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!

Pistachio cake with American Buttercream frosting, baked and designed by Christina Katopodis

MFS Exec Council Endorses MLA’s Statement Deploring Racism

The Executive Council of the Margaret Fuller Society, as an affiliated society of the Modern Language Association (MLA), endorses the Association’s Statement Deploring Racism.

The MLA’s statement reads:

“The Executive Council of the Modern Language Association condemns in the strongest possible terms the wanton destruction of Black life in the United States. We deplore the horrific murders of Black people by the police and the systemic racism in police forces, in educational institutions, and throughout society. It has never been more important for educational institutions to support and expand Black and Africana studies, Latinx and ethnic studies, and Native American studies and to teach the literatures born of struggle against racist violence. During the time of pandemic, Black Americans are disproportionately at risk of illness and death because of a historical and ongoing deprivation of adequate health care. Whether Black lives are extinguished by police forces or by a broken and unjust health care system, it is clear that they are treated as dispensable lives. We call for an opposition to racism throughout society and for an understanding of the history of racism and lynching as it assumes a freshly brutal form in the present. We urge departments of language and literature to engage with the art and criticism that reflects on history and envisions another future. We call on educational institutions to renew their commitment to actively undo structures that limit access by and hinder the full participation of Black Americans and other nonwhite people at all levels. We stand in solidarity with all those who are trying to make a world of racial equality and justice. We oppose the lethal ignorance and hatred that animates racism, and we affirm educational projects that expose (and seek to overcome) the scourge of white supremacy.”

Margaret Fuller Transnational Archive

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A textual map of Fuller’s writings in the Tribune

The Margaret Fuller Transnational Archive is a digital humanities project housed in Northeastern University’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks (NULabTMN). The aim of the project is to digitally map networks of publication involving Margaret Fuller and the circles of European and American political and cultural figures, including Horace Greeley, and Giuseppe Mazzini and Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso with whom she came into contact during the years 1846-1850, when she lived in Europe.

Between 1846 and 1850, Margaret Fuller was a foreign correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune, based at different times in Italy, France and England. The archive collects all of Fuller’s Tribune correspondence written between August 1846 and January 1850, as well as the Tribune Correspondence of Christina di Belgiojoso from 1850 and 1851. Browse the archive here.

Using Neatline exhibits, the creators have been able to spatially and temporally visualize both Margaret Fuller’s and Cristina Belgiojoso’s travels and writing. The textual and geographic maps demonstrate broader trajectories of writing to highlighting specific texts in conjunction with contemporary social and political events. View the travel and writing maps here.

Many thanks to Sonia Di Loreto, William Bond, and Sarah Payne for presenting this work at the ALA 2017 Conference.

Project Team & Advisory Board

Sonia Di Loreto, Università di Torino (Italy)

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Northeastern University

Ryan Cordell, Northeastern University

Molly O’Hagan Hardy, Director of Digital and Book History Initiatives, AAS

William Bond, PhD student, Norheastern University

Sarah Payne, PhD student, Northeastern University

Leslie Eckel, Suffolk University

Noelle A. Baker, independent scholar