Recovery Hub of Women Writers – Call for Teaching Materials (Deadline: 2.16.2024)

The Recovery Hub of Women Writers is seeking teaching materials related to using digital recovery projects or engaging students in recovery projects in the classroom!

Our team aims to collaborate with instructors to develop publishable, shareable resources on how to do recovery in the classroom or how to use digital recovery projects with students. By responding to this open call via the submission form below, you will be eligible to have your teaching artifacts peer reviewed by other scholar-teachers and published on Recovery Hub’s website.

We welcome anything from a classroom activity to just a few general thoughts about a teaching experience you had with a digital archive in the classroom. And while we would particularly invite instructors who have taught one of the below archives showcased at the Hub to submit, we are also interested in hearing from you if you have a classroom activity that focuses on other digital recovery projects or recovery work in the classroom.

• The Gloria Naylor Archive
• The Winnifred Eaton Archive
• Marjorie C. Luesebrink Collection at ELO’s The NEXT
• “The Yellow Wallpaper” Digital Edition
• This Beautiful Sisterhood of Books
• Other digital recovery projects

If you’ve got any teaching artifacts or brief reflections to share, please review the Hub’s Pedagogical Support page, Recovery Hub’s pedagogical mission statement (which includes a list of possible teaching materials) and review our MOU.

To submit, complete this form by February 16, 2024. We would love to hear from you!

Reminder – CFP: Lydia Maria Child Society (2 panels) at ALA 2024 (Deadline: 1.15.2024)

The Lydia Maria Child Society is issuing two CFPs for ALA 2024:

American Literature Association Conference in Chicago, IL
23–26 May 2024 at The Palmer House Hilton
https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-annual-conference/

1. Social Justice Pedagogy Roundtable

The Lydia Maria Child Society seeks participants for a roundtable on pedagogy, social justice, and American literature. Considering contemporary social justice concerns ranging from the global rise of white supremacism to persistent gender and racial inequities accentuated by COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on Black, Hispanic, and Native American and Alaska Native people, and by various state- and community-based oppositions to, and banning of, K–12 books and public-school curricula about race or gender, the Child Society feels strongly that many of the issues for which Child fought so passionately remain deeply relevant today. To honor her lifelong commitment to both education and writing as ways to attain social change, we ask that our selected panelists prepare brief presentations (approximately 10 minutes) on how they address the above issues and/or others within the literature classroom, before engaging in what we hope will be a fruitful and wide-ranging open discussion on social justice pedagogies and American literature. What texts and social issues have proved particularly pertinent to your students’ lived experiences of activism, marginalization, etc.? How do you productively draw parallels between the concerns of the literary works you teach and those we are facing in the world outside the classroom? What specific lesson plans, textual pairings/groupings, and/or other pedagogical approaches might you recommend to colleagues striving to make their syllabi and classrooms more socially conscious and engaged?

Please send 200-word abstracts of your proposed presentation, as Word documents, to lydiamariachildsociety@gmail.com by January 15, 2024.  Note that while we, of course, welcome proposals that engage with Child’s work, Child need not be included for your proposal to be considered.

2. Celebrating Hobomok (1824) at 200: New Directions, New Reflections

The year 2024 marks the 200th publication anniversary of Lydia Maria Child’s novel Hobomok (1824). Set in early 17th-century Puritan New England, the book features a taboo marriage between Puritan Mary Conant and indigenous Pokanoket Hobomok and Mary’s eventual re-assimilation, with their mixed-race child, into Puritan society.  The Lydia Maria Child Society welcomes new ideas about, or inspired by, this novel. How might its treatments of religious intolerance, racial strife, and gendered rebellion against a religious patriarchy offer new ways of understanding our own times?  How might using Hobomok in the writing, literature, history, education, or fine arts classroom introduce fresh perspectives about community, prejudice, and understanding?  Ever wonder about “the beautiful grey fox of the Mississippi” (ch. 12)?  How might focusing on the natural world—plants, animals, weather—in Hobomok or other writings help us reconceptualize or resituate human agency vis-à-vis that of other life forms?  What might nonhuman life suggest about the choices that human life forms make?  If neither Hobomok nor Child lie within your areas of expertise, how might your own work be in conversation with either?  What fresh surprises await us through our connections to Hobomok or Child or the 19th century US?    

Please send 200-word abstracts, as Word documents, to Sandy Burr at sburr@nmu.edu by January 15, 2024.  Early submissions welcome!

LMC Society

Melissa Gniadek, President
Sandy Burr, VP of Programs

Gia Coturri Sorenson, VP of Membership & Records
Sarah Olivier, VP of Communications
Lori Robison, VP of Inclusive Excellence & Social Action

listserv: lmcs-listserv@googlegroups.com

CFP: Elizabeth Oakes Smith Society at ALA (Upcoming Deadline: 1.15.2024)

CFP: American Literature Association Conference, May 2024:

Elizabeth Oakes Smith in Relation

Due date: Jan 15, 2024

Contact: Timothy H. Scherman, t-scherman@neiu.edu

A recent blog post on the Oakes Smith Society’s website* asks us to reconsider Nina Baym’s dismissal of Oakes Smith in Women’s Fiction (1978, 1993), where Baym described Oakes Smith as “not a team-player,” and the work that established her fame, “The Sinless Child,” a political “dead-end.”

Fortunately, Oakes Smith’s contemporaries in the feminist movement of the mid-19th century and later academic critics working in the wake of Baym’s early pronouncements have found neither to be the case, but looking more closely at Baym’s language, this panel asks as to contemplate what it might have meant for any woman writer to be a “team player” in the mid-nineteenth century US? Shared experiences with other women? Shared goals? A shared rhetoric or strategy? Must it involve contemporaneous interpersonal relationships? What sort of criticism of other women (something Oakes Smith never avoided) would disqualify one from being counted a “team player?”

The Oakes Smith Society welcomes papers considering all manner of ways in which Oakes Smith was seen in her day, or might be seen in our day, in relation to other women writers of her time—as pre-cursor, as co-worker, or even in her criticism of particularly privileged women whose influence delayed the emancipation of women in the US. The following examples may provide graduate students and others less familiar with Oakes Smith’s career some points of departure:

• The Feminist as Prophet—as Ashley Reed has argued in Heaven’s Interpreters (2020), Oakes Smith was part of an extensive tradition of women embracing the role of prophet to assert their cultural authority. While the relation between Eva, the child heroine of Oakes Smith’s “The Sinless Child”(1842, 1845) and Harriet Stowe’s Little Eva from Uncle Tom’s Cabin(1852), has been suggested, nowhere has a detailed comparison been elaborated. More broadly, echoes between Oakes Smith’s rhetoric of prophecy in her treatise Woman and Her Needs or her novel Bertha and Lily and the writings and speeches of women from Maria Stewart and Harriet Jacobs to Olympia Brown and Elizabeth Stoddard might be explored. In a related vein, how might Oakes Smith’s Shadowland, or The Seer participate in the spiritualist tradition that gave Hattie Wilson fame and income in her later career?

• Formal and Generic Innovations—while scholarship has found no specific bio-critical relationships between Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Gilman scholars and others already aware of the formal relationships between Oakes Smith’s “The Defeated Life” (1847) and the diary structure of “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) may be surprised to read a utopian pre-cursor to Gilman’s Herland (1915) in Oakes Smith’s “The Amazons of Mexico” (1877). Indeed, what examples of utopian fiction in the US were available to Oakes Smith in the 1870s, and how might we explain her adoption of the genre?

• Women and Labor—from the time of Woman and Her Needs and the beginnings of her career as a lecturer (principally in “The Dignity of Labor” (1852)), Oakes Smith made women’s equal opportunity to gainful employment the key to the emancipation of her gender and the recuperation of the “sanctity of marriage.” Alcott scholars and others might find Oakes Smith’s career-long arguments repeated and expanded not only in Alcott’s novel Work: A Story of Experience (1870) but likewise in the details of Alcott’s struggle for income as a woman writer in earlier decades. A similar study might consider Oakes Smith’s arguments in relation to Ruth Hall and the career of Fanny Fern.

• Team Transcendentalist—scholars such as Tiffany Wayne, Dorri Beam, Mary Louise Kete and to some extent Elissa Zellinger have argued for the inclusion of Oakes Smith’s work in the progress of transcendentalist thought, but the interpersonal dimensions of Oakes Smith’s relationships with key figures in the movement have yet to be fleshed out. If Thoreau’s journal reflections on his conversations with Oakes Smith were none-too-promising on December 31, 1851, the evening she delivered her lecture “Womanhood” at the Concord Lyceum, is there an archival record (journal, diary, newspaper) of what other transcendentalists Oakes Smith name-checks in her late lecture on Emerson and his circle (1884) may have thought of her work?

Inquiries or Abstracts of 250 words should be emailed to Secretary of the Oakes Smith Society, Rebecca Jaroff, at rjaroff@ursinus.edu or President of the Society, Timothy H. Scherman, at t-scherman@neiu.edu by January 15.

*Many of the links in this CFP invite scholars to consider the development of the Elizabeth Oakes Smith website, along with the appearance of the first volume of Elizabeth Oakes Smith: Selected Writings in 2023 and the arrival of the second volume early in 2024, all of which afford established scholars and their students at all levels the opportunity to incorporate Oakes Smith’s work into current critical debates and revise literary histories already established.

The Oakes Smith Society invites you to use (or order!) these new resources and become part of this major 19th century woman’s recovery—for our ALA panel and beyond.

CFP: 69th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference (Deadline 3.1.2024)

Cather and the Readerly Imagination 

In her own time as in ours, Willa Cather’s books created vibrant and varied communities of readers. Cather’s literary works detail numerous acts of reading, and she herself was an avid reader with an acute awareness of the reading public. The 69^th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference seeks to celebrate and explore both the act of reading Cather and the presence of reading and readers within Cather’s fiction and letters.  

The directors invite papers on a variety of topics related to Cather, readers, and reading, including but not limited to the following areas. 

1. Representations of readers and reading in Cather’s novels and short stories 

2. How readers navigate challenging topics in Cather’s fiction. 

3. Book clubs, both historical and contemporary, and their approaches to Cather. 

4. Teaching and pedagogical approaches; digital reading and/or the use of archival materials/Cather Archive documents. 

5. Reading Cather alongside banned or challenged books. 

6. Diverse communities of readers: women; immigrants; LGBTQ+ communities; Black, Indigenous, People of Color communities; disability communities; religious communities.  

7. Reading and affect: how emotions such as joy, grief, pleasure, and escape, are evoked by or represented in Cather’s works. 

8. Cather as a reader: the works and authors she read and their influence on her writing; her personal library; and her family’s library. 

9. Reader responses: how physical copies of Cather’s work (illustrations, typography, dust jacket and book cover design) affect readers’ reception; how audiobook features and narration shape how readers experience Cather’s work. responses. 

10. Genre: reading Cather within and beyond specific genres, including poetry, regionalism, modernism, the history of the novel.  

11. Reading Cather alongside her contemporaries 

Proposals of no more than 500 words should describe papers or presentations approximately twenty minutes long. Innovative formats are encouraged. Abstracts, along with a short bio, your contact information and institutional affiliation, should be submitted to Rachel Olsen, Director of Education and Engagement, via the 2024 Spring Conference Proposal Form by March 1, 2024. Responses to proposals will be sent by mid-March. At this time, we intend to offer an in-person conference but remain committed to offering digital programming to our audiences by way of live video streaming and pre-recorded material.  Questions may be directed to Rachel Olsen or Sarah Clere and Kelsey Squire, Academic Advisors of the 2024 Spring Conference, at sarahclere@gmail.com or squirekelsey@gmail.com  

Call for Proposals: The Elizabeth Oakes Society Travel Scholarship (Deadline: 1.31.2024)

Call for Proposals: The Elizabeth Oakes Smith Travel Scholarship, 2024

The Elizabeth Oakes Smith Society invites proposals from scholars interested in incorporating the life and work of Elizabeth Oakes Smith (1806-1893) into their projects. With the expanding EOS website, the appearance of Elizabeth Oakes Smith: Selected Writings, Volume I in March 2023, the availability of Volume II this spring, and a mass of new material available to scholars studying Oakes Smith’s life and work, scholarship focused on Elizabeth Oakes Smith is expanding quickly.

The Society is open to proposals from any discipline or approach that promises to contribute to the appreciation and understanding of Oakes Smith’s life and work.

Possible projects might involve literary history, archival recovery of Oakes Smith as a professional writer or political leader, comparative studies involving Oakes Smith and other more well-known writers of the 19th century, Civil War history, or film and art projects related to any of these topics.

The Travel Scholarship provides $2000 for a scholar to visit one or more of the following destinations where Oakes Smith’s papers and publications are housed:

• The University of Charlottesville, where the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library holds the largest collection of Oakes Smith’s manuscripts, correspondence, and personal items. ·
• The New York Public Library, where The New York Public Library in New York City, and where the Manuscripts and Archives Division holds some of Oakes Smith’s letters and writings. ·
• The Maine Historical Society Library and other local libraries in Oakes Smith’s early home of Portland, Maine.

The Travel Scholarship is intended to cover travel expenses, accommodation costs, and research fees for a period of up to two weeks. The scholar is expected to produce a report on their research findings and outcomes within six months of completing their trip. Work may take the form of a dissertation chapter, conference paper, a creative project, or a public presentation. The recipient’s report will be published on the Society’s website and newsletter, and recipients will be invited to present their work in upcoming Oakes Smith panels at national and international conferences.

To apply or inquire, please submit the following documents by email to VP of Communciations for the Oakes Smith Society, Zabrina Shkurti (zshkurti@usf.edu), by January 31, 2024:

• A cover letter that introduces yourself and your project
• A proposal that describes your research question, methodology, objectives, expected outcomes, and relevance to Oakes Smith’s life and work (maximum 1000 words)
• A budget that outlines your estimated travel expenses, accommodation costs, and research fees
• A curriculum vitae that highlights your academic or professional background, publications, awards, and relevant experience

The proposals will be evaluated by all Society officers and a select committee of published Oakes Smith scholars. The evaluation criteria will include:

• The originality and significance of the research question or approach
• The feasibility and soundness of the methodology
• The clarity and coherence of the objectives and expected outcomes
• The contribution to the appreciation and understanding of Oakes Smith’s life and work
• The adequacy and reasonableness of the budget

The successful applicant will be notified by March 1, 2024. The Travel Scholarship must be used within one year of receiving the notification.

For more information about the Elizabeth Oakes Smith Society and its activities, please visit our website.

We are eager to support research involving this provocative pioneer as her figure re-emerges in the 21st century and look forward to receiving your proposal.

CFP: Elizabeth Oakes Smith Society at ALA (Deadline: 1.15.2024)

CFP: American Literature Association Conference, May 2024:

Elizabeth Oakes Smith in Relation

Due date: Jan 15, 2024

Contact: Timothy H. Scherman, t-scherman@neiu.edu

A recent blog post on the Oakes Smith Society’s website* asks us to reconsider Nina Baym’s dismissal of Oakes Smith in Women’s Fiction (1978, 1993), where Baym described Oakes Smith as “not a team-player,” and the work that established her fame, “The Sinless Child,” a political “dead-end.”

Fortunately, Oakes Smith’s contemporaries in the feminist movement of the mid-19th century and later academic critics working in the wake of Baym’s early pronouncements have found neither to be the case, but looking more closely at Baym’s language, this panel asks as to contemplate what it might have meant for any woman writer to be a “team player” in the mid-nineteenth century US? Shared experiences with other women? Shared goals? A shared rhetoric or strategy? Must it involve contemporaneous interpersonal relationships? What sort of criticism of other women (something Oakes Smith never avoided) would disqualify one from being counted a “team player?”

The Oakes Smith Society welcomes papers considering all manner of ways in which Oakes Smith was seen in her day, or might be seen in our day, in relation to other women writers of her time—as pre-cursor, as co-worker, or even in her criticism of particularly privileged women whose influence delayed the emancipation of women in the US. The following examples may provide graduate students and others less familiar with Oakes Smith’s career some points of departure:

• The Feminist as Prophet—as Ashley Reed has argued in Heaven’s Interpreters (2020), Oakes Smith was part of an extensive tradition of women embracing the role of prophet to assert their cultural authority. While the relation between Eva, the child heroine of Oakes Smith’s “The Sinless Child”(1842, 1845) and Harriet Stowe’s Little Eva from Uncle Tom’s Cabin(1852), has been suggested, nowhere has a detailed comparison been elaborated. More broadly, echoes between Oakes Smith’s rhetoric of prophecy in her treatise Woman and Her Needs or her novel Bertha and Lily and the writings and speeches of women from Maria Stewart and Harriet Jacobs to Olympia Brown and Elizabeth Stoddard might be explored. In a related vein, how might Oakes Smith’s Shadowland, or The Seer participate in the spiritualist tradition that gave Hattie Wilson fame and income in her later career?

• Formal and Generic Innovations—while scholarship has found no specific bio-critical relationships between Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Gilman scholars and others already aware of the formal relationships between Oakes Smith’s “The Defeated Life” (1847) and the diary structure of “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) may be surprised to read a utopian pre-cursor to Gilman’s Herland (1915) in Oakes Smith’s “The Amazons of Mexico” (1877). Indeed, what examples of utopian fiction in the US were available to Oakes Smith in the 1870s, and how might we explain her adoption of the genre?

• Women and Labor—from the time of Woman and Her Needs and the beginnings of her career as a lecturer (principally in “The Dignity of Labor” (1852)), