Spotlight: Eagan Dean, MFS Board Member and Committee for Racial Justice

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. 

MFS Spotlight: MFS Board Member Etta Madden

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 19th-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.

Etta Madden is Professor of English, Emerita, at Missouri State University. She will be a visiting professor at the University of Pisa, Italy, Fall 2024, and has been a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the Università degli Studi di Catania (Italy), and a recipient of research fellowships at the New York Public Library and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Her books include Engaging Italy: American Women’s Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks (SUNY Press 2022), Eating in Eden: Food & American Utopias (U Nebraska 2006) and Bodies of Life: Shaker Literature and Literacies (Greenwood 1998).

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.

Spotlight: MFS Board Member Kathy Lawrence

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.

Get to Know Prof. Leslie Eckel, MFS Communications Officer

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 Dr. Leslie Eckel, who is Associate Professor and Honors Coordinator of English at Suffolk University.

Dr. Eckel teaches American literature, literatures of travel and migration, utopian and dystopian studies, first-year writing, and women’s and gender studies. She is currently working on two major projects: a monograph on utopianism in the long nineteenth century, and the Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Writings of Margaret Fuller with her co-editors Sonia di Loreto and Andrew Taylor. If you see Eckel on Zoom or at the next in-person conference, you might ask her about Atlantic literary studies, publishing and co-editing books, service-learning pedagogy, parenting, and even yoga.

We asked Dr. Eckel to tell us about what drew her to Margaret Fuller, and here is what she said: “I first discovered Fuller in a graduate seminar on Victorian poetry with the late Linda Peterson, who was a wonderful professor, as we were reading Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Fuller appeared in a footnote to the poem, and I wanted to learn her whole story! As I was starting my dissertation, I traveled to Rome and read Fuller’s dispatches from Europe for the first time while eating lots of Nutella on toast. … I love and appreciate Margaret Fuller’s ability to fuse intellectual pursuits with activism in a wider world. The turn she makes as she leaves Boston for New York is such an important part of this path, and she captures it when she writes in an 1845 letter to her brother Richard, ‘[I] wish to share and impel the general stream of thought.’”

In the next several years, Dr. Eckel would like the MFS to become more inclusive both in its membership and the conversations that our members have with one another. She believes that our current racial justice initiatives and planning for an international conference in 2023 are key steps in this direction.

During the pandemic, Dr. Eckel learned a great deal, including how to support her students more holistically as learners and as people, even via Zoom. The things she looks forward to doing most after the pandemic include: “Visiting faraway family and friends, exploring Legoland in Denmark with my son, and experiencing the next international conference with Fuller Society colleagues.”

We thank Dr. Eckel for her service and leadership and for sharing her time with us. If you would like to learn more about her work, see the resources she has shared with us below.

Bibliography:

A documentary film, Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Revolutionary, Risorgimento Productions, 2021, https://margaretfullermovie.com

An edited volume, The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies, edited with Clare Frances Elliott, Edinburgh University Press, 2016, https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-edinburgh-companion-to-atlantic-literary-studies.html

An article, “Radical Innocence: Margaret Fuller’s Utopian Rome” in Transatlantica, no. 2, 2015, http://transatlantica.revues.org/7754

A chapter on “Fuller’s Conversational Journalism: New York, London, Rome” in my book Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World, Edinburgh University Press, 2013, https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-atlantic-citizens.html

Get to Know Prof. Lisa West, MFS Financial Officer

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 Dr. Lisa West, who is a professor in the Department of English at Drake University.

We asked Dr. West to tell us a little about herself, and here is what she said: “As an undergrad, I majored in English but also completed an environmental studies concentration, resulting in 3 years’ work (as paralegal then Public Relations) with the EPA. I went back to grad school with the intent of linking my interest in the environment to reading and writing. My most popular course at Drake is on the Salem Witch Trials. Originally designed as a palatable way to teach colonial texts to undergrads, it has become fascinating to them and me as a window into archives, history-telling, and a variety of concepts from “truth” to “trauma.” In my first visiting professor position, I lit the English department of Santa Clara on fire. Literally. I was xeroxing materials for class and the machine was not working well. I removed my originals and went to class in another building – only to see a firetruck outside the department on my return. And it wasn’t even incendiary stuff I was teaching…”

The next time you see her you might ask Dr. West about her work in environmental humanities, including the ecogothic, environmental literature, some basics in environmental history; Catharine Maria Sedgwick; the “mound-builders” site and writings about their ruins; and how she teaches the Salem Witch Trials.

When it comes to Margaret Fuller, Dr. West says she is inspired by Fuller’s “sheer love of learning and her avid reading habits.” She continues, “I am humbled by how she paired that voracious appetite with dedication to SHARING  knowledge through conversations, translations, journalism, activism.”

In her role as Financial Officer, Dr. West keeps track of new and returning members and the society’s accounts. In addition to retaining the society’s current members, she “would like to see MFS focus on diversity of membership. I also would like to see a flexible and multi-faceted connection with the MF Neighborhood House.”

