Event Recap – Page 2 – Margaret Fuller Society

Margaret Fuller Society Panel at MLA 2019

Published on December 29, 2018 by adminLeave a comment

Women at Work: Margaret Fuller and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers on Work

Saturday, Jan 5, 2019

This session, organized by Sonia Di Loreto and presided by Jana L. Argersinger, explored Margaret Fuller’s relation to and representations of labor from multiple perspectives, including the ways in which Margaret Fuller and other 19^th c. women writers considered, debated, practiced, and critiqued labor.

Aimee Allard presented a paper focused on the labor of sewing, specifically the role of sewing within the asylum. Sewing was a tedious task designed to keep women busy, a punishment for women patients “who dared to read or write, and a system of unpaid labor from which unscrupulous asylum superintendents profited.” Allard writes, “For Fuller, sewing was a form of cloth confinement, so it seems only fitting that [Elizabeth] Packard and her contemporaries aligned needlework with straitjackets and fabric restraints.”

Hediye Özkan discussed how Lillie Devereux Blake approached issues faced by women in the nineteenth century in Fettered for Life or Master and Lord
(1874), “by using woman-slave analogy not only in a capitalist but also patriarchal society to reconstruct work, womanhood, and marriage.”

Jessica Horvath Williams approached nineteenth-century women’s labor through disability studies, examining journal entries related to the strenuous labor of nineteenth-century housework. In her paper she interrogated the impossible standard of the Colonial Good Wife, and asked what we mean when we apply the words “disabled” and “frail” to women in the nineteenth century.

Click here to read the full abstracts.

Presider

Jana L. Argersinger, Washington State U, Pullman

Presentations

‘Sent to the Sewing Room, and Compelled to Work’: Institutionalized Women’s Labor in Nineteenth-Century American Hospitals for the Insane

Aimee Allard, U of Nebraska, Lincoln

Solidarity across Classes and Women’s Labor

Hediye Özkan, Indiana U of Pennsylvania

The Disabled Superwoman: Disabling Domestic Labor in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s ‘Luella Miller’ and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s ‘No News’

Jessica Horvath Williams, U of California, Los Angeles

On the eve of the Margaret Fuller Society panel, Fullerites gathered in Chicago to have dinner together and discuss their research and their presentations at MLA.

fuller society dinner mla 2019 — *Photos courtesy of Jana L. Argersinger*

SSAWW 2018 Conference Recap

Published on December 1, 2018 by adminLeave a comment

This post was written by Margaret Fuller Society President Charlene Avallone, who also provided the photos from the event.

Margaret Fuller was very much in evidence at the 2018 Triennial Conference of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers in Denver (November 7-11), and the participation of Society members there was gratifying. The richly rewarding gathering around the conference’s timely thematics of “Resistance and Recovery across the Americas,” afforded many highlights.

The stimulating session on Thursday spoke to the conferences themes, while it both answered to the Society’s initiative of promoting attention to Fuller in the company of other women writers and extended genealogical excavation to include a male (proto)feminist and nineteenth-century women artists. Moderator and Past-President Phyllis Cole’s introduction linked the panel to the varied and complex models of relation alternative to lineal genealogy that are discussed in the essay collection that she edited with Second Vice President Jana Argersinger: Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism (University of Georgia Press, 2014). Fritz Fleischmann, speaking on “Margaret Fuller and John Neal,” expanded recovery of the nineteenth-century dialogue between women and men as they attempted to work their way out of patriarchal structures of thought toward expanded ideas of “woman” and women’s rights. Etta Madden, in “Genealogies of Translation: Fuller, de Staël and Caroline Crane Marsh, “explored direct influences among these three women as they found travel and translation means of crossing boundaries of nation, language, and culture to arrive at new knowledge and self-transformation. Yoshiko Ito’s paper, “Looking for Transpacific Genealogy in Early Feminism: A Study on the Analogy between Margaret Fuller and Ume Tsuda,” reflected on a serendipitous newspaper juxtaposition to present a critical model of how inspiration can travel across cultures even without direct influence. Janessa Kenway opened a largely uncharted topic in Fuller Studies with “The Visual Genealogy of Margaret Fuller” as she began to map Fuller’s Transcendentalist aesthetic beyond her own appreciation of contemporary artists to recover nineteenth-century female painters and sculptors of the ideal. Read the paper abstracts here.

