Science in ‘Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain'” on a panel focused on the relationship between literature and taxonomy.
On Saturday, January 10, our Fuller Society sponsored panel, “Margaret Fuller and Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers Observing Nature, Engaging Science,” featured papers by Alice de Galzain (MFS Advisory Board), Thomas Howard, and Maxime Fecteau and was presided by Christina Katopodis.
de Galzain spoke about “The Possibility of Mutual Flourishing” in the works of Margaret Fuller, Caroline Healey Dall, and Marianne Dwight Orvis, emphasizing female agency in Fuller’s short story, “Yuca Filamentosa” (1842), Dall’s Historical Pictures Retouched, and Dwight’s watercolors. de Galzain, through the lens afforded by Sarah Ahmed’s work on emotion, highlighted the important lesson of “wait and trust” in botany.
Howard’s paper focused on Emily Dickinson and the poetics of science, inviting us to “think botanically” with Dickinson, emphasizing plant agency. He traced Dickinson’s scientific thinking through her correspondence, and framed her scientific thinking in poetry as the art that “precedes science”–Charles Darwin writes that art precedes science because it is “experience & observation.”
Fecteau presented, “What Mystery Pervades a Well!”: Lynn Margulis in Conversation with Emily Dickinson” and delighted us with Margulis’s poetic thinking about microbiology and symbiosis. Margulis lived next door to Emily Dickinson’s Amherst homestead, claimed to “hear” Dickinson during her walks through Amherst, and wove the poet’s verses into her scientific presentations.
On Saturday January 10, Koritha Mitchell read aloud Eagan Dean’s remarkable presentation, “Against the Clinical Gaze on Life Writing: Louisa May Alcott and Self-Narrated Gender,” which was followed by great interest and robust discussion. Jay Grossman commented that it was a “provocative” and “convincing” paper.
MFS members and panelists convened for a Fuller Society lunch and dinner on Saturday when we were able to continue our conversations. It was such a joy for all of us to be together for a large part of the day, and it often felt as if our fellow members were there with us as we shared stories and admiration for our colleagues and friends.
On Sunday, January 11, MFA Member Ariel Silver presided on the panel, “Family Resemblances: Hawthorne’s Extended Bloodlines.”
Margaret Fuller Society’s Special Issue on “Protest”
The theme of the next issue of Conversations (Vol 6.2) is of the moment: Protest. We ask our contributors to reflect on what protest means both to you and to our nineteenth-century forebears whose thinking laid the groundwork for much of ours. We will publish long pieces and short, archival excerpts from the work we study, and reports on our and our communities’ protest efforts. You are welcome to publish anonymously (extravagant/fanciful pseudonyms welcome) if you so prefer, especially if your career might be in peril for speaking out. Please use your imagination, your creativity, and your hearts to help us move forward collectively into a world that is kind, just, and loving.
Please note: Although Conversations is not blindly peer-reviewed, our editorial team reviews all submissions and, in the case of acceptance, offers revisions as needed.
Deadline: February 28, 2026.
Email for submissions, proposals, and questions:
Peruse previous issues of Conversations.
Trouble and Recovery: Health in Margaret Fuller’s Life and Society
The Margaret Fuller Society is pleased to sponsor a panel for the upcoming Thoreau Society Annual Gathering in Concord, MA, July 8-12, 2026, complementing the overall conference theme, “Living Well: Thoreau, Health, and Flourishing.” Both health and the forces opposing it had powerful resonance in Fuller’s life and thought. As she wrote in the New York Tribune, “cancer on the body must in time affect the head and heart also.”* The words of our title, “Trouble and Recovery,” encompass both obstacles to health and its restoration, in Fuller’s personal life or the family and society within which she lived, in body or “head and heart,” whether descriptive or metaphoric in significance. Proposals might, for example, focus on her struggle with headaches, early experiences of loss, record of dreams, nursing experience in Rome, pregnancy and childbirth, strategies of recovery and reform. So might they focus on any method of treatment she experienced, traditional or experimental, on the circumstances beyond recovery at the end of her life, on her analysis of societal ills and cures in the United States or Europe, or on her representation of health in Woman in the Nineteenth Century or other writing.
We also invite paper proposals that draw comparisons between Margaret Fuller and other women writers and movements, or other Transcendentalists. Contributions exploring the material dimensions of nineteenth-century women’s writing about health, as well as questions of archival recovery, are welcome. Early and independent scholars of Fuller are invited to propose their work as well as those more seasoned. Please submit a 300-word abstract and brief curriculum vitae to Phyllis Cole (pbc2@psu.edu) and Alice de Galzain (alice.degalzain@gmail.com) by December 31.
*Bean and Myerson, eds., Margaret Fuller, Critic, p. 103.
“We do not propose to remain silent.”
(founders of the Antioch Review, 1941)
Inspired by the AAC&U’s “Call for Constructive Engagement” and the Big 10’s developing “mutual defense compact,” and drawing from the commitment to justice and free inquiry among our subjects of research, the Margaret Fuller Society, Transcendental Concord, and the Thoreau Society are seeking collaborators in developing a public statement and potential solidarity compact. We seek collaboration in responding to dramatic recent assaults, originating in the US, on intellectual freedom, research funding, and the integrity and safety of learning environments.
We invite author societies and other organizations to join in conversation about our shared values as teachers, researchers, cultural workers, and thinkers in this extraordinarily challenging time for free inquiry. Through developing this statement, we hope to cultivate empathetic community and the capacity for a future mutual aid compact.
We are seeking cross-organizational collaboration among a broad and diverse array of societies and groups, including members and leaders at all levels.
Questions we hope to discuss include:
If this enterprise speaks to you, send your name, affiliated author society or similar organization, and contact information to authorsocietycollaboration@gmail.com. Please also help us spread the word by bringing our call to the attention of others you know who are active in author organizations. General body members of any organization are welcome to participate in conversation regardless of whether they represent their organization as a whole.
Our next steps will be to 1) invite everyone who has expressed initial interest to share core concerns they’d like to see considered in the drafting process; and 2) enlist a small committee to draft our statement.
Looking forward in solidarity,
The Executive Council of the Margaret Fuller Society
Transcendental Concord
The Thoreau Society
2026 Conference | 12–14 March 2026 | Cincinnati, Ohio
“To Give Them All A Welcome To Our Shores”: Immigrant Voices and Advocates in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals
Organized by the Margaret Fuller Society
On 28 June 1845, Margaret Fuller published a piece in the New-York Daily Tribune calling on readers to celebrate “The Irish Character.” In her opening paragraph, Fuller positions her article as a response to a piece published the week before titled “Spirit of the Irish Press.” Fuller’s eight-paragraph editorial is complicated and, at moments, difficult to read. The final, breathless paragraph opens with one of her characteristic rallying cries:
When we consider all the fire which glows so untameably in Irish veins, the character of her people, considering the circumstances—almost miraculous in its goodness—we cannot forbear, notwithstanding all the temporary ills they aid in here, to give them all a welcome to our shores. Those ills we need not enumerate; they are known to all, and we rank among them what others would not, that by their ready service to do all the hard work they make it easier for the rest of the population to grow effeminate and help the country to grow too fast. But that is her destiny, to grow too fast; it is useless talking against it.
On one hand, Fuller urges us not to name “ills” often associated with particular groups of immigrants (in this case, Irish-Americans). In the rest of the article, she urges us to counter stereotypes and slurs with empathy, with humanity, and with hope for the future of the nation. On the other hand, her article puts words to these stereotypes and slurs in key passages elsewhere. It also romanticizes Irish and Irish-American people, opening with a trio of anecdotes about immigrant families’ sacrifices whose “old romantic associations” feel more like “poetry” to Fuller than the life stories of flesh-and-blood bodies.
One hundred and eighty years later, we too turn to journalists’ outcries to bolster our collective moral compass as a nation—against rising anti-immigrant racism; against dehumanizing expulsions and repressions of refugees, immigrants, and citizens; and even, as of June 2025, against violent judicial erasures of the most fundamental ideas in the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified twenty-three years after Fuller’s piece).
What can we learn from Fuller’s journalism about immigrants? How does it compare to other voices or advocates of her moment? How do her slurs, stereotypes, and/or silences haunt?