Finally, we asked Dr. West to tell us about one thing she did or learned during the pandemic that she is proud of. She responded, “My siblings and I started weekly family Zooms with each other, my Mom, and sometimes our kids. We all live in different cities, so this has been a lovely way to feel more connected to each other. I think is a Sunday night tradition we will keep.” 

We thank Dr. West for her service and leadership and for sharing her time with us. If you would like to read her work, see the citations below.

Bibliography:

“Six Lessons in Teaching Susanna Rowson’s Sincerity through the Just Teach One Project.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 34.1. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. 2017. 

“The Nature of ‘The Flourishing Village’ in America: Prospects in Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie.” Literature in the Early American Republic. Volume 2. Brooklyn, NY: AMS Press, Inc. 2010. 

“Toward a Political Ecology in Lydia Maria Child’s ‘Chocorua’s Curse.’” Gendered Ecologies: New Materialist Interpretations of Women Writers in the Long Nineteenth Century. Eds. Dewey Hall and Jillmarie Murphy. Intro. by Stacy Alaimo. Afterward by Jane Bennett. Clemson University Press, 2020. 

“Susan Fenimore Cooper’s ‘Home Book of the Revolution’: Mount Vernon: A Letter to the Children of America, Patriotism, and Sentiment.”  Susan Fenimore Cooper: New Essays on Rural Hours and Other Works.  Eds. Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson.  Foreword by Lawrence Buell.  Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001, pp 39-60. 

“Fragments, Ruins, and Artifacts of the Past: The Reconstruction of Reading in The Deerslayer.” Nineteenth Century Literary Criticism. Columbia, SC: Layman Poupard. Library Database. NCLC is part of the survey of criticism and world literature that is contained in Gale’s Contemporary Literary Criticism (CLC), Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism (TCLC), Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800 (LC), Shakespearean Criticism (SC), and Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism (CMLC). www.lpppub.com/nineteenth-century-criticism

Web Publications 

“Onlookers, Rescuers, and a ‘Melancholy Witness,’” Just Teach OneCommon-Place: An Interactive Journal of Early American Life, American Antiquarian Society, 2019. http://www.jto.common-place.org/justteachone/ 

Sentimental Fragments, Absence, and “Writing” Issues,”Just Teach OneCommon-Place: An Interactive Journal of Early American Life, American Antiquarian Society, 2018. http://www.jto.common-place.org/justteachone/ 

“‘The Afric-American Picture Gallery’ Reflection,” Just Teach One African-American LiteratureCommon-Place: An Interactive Journal of Early American Life, American Antiquarian Society, 2015. http://www.jtoaa.common-place.org 

Get to Know Our Second Vice President, Prof. Mollie Barnes

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 Dr. Mollie Barnes, who is Associate Professor of Nineteenth Century U.S. Literature at the University of South Carolina Beaufort, a teaching-intensive university committed to serving students and their families in lowcountry communities.

We asked Dr. Barnes to tell us a little about herself and she joyfully responded: “I love having my dream job and living in my dream part of the country. Half of my teaching is to students in first-year composition. Half is to English Studies majors and minors. I’m grateful for long summertime mornings and evenings to dive into writing projects that matter to me. The work that I’m most grateful to do—at my university and in our field—is supporting conversations and actions that center diversity, equity, and inclusion. I love gardening, cross-stitching, and being a cat-mom to my sweet tortie-girl named Frida.” [Frida is pictured below]

What is one thing about Fuller that you admire or find inspiring—why you gravitate to her in your scholarship or life?

Dr. Barnes: “I realize when I read Fuller with my students how surprising she is in the varieties of her passions—and in the ways she changes her mind over time. In my absolute favorite quotation, even Fuller seems surprised at the kaleidoscope qualities of her own mind and existence as she remembers herself in her childhood home: ‘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?'”

What would you like MFS to accomplish in the next 5 years?

Dr. Barnes: “I’m happy to assist Katie Kornacki with Conversations, the newsletter for the Margaret Fuller Society. I’m also happy—now that this pandemic may be winding down—to firm up the CFP and the date and the location for Journaling for Justice. In both of these efforts, and in partnership with my colleagues who lead this organization, I’m most committed to 1) advocating for teaching and service and scholarship that centers anti-racist work and 2) strengthening Fuller’s place in conversations about innovative pedagogies and sensitive community engagement.”

What is one thing you did or learned during the pandemic that you are proud of?

Dr. Barnes: “I am learning to slow down and to savor ‘small’ things I haven’t made time to appreciate for too long. An old song I forgot I loved. An exquisite bird staring at me in my windowsill or the tree outside my office. Chartreuse embroidery floss. And hugs with friends in my bubble. Some big things too: my first house, my first publication on Fuller in print, and tenure and promotion!”

Bibliography: 

“Margaret Fuller’s Late Abolitionist Rhetoric: How She Changed Her Mind.” Nineteenth-Century American Activist Rhetorics, edited by Patricia Bizzell and Lisa Zimmerelli, MLA Press, 2021, 64–75.

“Teaching to Resist, Teaching to Recover: Charlotte Forten’s Sea Islands Archives Across Private and Public Forms.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, vol. 37, no. 2, fall 2020. 

Frida

Get to Know Andrew Wildermuth, MFS Leader from Erlangen, Germany

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 Graduate Student Liaison, Andrew Wildermuth, who recently answered some questions from MFS Web Developer Christina Katopodis.

Wildermuth is a graduate student in North American studies in Erlangen, Germany, and holds interests in poetics and politics, romanticism, and biopolitics. He is originally from Annapolis, Maryland, where he attended Anne Arundel Community College and St. Mary’s College of Maryland. He also works as a copyeditor and writes his own poems, with recent poems published in Columbia Journal, EcoTheo Review, and SOFTBLOW.

If you run into Wildermuth at a conference or on Zoom, you might ask him about how to attend tuition-free grad school in Germany as a non-EU citizen (or about tasty German beverages).

Katopodis: What is one thing about Fuller that you admire or find inspiring?

Wildermuth: I am perplexed and inspired by Margaret Fuller’s ceaseless imagination and ambition, her wide and bending conceptions of gender, as well as her always-surprising use of language. An 1835 journal fragment that haunts and scares me: “aims unreached occasions lost.”

Katopodis: What would you like to see the Margaret Fuller Society accomplish in the next 5 years?

Wildermuth: I would like to see the Margaret Fuller Society provide platforms for research and teaching that critically explores race, racism, and colonialism in the work of Margaret Fuller. I believe we need to build better vocabularies to understand how racial and racist discourse operates in early U.S. literature, especially in literature often considered liberal or progressive.

Katopodis: What is one thing you did or learned in the pandemic that you are proud of?

Wildermuth: I revived my running habit somewhat, which has nicely balanced a simultaneous revival of interest in wine and beer!

We thank Wildermuth for spending time to tell us more about himself. If you would like to read some of his scholarship, keep an eye out for two articles forthcoming this spring/summer: a paper on the sonnet politics of Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows in the journal Aspeers; and a paper on Shelley’s Frankenstein and biopolitics in the journal ZAA: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik.

Get to Know Our Immediate Past President, Charlene Avallone

Charlene Avallone is the Immediate Past President of the Margaret Fuller Society. As part of a new blog post series, we are taking a moment to get to know our society’s leaders and members. We thank Avallone for all her hard work on behalf of the Margaret Fuller Society and for taking a moment to answer some questions for us.

Coming from a rural working-class background in Upstate New York, Avallone earned degrees “long ago,” as she puts it, at the College of Saint Rose (BA) and SUNY Binghamton (MA, PhD, dissertation on Melville). After serving on the faculties of the universities of Hawai’i and Notre Dame, she now works as an independent scholar, alternating between Kailua, Hawai’i, where she serves as an “in-house” editor for Chip Hughes’s Surfing Detective mystery series, and Upstate, “where my heart dwells.” 

If you have receives an email from Avallone, you might have noticed she signs her emails with a proper “aloha.” If you see her at a conference, you might ask her about Hawai’i. “What members of other academic societies to which I belong ask me about most is Hawai’i,” Avallone says, “which opens up a conversation on the over-developed tourist economy, militarization of the Islands, racial dynamics, and the Hawaiian sovereignty movement.”

In the next 5 years, Avallone would like to see the Margaret Fuller Society continue to grow “in its membership, its outreach, and its embrace of critical approaches.”

What is one thing about Fuller that you most admire? “I find Fuller’s writings important because they have allowed me to address multiple vital issues in my teaching and researching of U.S. literatures and of gender studies: issues ongoing since her time of gender, race/ethnicity, class, religion, and ecology, as well as the history and methods of close reading and interpretation necessary to consideration of these complex issues.”

Share one thing you learned during the pandemic. “Pandemic restrictions allowed me to (re)learn how much joy is to be had in slowing down to appreciate diurnal routines. (Spending mornings with a two-year-old helps.)”


A Bibliography of Charlene Avallone’s Publications on Fuller:

Woman in the Nineteenth Century:  Romanticism and (Proto)feminism.” Invited essay. Handbook of American Romanticism. Eds. Philipp Löffler, Clemens Spahr, and Jan Stievermann. De Gruyter, forthcoming 2021. 

“Margaret Fuller and ‘the best living prose writer,’ George Sand: A Revisionist Account.” Invited essay.  Nineteenth-Century Prose. Special Issue on Margaret Fuller. Guest Editor: Brigitte Bailey. 42, 2 (Fall 2015). 93-124.

“Circles around George Sand:  Margaret Fuller and The Dynamics of Transnational Reception.” Margaret Fuller and Her Circles, Ed. Brigitte Bailey, Kate Viens, and Conrad E. Wright.  University Press of New England. 2012. 206-229.

“What American Renaissance? The Gendered Genealogy of a Critical Discourse.” PMLA 112, 5 (1997):  1102-1120. Reprinted in American Literature: A Sourcebook for Teachers. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006. 

“The ‘Red Roots’ of White Feminism in Margaret Fuller’s Writings.” Doing Feminism: Teaching and Research in the Academy. Ed. Mary Anderson, Lisa Fine, Kathleen Geissler, and Joyce R. Ladenson. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1997.