IMG_2782_2 — Phyllis Cole, Jenessa Kenway, Yoshiko Ito, Etta Madden, and Fritz Fleischmann

Fuller received attention at other panels, too. In the session “Resisting The Canonical Syllabus,” Lesli Vollrath’s talk, “Voices of Resistance Unfolding: Teaching Margaret Fuller as a Nasty Woman in Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” advanced the Society’s other current initiative, to promote the teaching of Fuller. And Sarah Salter presented “Margaret Fuller’s Italian Regionalism” at the session “Regionalism Beyond Fiction: Women’s Resistance Across Periodical Forms.”

Additionally, the conference brought together Society members who spoke on a variety of other writers at other sessions: Treasurer Noelle Baker (Elizabeth Cady Stanton), Mollie Barnes (Charlotte Forten), Kate Culkin (Harriet Hosmer), Advisory Board Member Lucinda Damon-Bach (Anna Jameson and Catharine Sedgwick), Elizabeth Dean (Nella Larson), Mark Gallagher (Louisa May Alcott), Denise Kohn (Laura C. Bullard), Ariel Silver (Alcott), Lisa West (Sedgwick), and President Charlene Avallone (Bullard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and George Sand). More details on the presentations can be found in the draft program of the conference. Mollie also volunteered her services at the (very early morning) CV Workshop to help graduate students and others polish their credentials for the job market.

MFS members at the dinner organized by Noelle Baker

The Society hosted two well-attended social events on Friday. The afternoon tea, a collaborative event with the Sedgwick and Stowe societies, was organized by Jana Argersinger, Noelle Baker, Cindy Damon-Bach, and Beth Lueck (Past President, Harriet Beecher Stowe Society), with the adept direction of Jordan Von Cannon (VP of Publications for SSAWW). In addition to tasty pastries, the tea provided an occasion for new MFS members to introduce themselves and their work in a conversational setting and for all members to engage with scholars studying other American women writers. A hearty welcome to new members who joined the Society around the Conference: Kate Culkin, Elizabeth Dean, Jenessa Kenway, Etta Madden, and Lisa West. Noelle also arranged the dinner that spirited Society members away from the tourist district to experience something of a Denver neighborhood, as well as a delectable meal, at the Mexican restaurant El Jefe. Dinner offered further opportunity for that favorite discourse of Fullerites–conversation.

The following day, a standing ovation from a packed ballroom at the conference Awards Luncheon welcomed Phyllis Cole to the podium to accept the Karen Dandurand Lifetime Achievement Award. The award, given every three years, recognizes committed and extended work that has furthered the goals of SSAWW “to support and broaden knowledge among academics as well as the general public about American women writers.” The award speech, delivered by Jana Argersinger, acknowledged the many dimensions of Phyllis’s outstanding career: her extraordinary teaching, public speaking, publishing, groundbreaking research on women writers, service, mentoring, and community-building. (Read the nomination letter here.) No applause was more heartfelt than as Phyllis was honored for “her passion for shaping, encouraging, and inspiring the next generation of readers, thinkers, and scholars that makes Dr. Cole such as strong role model for us all.”

IMG_2786_2 — Noelle Baker, Mollie Barnes, Phyllis Cole at the tea co-sponsored with the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society

In her acceptance speech, Phyllis invoked Fuller, too, as a model, a “model of resistance” for today in calling the women of her country to bring their “moral power” to protest the martial nationalism that was transpiring at the Mexican border in 1844. One conference participant, following up on the conversation at a panel sponsored by the Lydia Maria Child Society, shared a practical model of such protest for teachers to post on a syllabus: “As an educator, I fully support the rights of undocumented students to an education and to live free from the fear of deportation. I pledge confidentiality to any student who wishes to disclose their immigration status, and I will work with students who require immigration-related accommodations.” The syllabus also included a web address for contacting the state’s New Mexico Dream Team.

Many left Denver remarking on the inspiration, energy, and inclusion that characterize the SSAWW Triennial and already looking forward to the next conference in Philadelphia in 2021.

Heidelberg Conference Recap

Published on November 1, 2018 by adminLeave a comment

This post was written by Margaret Fuller Society member, Website Editor, and contributing author, Christina Katopodis.