Papers for this panel could engage the following topics, among others:
● studies of immigrant newspapers or other periodicals
● recoveries of immigrant writers, whether canonical, non-canonical, or unnamed
● analyses of print culture communities bound together through immigrant periodicals
● representations of journalism in immigrant literature
● discussions of immigrant advocates and/or their limitations
● approaches to teaching immigrant voices and advocates in undergraduate courses
Submissions about Margaret Fuller are, of course, welcome, but proposals need not be limited to Fuller. We deliberately seek engagement between and across author societies to think creatively and imaginatively together about the future of our work. The Fuller Society’s Committee for Racial Justice encourages submissions that address anti-racist approaches to scholarship, pedagogy, and community engagement. Scholars of color and early-career scholars are—as always—especially invited to apply.
Please send proposals (250–300 words) or questions to Mollie Barnes at mbarnes2@uscb.edu with “C19 2026” in the subject line by 10 August 2025.
Alice de Galzain (Sorbonne Université) and Johanna Pitetti-Heil (Universität zu Köln) are delighted to share the details of their upcoming conference “Critical Health: Feminist Perspectives on Health and Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century United States.” The event will be held on October 17-18, 2025, at Sorbonne Université in Paris, France. Alice and Johanna met when they both presented on the Margaret Fuller Society panel at the Thoreau Society Annual Gathering in July 2024, and they are thrilled to be collaborating on this new project:
“Critical Health” centers on women’s diverse experiences of health in the nineteenth-century United States. Focusing on the major changes in medicine and society during the nineteenth century, the conference aims to uncover the intricate connections between the personal, the political, and the medical realms. “Critical Health” brings together inquiries into medical practices, women’s experiences of health and well-being, and forms of physical and mental resistance to biomedical control. Inspired by Margaret Fuller’s engagement with questions pertaining to health and illness, the conference includes a number of papers on Fuller and transcendentalist writers, but it also branches out to transatlantic and interdisciplinary issues.
Given the rise of health precarity that is currently ravaging the U.S., the importance of thinking critically about matters pertaining to women’s health in the nineteenth century is a particularly timely discussion, for which we aim to provide an engaging and provocative forum. By taking a multi- and interdisciplinary approach to health-care that covers literary studies, medical history, dance studies, and physical cultures, “Critical Health” puts into conversation a variety of research on the manifold ways in which health and well-being were approached in the nineteenth century. Investigating women’s health from these perspectives will yield a complex understanding of the relationship of individual suffering, structural neglect, and communal practices of care from an innovative interdisciplinary angle.
We are very pleased to share a preliminary version of the conference program, which features a total of 22 speakers from France, Germany, the UK, the USA and Canada, including several Margaret Fuller Society board members. What’s more, we are truly honored to announce that Professor Emerita Phyllis Cole will be delivering the keynote address, tentatively titled “Self and Other: Caring for Health in the Journals and Letters of Transcendentalist Women.” The conference will be held as a hybrid event, which will allow Margaret Fuller Society members to attend the event remotely.
A bientôt,
Alice & Johanna.
[Featured Image via Wikimedia]
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARGARET!!
Let’s honor Margaret Fuller’s 215th birthday (May 23, 2025) 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 $21.50, $43, $215, or any amount to the Margaret Fuller Society. Donations for the fundraiser will be used to fulfill the mission of the Society, including its new and expanding number of awards: the Phyllis Cole Award for Social Service and the Teaching to Racial Justice with Margaret Fuller Award, both of which you can read about here. 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
We thank you for your support of the society’s work and for sharing the life, legacy, and contributions of Margaret Fuller with others.
Margaret Fuller’s “Entertainments of the Past Winter,” published in the July 1842 issue of the Dial, relays, “Wherever we went, there was Lyell’s Geology on the table, and many of the suggestions made by these lectures lingered in conversation throughout the winter.” She is referencing Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which made the then relatively new concept of deep time palatable to a wide audience. Lyell aided Fuller’s understanding of how past and present are connected, and helped her to see the long and ongoing processes of nature.
We often consider Fuller an early feminist, journal editor, educator, translator, music critic, and pioneering war correspondent, but we rarely frame her as a woman writer reading and responding to emerging sciences. Yet we know she was among many American women writers studying and responding to natural science. Susan Fenimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, Fanny Fern, Almira Phelps, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, and Mary Treat are but a few examples.
The Margaret Fuller Society invites papers that engage American women writers and science, including but not limited to these topics:
While we welcome and encourage submissions that engage Margaret Fuller’s work, submissions need not be limited to work on Fuller herself. Early career scholars and graduate students are especially welcome to submit. Please send a title and 300-word abstract to Dr. Christina Katopodis (katopodis.christina@gmail.com) by March 20, 2025.
Society for the Study of American Women Writers
2025 Conference | 6–9 November 2025 | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
“A Conversation about Coalition Building: The Role of Women Author Societies in Times of Political Crisis,” organized by the Margaret Fuller Society
In 2025, in the spirit of Margaret Fuller’s nineteenth-century “conversations” and on the 25th anniversary of the founding of SSAWW, we seek to harness the power of community and of coalition building. We’re looking for speakers who have been or are currently leaders of women’s author societies—and for speakers who can voice perspectives about what emerging and/or marginalized scholars need from women author societies at this time. We want to host a roundtable conversation about what these author societies can do—and how we envision them shaping or re-shaping the field at a moment when educators—especially scholars and teachers whose work is amplifying the voices of women and people of color—are subject to budget cuts and to political censorship, elimination, investigation, and other violences.
Papers for this panel could engage the following questions, among others:
Submissions about the Margaret Fuller Society are, of course, welcome, but proposals need not be limited to Fuller. We deliberately seek engagement between and across author societies to think creatively and imaginatively together about the future of our work. The Fuller Society’s Committee for Racial Justice encourages panel submissions that address anti-racist approaches to scholarship, pedagogy, and community engagement. Scholars of color and early career scholars are—as always—especially invited to apply.
Please send proposals (250–300 words) or questions to Mollie Barnes at mbarnes2@uscb.edu with “SSAWW 2025 Proposal” in the subject line by February 21, 2025.
The Margaret Fuller Society is pleased to sponsor a panel at the upcoming Thoreau Society Annual Gathering in Concord, MA, July 9-13, 2025. The overall theme of the conference, in honor of the 350th anniversary of the battle of Lexington and Concord, is “Revolution,” an especially apt context for exploring Fuller’s life and work. Papers might focus on her rhetoric of the American and French revolutions in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, her choice of heroines from history relevant to revolutionary progress, or her address to national questions of race and slavery alongside gender. Her dispatches for the New York Tribune might be explored as they actually take readers to the scene of revolution and its defeat in Rome, and as she interprets the new order and the “next revolution” for both Europe and America, while her personal correspondence hints at the personal or sexual revolution in her own life.
We also invite paper proposals that draw comparisons between Margaret Fuller and other women writers and movements, or other Transcendentalists. Early and independent scholars of Fuller are welcome to propose their work as well as those more seasoned. Please submit a 300-word abstract and brief curriculum vitae to Christina Katopodis (katopodis [dot] christina [at] gmail [dot] com) with subject line “MFS 2025 AG Proposal” by December 31.
Note: Dec 31 is the extended deadline. The original deadline was Dec 15.
This post was written by contributing author, Dr. Alice de Galzain.
Ten years ago, in a review of Megan Marshall’s Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (2013) and John Matteson’s The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography (2012), Fritz Fleischmann asked the following question: “why is [Margaret Fuller] still so little known?” (275). While welcoming the publication of these two phenomenal biographies, he regretted that “[t]here is no Margaret Fuller Memorial, no museum, no national holiday, not even a postage stamp” (275). Strictly speaking, Fuller’s cenotaph at Mount Auburn Cemetery can be considered a memorial and there was also a memorial pavilion put up on Fire Island in the early twentieth century that lasted about a decade, until a storm swept it away.[1] However, the kind of reverence that has always characterized the public reception of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s and Henry David Thoreau’s works—which is what I think Fleischmann is alluding to—has not been there for Fuller, whose name was rescued from oblivion by an amazing group of scholars in the 1970s and 80s.
In 2024, things are looking quite different. The recent updates to the Margaret Fuller Society online bibliography [now publicly available to view and download below and on our resources page] reflect the dynamic state Fuller studies are in today, showing that a tremendously vast amount of scholarly work has been produced on Fuller in recent years. It is a really exciting time for Fuller studies! In 2025, a Library of America edition of Fuller’s writings, edited by Noelle A. Baker, Megan Marshall, and Brigitte Bailey, will be published, and, in the years to follow, the Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Writings of Margaret Fuller, edited by Leslie E. Eckel, Sonia Di Loreto, and Andrew Taylor, will also come out. Symbolically very important, these two editions mark a crucial milestone in terms of the accessibility of Fuller’s writings.
In “A Short Essay on Critics,” Fuller defined the role of the “critic” as follows:
we feel the need of a criterion, of a standard; and then we say what the work is not, as well as what it is . . . . We do not seek to degrade but to classify an object by stating what it is not. We detach the part from the whole, lest it stand between us and the whole. When we have ascertained in what degree it manifests the whole, we may safely restore it to its place, and love or admire it there ever after. (8)
The body of critical work listed in the Fuller Society online bibliography—journal articles, monographs, edited collections, and dissertations—sheds light on the glories and limitations of Fuller’s work—on “what it is” and “what it is not.” It shows that, now more than ever, new perspectives are entering Fuller studies—queer, ecofeminist, decolonial, and pedagogical perspectives. The bibliography, which features works in English and other languages (a beautiful reflection of Fuller’s cosmopolitanism) and which we will continue to update, seeks to help graduate students, scholars, and members of the general public alike easily navigate and understand the current—and past—state of Fuller studies.
Works Cited
Fleischmann, Fritz. “Reading Margaret Fuller.” Resources for American Literary Study, vol. 37, 2014, pp. 275-88.
Fuller, Margaret. “A Short Essay on Critics.” Dial, vol. 1, no. 1, 1840, pp. 5-11.
[1] I owe these two remarks to Megan Marshall, who kindly reminded me of Fuller’s two memorials in an e-mail.
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 Justice Committee Member Dr. Eagan Dean, who is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University.
Q: What might MFS members ask you about?
A: Trans studies, finishing your dissertation, Fuller family materials at Harvard, book history, publishing in Scholarly Editing.
Q: What’s something about Fuller that you find inspiring?
A: I’m inspired by her creative thought about gender and by her tenacity. She knew her ideas about gender nonconformity in particular were not well received and her scholarly style was often derided, especially by male peers. This did not deter her. I admire her commitment to her own research insights in the the face of skepticism. My favorite quote is about encouraging gender nonconforming people to thrive in whatever life brings them joy, especially for young women. She writes, “Fourier had observed…one third of women as likely to have a taste for masculine pursuits, one third of men for feminine…no need to clip the wings of any bird that wants to soar and sing, or finds in itself the strength of pinion for a migratory flight unusual to its kind.”
Q: What would you like to see the MFS accomplish in the next five years?
In the next five years I would love to see MFS build on its success with the social service award to continue developing relationships with organizations and scholars focused on racial justice. Perhaps we might take a page from Fuller’s critiques of American prison to build connections with abolitionist thinkers and organizers. I am so proud to be part of an author’s society that is invested in our author’s living legacy in the world, not only as a literary figure but also as an engaged critic of social wrongs.
Q: What is one thing you’ve learned or accomplished in the last year?
A: I am very proud of defending my dissertation! I’m excited to have the time and space to think about the wider conversations I can join in the book version of the project.
Q: Where could Fuller Society members go to learn more about your writing and research?
A: Fuller is very core to my work. For more on trans studies, I recommend “Androgyny and Desire.” For more book history, I recommend ““Woman in the Nineteenth Century and the Politics of Reprinting.”
“Androgyny and Desire: Margaret Fuller, Julia Ward Howe, and Fractured Trans Archives.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, vol. 40 no. 1, 2023, p. 59-84.
“Woman in the Nineteenth Century and the Politics of Reprinting, 1845-1980.” ESQ 69.1 (2022): 39-72.
Eagan Dean (they/he) is a scholar of American cultural and literary history. He is currently a Postdoctoral research fellow with the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University and serves as co-editor of the “Essays” section in Scholarly Editing. Their research uses archival and literary analysis to understand the origins of contemporary beliefs about gender and transgender life. His work argues that current conversations about transgender experience are inseparably intertwined with the ideologies of race, colonialism, and misogyny which shaped the early U.S. Eagan Dean is completing his book manuscript, Inventing American Gender: Nineteenth Century American Literary Gender and its Uses. The monograph demonstrates that historical U.S. texts produced gender identities anew as rhetorical tools and used these tools to advance the political investments of their authors pertaining to racial and colonial power.
Prior to joining the Clayman Institute, Dean completed a PhD in Literatures in English with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. At Rutgers, he won several teaching awards and essay prizes, including the Excellence in Leadership and Teaching Award. This award recognized his development of new trans history curricula and work with community nonprofits.
