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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. 

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. Etta Madden, who is Professor of English, Emerita, at Missouri State University.

Q: What might MFS members ask you about?

A: Fuller Society members might ask me about 19^th-century US women in Italy; US “utopian” and intentional communities and literature; cookbooks and foodways; knitting; and swimming.

Q: What’s something about Fuller that you find inspiring?

A: I fell in love with Fuller because of her writing about gender fluidity in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. However, as I read more of her writing and about her life, I came to admire the arc of her development—i.e. what she would call “the unfolding of her life from within”—but what we all know also was influenced by external forces, such as relationships with family and friends. I have been especially moved by how she was changed by her teaching experiences and her editorial experiences in New England; her time as a news writer in New York; and her dramatic personal changes as she traveled abroad in Europe.

It’s probably not surprising, then, that among my favorites of Fuller’s writings are her comments on “the American in Europe,” from one of her undated dispatches to the Tribune. Her delineation of three types of Americans—”the servile,” “the conceited,” and “the thinking American”—still ring true today as we consider why and how many people from the US travel. The first goes “abroad to spend his money and indulge his tastes;” the second “declares he thought it was all humbug before he came, and now he knows it;” and the third “wishes to gather and carry back with him all that will bear a new culture and a new climate.”  Fuller’s experiences in Rome’s Church of San Luigi (dei Francesi) with the San Domenichino frescoes of Santa Cecilia’s life—so understated in her dispatch of December 30, 1847—embody the “thinking American.” She is changed by what she learns of the noblewoman, Santa Cecilia, who cared deeply for the needy masses. These frescoes, rather than the famous Caravaggio paintings of biblical scenes, move her.

Q: What would you like to see the MFS accomplish in the next five years?

I am delighted to have come on board during the discussions of a “journaling for justice” conference. I’m hopeful that the planning for a conference celebrating women in international journalism will come to fruition in 2026—possibly in Italy!

Q: What is one thing you’ve learned or accomplished in the last year?

I organized and co-led a small group trip to Italy, following in the footsteps of nineteenth-century writer Constance Fenimore Woolson. It was such a treat leading a phenomenal group of “Woolites” with biographer Anne Boyd Rioux. I especially liked that it allowed me tap into my knowledge of US women writers in Italy (including Fuller, of course) as well as Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Below is a brief bibliography of possible interest to MFS members to get to know Dr. Madden’s writing and research:

Engaging Italy: American Women’s Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks. SUNY Press (April 2022 cloth; October 2022 e-book and paper).

Selections from Eliza Leslie. Ed., Intro. & Bibliography. University of Nebraska Press, 2011.

“Soaring Above Zoar: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Utopian Visions & Discourses.” In Eds. Kathleen Diffley, Caroline Gebhard and Cheryl Torsney. Secret Histories: A New Era of Constance Fenimore Woolson Scholarship. University of Georgia Press, Forthcoming 2024.

“Cultivation and Sustainability with Student Collaborators: Anne Hampton Brewster’s Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Letters from Rome, 1869-1870.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. 40.1-2 (2023). 223-32. With Alyssah Morrison.

“Writing Man and Nature (1864) in Italy: George and Caroline Marsh on Human-Environmental Relations.” Rivista italiana di filosofia politica. 4 (2023), 197-214.

“Travels, Translations and Limitations: Ambasciatrice Caroline Crane Marsh.” Transatlantica: American Studies Journal. Special issue on Transatlantic Women Writers. 2018.1.

“Anne Hampton Brewster’s St. Martin’s Summer and Utopian Literary Discourses.” Utopian Studies 28.2 (2017), 305-26.  

“Science in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827).” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 20 (2003) 1 & 2: 22-37.  Co-authored with Shelley R. Block.

This year, the Margaret Fuller Society (MFS), once again, is spending time getting to know its leaders and members who live all over the world. This month we honor the work of Dr. Kathy Lawrence, who teaches at Georgetown University and is completing an edited volume of Henry James’s stories for the Cambridge University Press Complete Fiction of Henry James (forthcoming 2024), as well as a biography entitled Caroline Sturgis, Starlike Soul. To get to know Kathy, we asked her a few questions.

Q: What might MFS members ask you about?

A. I would like to tell MFS members about my travels in search of Fuller’s influence on three of her disciples: Caroline Sturgis, William Wetmore Story, and Henry James. Their discipleship was not imitative but rather individual, the fulfillment of their own vision for life, for she modeled how to be a seeker, not a follower. As a literary archivist, I have combed through repositories in London and Oxford, England, Paris, France, and Florence, Rome, and Venice, Italy. On our own continent, I have delved into libraries in Boston and Northampton, Massachusetts, New York, New York, Hanover, New Hampshire, Pasadena and Berkeley, California, Austin, Texas, and Charlottesville, Virginia. I have met the descendants and families of those artists. My wanderjahre has shown me the power of transmission, the presence of the unseen.

Q: What’s something about Fuller that you find inspiring?

A: What I admire about Fuller is her stoicism, a resilience and perseverance that inspired her three disciples (mentioned above) to live with their disabilities, both inherited and acquired, just as she had done. Like Fuller, Caroline Sturgis suffered, suffered terribly, and confronted severe losses, and she was ill for most of her life; yet she continued to write and paint, to raise her daughters to be artists, and to travel, as Fuller had encouraged her to do. William Wetmore Story was traumatized, running from New England and the humiliations he faced in Boston after his father Supreme CourtJustice Joseph Story was forced by his commitment to federalist principles to decide the infamous fugitive slave case Prigg vs. the State of Pennsylvania; yet, motivated by his attendance at Fuller’s only co-ed “Conversations,” he undertook to make a life in Rome and to become a successful sculptor. Henry James was lonely as a gay man in Victorian Boston; yet he pursued an arc of discovery that enabled him at long last to accept, indeed to celebrate, his identity, and to transmit it through his late fiction and non-fiction. He paid tribute to both Fuller and Sturgis near the end of his life in his memoir Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), a work that disclosed his queerness, his multiple disabilities and those of his family. In my recent article for the Henry James Review, I label this late style of James “the poetics of disclosure.”

Q: What would you like to see the MFS accomplish in the next five years?

A: An international conference in Italy!! Italy meant so much to Fuller and her work. It would be most appropriate for us to gather there.

Q: What is one thing you’ve learned or accomplished in the last year?

A: One thing I have learned in the past year is to meditate and to infuse every day with mindfulness. Fuller knew how to tap into this observation of direct experience, as shown in her autobiographical fragment, her poetry, and her letters. She was preternaturally aware, a core ability that bolstered her romanticism with realism.

After receiving her BA cum laude at Yale and her PhD at Boston University, in English and American Studies, respectively, Dr. Lawrence taught at George Washington University, Brandeis University, and is now at Georgetown University. In addition to her teaching, she is completing an edited volume of Henry James’s stories for the Cambridge University Press Complete Fiction of Henry James (forthcoming 2024), as well as a biography entitled Caroline Sturgis, Starlike Soul.

Below is a brief bibliography of possible interest to MFS members to get to know Dr. Lawrence’s writing and research:

“The ‘Dry-Lighted Soul’ Ignites: Emerson and His Soul-Mate Caroline Sturgis As Seen in Her Houghton Manuscripts.” Harvard Library Bulletin, Fall 2005, vol. 16, no. 3, 37-67.

“Soul Sisters and the Sister Arts: Margaret Fuller, Caroline Sturgis, and Their Private World of Love and Art.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 54: 79-104.

“The Small Boy Was ‘Other’: Disability in James’s Fourth Phase.” The Henry James Review, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Winter 2024), pp. 47–71.