37907178_10104984991538844_7781618504192491520_n — Photo taken in Heidelberg, Germany at sunset by Christina Katopodis

Fullerites gathered with Emersonians and Thoreauvians in Heidelberg, Germany on July 26-29, 2018 for the “Transcendentalist Intersections: Literature, Philosophy, Religion” Conference hosted by the University of Heidelberg and sponsored by the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, the Margaret Fuller Society, and the Anglistisches Seminar and Center for American Studies at the University of Heidelberg.

Dan Malachuk, President of the Emerson Society, writes: “In late July, more than seventy scholars from around the world gathered at the University of Heidelberg for four balmy days of intense cross-disciplinary dialogue about some of the most pressing issues in Transcendentalist studies. Perhaps the largest conference ever held on this subject, “Transcendentalist Intersections: Literature, Philosophy, Religion” was the vibrant conclusion to a four-year collaboration of the University’s Anglistisches Seminar and Center for American Studies, the Margaret Fuller Society, and the Emerson Society. Reflecting at a closing session, participants recalled especially fruitful conversations about the continued indispensability of archival research, recovering “minor” figures, assessing intra-movement conflicts as well as confluences, whether to de- or re-transcendentalize the movement, interrogating as always its nationalist character, and remembering the periodicals, including the Dial, whose subtitle was also the conference’s and—let us hope—a continuing prompt for more such intersections.”

Laura Dassow Walls, in her keynote address, called to mind Fuller telling Thoreau that nature is no more his until he is more hers. This sentiment of embrace, exchange, and openness characterized many of the papers, dialogues, and exchanges throughout the conference. Walls crafted a beautiful and inspiring argument for what she calls the “parahuman” (as opposed to “nonhuman” or “posthuman”), reminding us that there really is no “not-me,” that we are all connected, and that we are the very criminals we are searching for in our present climate crisis. Responding to a question about how to reconcile ourselves with Emerson’s use of the word “Nature” given recent ecocritical scholarship that has problematized that term (I am thinking of Timothy Morton especially), Walls pointed to the specificity of each instance, moment, and context of Emerson’s use of the word “nature” and called for us all to remember to be very specific when we use it ourselves.

37739134_10104984991454014_4752817406823366656_n — Photo by Christina Katopodis

On the next day, Fullerites and Emersonians gathered for panels on Alcott, Fuller, Emerson, and Thoreau. Russell Sbriglia’s paper on Fuller, Hegel, and concrete universality discussed Fuller’s work to harmonize the particular with the universal. Sbriglia used the “+” in LGBTQ+ to demonstrate the relevancy of Fuller’s argument that there is no humanity unless we are all a part of it; we are not free until all of us are free. Sbriglia suggested that Fuller’s assertion that Man cannot be realized without Woman is not an addition but a transformative process that affects the whole. You can read a full abstract of Sbriglia’s talk here.

There were so many beautiful papers to feed the mind at the conference. To touch on some of those about Margaret Fuller, I will do my best to quickly introduce them. For more details, you can read the full abstracts in the embedded links below.

: “Transcendental Feminisms” Panel, photo courtesy of Marina P. Kizima

There was a diverse range of subjects covered. One vibrant thread of discussion could be traced between Phyllis Cole‘s paper on Fuller and Socialism in Paris and David Robinson‘s paper on Fuller, Channing, and Fourierism. Mollie Barnes called our attention to the importance of sculpture as it captures historical movement and inspiration into action. Leslie Eckel presented her work on utopias focusing on failure. Christina Katopodis presented her sound studies work on “Pulse and Polarity” in Fuller and Emerson. Marina P. Kizima focused on the religious aspects of Fuller’s work and Denise Kohn focused on Fuller and women’s suffrage. In addition to covering Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, there were papers on Summer on the Lakes such as Monika Elbert‘s and on Fuller’s letters such as Mario Bannoni‘s presentation on three letters of Fuller’s recently found in Italy.

Transcendental Forms 3 — “Transcendental Forms” Panel, photo courtesy of Marina P. Kizima

Some papers focused on translation, such as Fuller’s translation of Conversations with Goethe, and Adrienne Perry asked us to think about the ethics of Transcendental translation. Other papers focused on periodicals, such as Brigitte Bailey‘s paper on The Dial and print culture; Sonia Di Loreto presented a paper on Fuller’s “A Daughter of Italy” (1848) and transnational intersections in the People’s Journal. In her paper on Emerson and George Sand, MFS President Charlene Avallone urged us all to read more of George Sand’s work. Sarah Wider read a beautiful paper on Caroline Sturgis, who drew for Ellen Tucker Emerson when she was a little girl. David Greenham presented a paper on Emerson’s cognitive topology, looking at his metaphors not as literary devices but as working out ways of thinking. His diagram of light refraction on the eye was very impressive. There really was too much wonderful work than could be captured in a single event recap and do it justice.

At the conference, the Margaret Fuller Society was able to conduct a meeting to discuss current business and spend time getting to know new members and share scholarship.

MFS Charlene, Sonia, Agnese — Margaret Fuller Society Business Meeting, photo courtesy of Marina P. Kizima

American Literature Association 2018 Conference Recap

Published on September 19, 2018 by adminLeave a comment

This post was written by Margaret Fuller Society member and contributing author Michael Schrimper.

From May 24-27, 2018, members of the Fuller Society gathered in San Francisco at the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero for the 27th Annual conference of the American Literature Association. Over the course of the four days, the Society held two panels, a successful business meeting, and one dinner with a lovely view of the Bay.

On Friday afternoon’s panel, “Margaret Fuller: In the Classroom and Beyond,” which was chaired by Larry Reynolds (Texas A&M University), the first presenter was Holly Dykstra (Laredo Community College). In her paper “Using Fuller to Teach Fuller: Creating Agency and Security,” Dykstra outlined the ways in which Fuller serves as something of a role model for her students (some of them first generation or undocumented) at her college near the border of Mexico. Dykstra examines the concepts behind Fuller’s Conversations—“immersing others in challenging academic situations, encouraging shared knowledge, and spreading education to those who lack agency”—as a way for her students to not only relate to Fuller, but potentially see Fuller’s will and work as models for their own. Callie Gallo (Fordham University) presented “Teaching Margaret Fuller, Fanny Fern, and the Nineteenth-Century Press in the Wake of #MeToo,” drawing startling connections between nineteenth-century scenes of male aggression and sexual violence and news stories unfolding in our contemporary climate. Lesli Vollrath (University of Houston) presented “Elemental Bodies: Mapping the Materialist Cartographies of Margaret Fuller’s ‘Leila’ and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening in a Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Classroom,” providing an overview for teaching Fuller’s and Chopin’s texts through critical frameworks ranging from Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976) to Stacy Alaimo’s New Materialist concept “trans-corporeality.” These frameworks, Vollrath suggests, create relational possibilities for the female body in its environment. Nanette Rasband Hilton (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) also gave a paper concerned with Fuller’s “Leila,” “Praxis of Duality: The Sisterhood of Fuller’s ‘Leila’ and DuBois’s ‘Atlanta.’” Hilton’s paper demonstrated the potential of a reader’s own ipseity to promote “multiple social identities with awareness of crosscutting memberships.” At this notably well-attended panel, Hilton led a moment of silence to honor the memory of prodigious Fuller scholar Professor Jeffrey Steele.

Out of NE5 — Photo courtesy of Katie Kornacki

On Saturday’s panel, “Margaret Fuller: Out of New England,” chaired by Society Treasurer Noelle Baker (Independent scholar), Simone Puelo (University of Connecticut, Storrs) presented “Of Good and Noble Aspect: Margaret Fuller, Catholicism and Pius IX (1847-1850),” tracing Fuller’s ambivalent views of Catholicism and Pius IX, as well as her criticism of theocratic monarchy and the Papal State. Puelo sees many of Fuller’s critiques of the Church as “emancipatory” in nature, exposing the institutional injustices common Catholics faced. Clemens Spahr (Mainz University, Germany) presented “Romantic Revolutions: Cosmopolitan Radicalism in Margaret Fuller’s Dispatches from Europe,” which reads Fuller’s European dispatches for Horace Greeley’s the New-York Tribune as “not a refutation of her earlier Transcendentalism,” nor a “simple continuation” of that project, but, rather, a “rewriting” of her Romanticism. Katie Kornacki (Caldwell University) gave a paper entitled “‘The Morning Star of Margaret Fuller’: The Woman’s Club Movement and the Legacy of Fuller’s Conversations,” outlining Fuller’s continuing influence in women’s clubs across the United States. Michael Schrimper (Independent scholar) presented a transatlantic study, “Who’s Afraid of Margaret Fuller?: Literary and Biographical Connections Between Virginia Woolf and Margaret Fuller,” delineating the ways in which Fuller, in “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain” in particular, anticipates the high Modernist feminist narratology of Virginia Woolf’s experimental 1917 sketch, “Kew Gardens.”

Phyllis with award 2 — Photo courtesy of Jana L. Argersinger

Prior to Saturday’s panel and business meeting, Fullerites gathered for a Friday evening dinner at Sens, a warmly-lit Mediterranean restaurant overlooking the Bay Bridge. Before partaking in a meal including grilled Spanish octopus and dry-aged rack of lamb, Society members watched as Treasurer Noelle Baker presented the first inaugural Phyllis Blum Cole Award for Social Service to its eponymous original recipient. In giving reasons for her receiving the award, Baker cited Cole’s: forging a relationship between the Society and the Margaret Fuller House of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a non-profit organization propagating Fuller’s social ideals; and her vital role as President of the Society, which, in her three-year tenure, saw Cole expanding membership, increasing funds, generating a Society newsletter, renewing panel status at MLA, establishing a new Society website, and revising Society governance structure, among other feats. Society members watched with admiration as Baker presented Cole with a plaque engraved with Fuller’s words from her 1844 New-York Tribune piece, “Thanksgiving:” “No home can be healthful in which are not cherished seeds of good for the world at large.” A similar plaque will be presented, to quote the speech written by Baker and current Society President Charlene Avallone, “every three years to a Society Member” whom the Executive Council “recognizes as having worked in some significant way to promulgate the social ideals advanced by Margaret Fuller.” In addition to the plaque, the award it is to take the form of a donation to the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House.

To top off the occasion in honor of Professor Phyllis Cole, there were cheers of congratulations, along with heartfelt wine toasts, all around.

ALA 2018 in San Francisco, CA

Published on March 18, 2018July 10, 2020 by adminLeave a comment

Join us at the 2018 American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco, California, May 24-27, for two panels sponsored by the Margaret Fuller Society.

“Margaret Fuller: In the Classroom and Beyond” on Friday, May 25th, 2:10-3:30 PM

Chair: Larry Reynolds, Texas A & M University

1. “Using Fuller to Teach Fuller: Creating Agency and Security,” Holly Dykstra, Laredo Community College

2. “Teaching Margaret Fuller, Fanny Fern, and the Nineteenth-Century Press in the Wake of #MeToo,” Callie Gallo, Fordham University

3. “Elemental Bodies: Mapping the Materialist Cartographies of Margaret Fuller’s ‘Leila’ and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening in a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Classroom,” Lesli Vollrath, University of Houston

4. “Praxis of Duality: The Sisterhood of Fuller’s ‘Leila’ and Du Bois’s ‘Atlanta’,” Nanette Rasband Hilton, University of Nevada–Las Vegas.

[The Margaret Fuller Society Business Meeting will be conducted on Saturday, May 26, at 2:10-3:30 PM.]

“Margaret Fuller: Out of New England” on Saturday, May 26, at 3:40-5:00 PM

Chair: Noelle Baker, Independent Scholar

1. “Of Good and Noble Aspect: Margaret Fuller, Catholicism and Pius IX (1847-1850),” Simone Maria Puleo, University of Connecticut, Storrs

2. “Romantic Revolutions: Cosmopolitan Radicalism in Margaret Fuller’s Dispatches from Europe,” Clemens Spahr, Mainz University, Germany

3. “‘The Morning Star of Margaret Fuller’: The Woman’s Club Movement and the Legacy of Fuller’s Conversations,” Katie Kornacki, Caldwell University

4. “Who’s Afraid of Margaret Fuller?: Literary and Biographical Connections Between Virginia Woolf and Margaret Fuller,” Michael Schrimper, Independent Scholar

You may also be interested in this panels with presentations on Fuller:

“‘A Choir of Resistance’: ‘Unruly’ Voices and ‘Nasty’ Women in American Literature” on Friday, May 25, at 5:10-6:30 PM

Chair: Elif Armbruster

1. “A Choir of Resistance: Margaret Fuller’s Network of Nasty Women in Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” Lesli Vollrath, University of Houston

2. “Nasty Women in the Press: Margaret Fuller, Fanny Fern, and the Pitfalls of Professionalization,” Callie Gallo, Fordham University

3. “‘A Peculiar Case’ of Women’s Writing in Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons,” Ki Yoon Jang, Sogang University (Seoul)

4. “The Unruly, Unmarried Black Woman Mimi Daquin of Walter White’s Flight,” Julie Anne Naviaux, University of Alabama in Huntsville

5. “Wandering Women and Queer Resistance in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood,” Victoria Chandler, University of South Carolina

6. “Teaching the ‘Nasty Woman’: Facing Resistance in the Classroom,” Elif Armbruster, Suffolk University

The full program draft is available here.

Margaret Fuller Panel at ASA

Published on November 6, 2017February 28, 2023 by admin2 Comments

Margaret Fuller scholars and society members will be at the American Studies Association conference this weekend in Chicago, IL.

Margaret Fuller’s Politics of Dissent

Sat, November 11, 8:00 to 9:45am, Hyatt Regency Chicago, Burnham, Third Floor West Tower

Chair: Sonia Di Loreto (University of Torino, Italy)

Panelists:

William Bond (Northeastern University)

Dorri Beam (Syracuse University)

Johnatan D. Fitzgerald (Northeastern University)

Sarah Payne (Northeastern University)

Abstract

In the light of this year’s theme, “Pedagogies of Dissent”, for ASA 2017 we would like to propose a round-table on the conjuncture of politics, intellectual activity, and education in the work of Margaret Fuller and some of her friends and collaborators (especially Giuseppe Mazzini and Cristina di Belgiojoso) in the revolutionary Europe of the 1840s.

Centering the roundtable on our collaborative, multilingual Digital Humanities project, the Margaret Fuller Transnational Archive, we would like to address the intellectual genealogies of revolutionary thought. These intellectual networks of exchange became visible in our research and in the construction of the archive. By portraying networks and clusters of publications involving Margaret Fuller and some of her correspondents in Europe, the archive helps to uncover how the intellectual militancy of these public figures was deeply invested in creating oppositional pedagogies. We will concentrate on specific articles published in the People’s Journal (London) in 1847 and in the New York Tribune in 1847-50, to reflect on educational models outside of well established educational institutions, such as, for example, Mazzini’s evening school for Italian boys founded in London in 1841, as well as Fuller’s observation that educational opportunities in England are increasingly “extended to girls,” as she writes, they “ought to be.”

While focusing on Fuller’s role in the exchange and circulation of revolutionary theory in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, we also aim to engage with Fuller’s transformation of genre-conventions in her letters to the Tribune. In particular, we will be examining Fuller’s breaking with the conventions of travel-writing and with the politics and aesthetics of landscape- writing in her accounts of travelling through Europe. In so doing, it is possible to consider Fuller a forerunner to the genre that would come to be called literary journalism.

We also intend to discuss different possibilities offered by digital platforms and archives, since the digital format is ideally suited to document, map, and visualize the scope and significance of networks across politically contested space and through time. Added to this, the digital platform decentralizes modern scholarship, reaching scholars who work in the U.S. and in Europe, as well as elsewhere. By using the collaborative and inclusive nature of our project (a transnational archive where scholars from different countries, and at different stages of their career work together), we would also like to engage in new models of political pedagogies, outside of national borders and institutional limitations.

Thank you to Sonia Di Loreto for providing the information for this post!

Image via TripAdvisor

Fullerians at SSAWW in Bordeaux

Published on August 31, 2017February 28, 2023 by adminLeave a comment

This post was written by Margaret Fuller Society First Vice President and contributing author Charlene Avallone.

Conference director Stéphanie Durrans and her coworkers welcomed us this July to the Université Bordeaux Montaigne for the first international conference organized by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, a gathering characterized by the hospitality and intellectual stimulation traditionally associated with the host nation. Not surprisingly, Margaret Fuller was much in evidence–for among American writers, Fuller stands out as paradigmatic of the conference theme: Border Crossings.

Notorious in her own time for transgressing and confounding boundaries in her life and work, Fuller remains recognized for transcending confines. She evaded restrictions on education and library access, preparing herself for an exceptional career that amalgamated roles as educator, public intellectual, translator, journalist, frontier and transnational travel writer, and theorist of (trans)gender. Born into New England elite, she represented causes of immigrants and the poor and championed claims of human rights against state and social constraints. A female pioneer in transnational cultural and political journalism, Fuller explored the possibilities of literary and political connections in her European travels. Her writings, now issued in several nations and languages, often blur conventional boundaries between oral/literary discourse, male/female spheres, or popular/high genres of literature and philosophy.

Panelists on the roundtable sponsored by the Fuller Society highlighted this liminal figure, examining: Fuller’s literal and political translations of European writers (Kathleen Lawrence); her redefinition in her pedagogy and literary canon of the boundaries between women’s conversational culture/Socratic dialogue and imitative/original learning and writing (Christa Vogelius); her participation in multilingual epistolary networks that cross national, ideological, private/public, and genre boundaries (Sonia Di Loreto); her transformation of nationalist travelogue through her transatlantic reading and travel, deviation from normative masculine perspectives, and translation (Brigitte Bailey); and transnational reception history of her life and work (Marina Kizima).

On another panel, speakers analyzed Fuller’s self-conscious rhetorical strategies of revisioning as she confronted changing national borderlines and internal divisions, including over slavery (Mollie Barnes), and directed attention from Fuller’s connection to socialism to consideration of her thinking about property and its relation to revolution (Abigail Fagan). Together, they conveyed a nuanced sense of Fuller’s journalistic negotiations with radical political positions.

The panel, 19th-Century Women Crossing Borders between Literature, Science, Politics and Welfare Issues: Margaret Jay Jessee, Abigail Fagan, and Mollie Barnes

20170706_130316 — Many thanks to Brigitte Bailey (left, next to Sonia Di Loreto) for providing photos from the event!

12th Annual Sweet Soul Supper

Published on July 11, 2017February 28, 2023 by adminLeave a comment

This post was written by Margaret Fuller Society member and contributing author Michael Schrimper, who also provided the photos from the event.

MIT’s Morss Hall, decorated for the event

On the evening of Thursday, June 15, the President of the Margaret Fuller Society, Phyllis Cole, was joined by three society members, Leslie Eckel, Megan Marshall, and Michael Schrimper, for the Twelfth Annual Sweet Soul Supper, held to benefit the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House of Cambridge. The event took place at MIT’s Morss Hall, featured live music, a silent auction, and a buffet.

Phyllis Cole introduces Ellen Semonoff, winner of the Inaugural Margaret Fuller Women’s Leadership Award. Since the evening was packed with awards and speeches, Cole shared only one Margaret Fuller quote with the audience during her introduction, “If you ask me what offices [women] may fill, I reply–any….Let them be sea-captains, if you will.” Cole then pointed out that Ellen Semonoff hasn’t been a sea-captain, but instead a leader in responding to the needs of others–a vocation in fact closer to Margaret Fuller’s heart.

Halfway through the event, Phyllis Cole presented Ellen Semonoff with the Inaugural Margaret Fuller Women’s Leadership Award, for Semonoff’s lifelong contributions to the public. Semonoff has been Cambridge’s Assistant City Manager for Human Services; she leads a staff of 600 in providing child care, family support, youth programs, workforce development, adult basic education, recreation, fuel and nutrition assistance, homeless programs, and services to the elderly and disabled. She started her career as a lawyer in Washington, working as an assistant to Joseph Califano in Heath, Education, and Welfare and a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Semonoff was selected by the Margaret Fuller House for her contributions, and the House asked Cole to present the award in honor of Fuller, whose advocacy of women’s leadership they were also recognizing. Following Cole’s introduction, Semonoff received a standing ovation from the whole house.

From left to right: Leslie Eckel, Michael Schrimper, Phyllis Cole, and Megan Marshall smile for a photo after enjoying a buffet of soul food. Dishes served include stuffed chicken breasts, roast beef, macaroni and cheese, and fried plantains. The silent auction featured a chance to bid on ice-cream-making sessions at a popular Cambridge ice cream shop and a session with a personal trainer at a Cambridge fitness center, among other items.

Michael Schrimper teaches in the Writing, Literature & Publishing department at Emerson College in Boston.

Margaret Fuller Society Celebrates 25 Years

Published on May 28, 2017February 28, 2023 by margaretfullersocietyLeave a comment

“I remembered how, a little child, I had stopped myself one day on the stairs, and asked, how came I here? How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?” — Margaret Fuller

In celebration of the society’s 25th Anniversary, society members gathered at the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House on Saturday, May 27. Margaret Fuller Society President Phyllis Cole began our meeting up the stairs in the Margaret Fuller House reading attendees this quotation from Fuller’s reflections on her childhood. Members who gathered in Boston for the American Literature Association 2017 annual conference traveled by bus to Fuller’s birth home, now a community center, on 71 Cherry Street in Cambridge, MA. We climbed the those same stairs that Fuller herself had stopped on many years ago, and celebrated the life and work of Margaret Fuller as well as the tremendous community support the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House provides today.

The Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House (MFNH) offers emergency food services to 16,000 unique individuals each year. Serving approximately 300 people a day, the work of 25 volunteers each morning is invaluable to the local Port community. The House also provides nurturing and educational child and teen programs in partnership with local schools to foster the social and emotional development of youth in need. It was delightful to hear the voices of children playing outside and in the house throughout the afternoon we spent with Christina Alexis, the Executive Director on the left in the photo above.

The MFNH has a community advancement program that works to build community and provide education, resources, and information to help lift individuals out of poverty and become successful and self-sustaining. Using their Margaret Fuller Method, a holistic model made up of four interconnected pillars, their mission is to strengthen and empower individuals of all ages and to address the economic, social, and political inequities that shape the lives and futures of Port residents. Make a donation.

ALA 2017 Conference & the 25th Anniversary of the Society

Published on May 27, 2017February 28, 2023 by margaretfullersocietyLeave a comment

IMG_20170527_081428 — Yoshiko Ito presents at ALA 2017

We gathered in Boston, MA for the American Literature Association 2017 conference May 25-28, where the Margaret Fuller Society organized two panels and celebrated its 25th Anniversary. On Thursday, Wesley Mott presented “‘Testifying of that Unseen World within’: ‘The Dial’ and Transcendentalist Music Criticism” on a “Musical Intelligence in Antebellum Boston” panel.

On Friday, the first of the Fuller Society panels, “Presenting Margaret Fuller I: Touring, Film, and Digital Humanities,” was chaired by First Vice President Charlene Avallone. Reverend Jenny Rankin discussed her walks “On the Road in Fuller’s Footsteps” in Italy. Fuller Society Board Member Sonia Di Loreto, with William Bond and Sarah Payne, presented their Digital Humanities project and incredibly useful teaching tool, The Margaret Fuller Transnational Archive, which you can read more about here. Finally, Jonathan Schwartz presented a preview of a documentary film on Margaret Fuller. Many members who participated in the film making were present. Fuller Society President Phyllis Cole moderated a Ralph Waldo Emerson Society panel in the afternoon called “Beautiful Foes: A Roundtable Discussion of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Affiliations with Women,” on which Sarah Ann Wider, Kate Culkin, Fuller Society Treasurer Noelle Baker, Christopher Hanlon, and Andrea Knutson presented.

IMG_20170527_144356 — Phyllis Cole addresses Fuller Society members at the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House

On Saturday, the day began early with the second Fuller Society panel, “Presenting Margaret Fuller II: Writing Activism,” chaired by Charlene Avallone. Yoshiko Ito began the presentations talking about her work teaching Fuller in Japan in her paper, “Rhetorical Strategies of Margaret Fuller and Hiratsuka Raicho.” Then Katie Kornacki presented on Fuller as satirist in “Margaret Fuller’s New York Journalism: Anti-Capital Punishment Reform, Evolution, and the Role of the Public Intellectual.” Finally, Christina Katopodis concluded the panel with her paper arguing for Fuller as a forerunner of William James in her paper “Margaret Fuller’s Early Feminist Pragmatic Method.” Full abstracts are available in Past ALA Convention Paper Titles in the society archives.

To celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Margaret Fuller Society, after a successful business meeting Fuller Society members visited the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House for refreshments, cake, and a tour of the community center, through the child care rooms, food services kitchen, and the shady playground outside. You can read more about the House and our visit here and make a donation to the house on their website. The community center is a symbol of love in Cambridge. You can read more about what volunteers do here. The day concluded with the American Literature Association 2017 conference reception.

IMG_20170527_162947 — Christina Alexis, Executive Director of MFNH with Charlene Avallone

Thank you to all the members who made these thought-provoking panels, visit to the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House, and overall wonderful weekend possible!