The Margaret Fuller Society sponsored a panel on “Margaret Fuller, Women in the 19C, and Resilience” at the Thoreau Society Gathering held in Concord, MA on Thursday, July 11, 2024. Read the full CFP here (opens in new tab). The panel, co-organized by MFS Past President Phyllis Cole and MFS Second Vice President Christina Katopodis, was very well-attended and followed by a robust, engaging discussion with the audience. The papers were as follows:
“The Body Resilient: Margaret Fuller’s Materialist Transcendentalism” by Johanna Pitetti-Heil
Johanna Pitetti-Heil is an American studies scholar with a specific research interest in literary studies and cultural theory, critical dance dance studies, feminist philosophy, and, most recently, transcendentalism. She is a (tenured) senior lecturer for gender and diversity studies at the English Department of the University of Cologne, Germany. She is co-editor of gender forum and she is a board member of SLSAeu. She is the author of Walking the Möbius Strip: An Inquiry into Knowing in Richard Powers Fiction (Winter, 2016), and her work in American literary and cultural studies, including critical dance studies, has appeared in journals such as Dance Chronicle, Hypatia, Amerikastudien / American Studies, WiN, the forum of J19, and in edited collections. She passed the Habilitation review process in 2024 and is currently preparing her second book manuscript “Becoming-Body: Practices of Freedom and Technologies of the Self in American Modern Dance.”
Johanna spoke about the linkage between materially real bodies (and body pains) and Fuller’s philosophy, reminding us that Fuller did not always put the soul over matter. She theorizes Fuller’s materialist transcendentalism, drawing from new materialism.
“Women Transcendentalists in the Publishing World: Margaret Fuller and Caroline Healey Dall’s Stories of Resilience” by Alice de Galzain
Alice de Galzain completed her PhD in English at the University of Edinburgh, where her dissertation focused on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s portrayal of Margaret Fuller in Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852). She is about to begin a postdoc at Sorbonne University, working on “Women Networks and Transcendentalist Utopias: Health, Gender, and Reform.” Alice is the Associate Editor of The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies and the Associate Editor of Margaret Fuller, Periodical and Other Writings, 1834-1844, The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Writings of Margaret Fuller. Her article on “Transcendentalist Women in Conversation: Margaret Fuller, Sophia Ripley, and ‘Woman’” appeared in Transatlantica: American Studies Journal in 2022, and she has two essays due to appear in Legacy and LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory later this year.
Alice spoke about how women’s overwork gets written into their sentences, notes their shortness, the integration of life and work writing in the same spaces. She spoke about the precarity and burdens of editorship, that Fuller and Dall were lied to, undercompensated, and, yet, remained committed to the written word.
“Resilience in Fuller’s Friendships with Arconati and Belgiojoso” by Patricia Richards
Patricia Lyn Richards earned her PhD in Italian literature from Rutgers University and has taught for several decades at Kenyon College in Ohio. Though her field was the Renaissance, she later moved into film, and recently discovered the intriguing complexity of the nineteenth century, while researching a paper on both the men and women Fuller was closest to in Italy.
Patricia spoke about friendship (in concept and in practice), focusing on Fuller’s friendships with two women in Italy. She detailed how these two women contemporaries offered Fuller examples of supportive friendships: they offered her solace, information, and the opportunity for action, giving reality to her philosophy of gender.
The panel was followed by a ceremony honoring MFS Past President Phyllis Cole, who was awarded the Thoreau Society Medal, the society’s highest honor, as well as a dinner at Fiorella’s Cucina organized by MFS Second Vice President Christina Katopodis.
