Call for Submissions to Conversations
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.
CFP for an MFS-Sponsored Panel at the 2026 Thoreau Society Annual Gathering
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.
CALL FOR COLLABORATION
“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:
- · How might a statement reflect our shared values and communicate support for researchers, teachers, and cultural workers?
- · What forms of mutual support can author societies and similar organizations offer to one another in terms of sharing information or pitching in labor?
- · How would we want to respond if a society or society member’s research were targeted by funders, political officials, or academic officials because of that research’s political context or the researcher’s background? How would we want to respond to unjust employment actions against fellow teachers and cultural workers?
- · How can we keep each other safe from harassment, especially in the classroom and online?
- · What kind of community capacity can we build to weather the coming storm in and outside academia?
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
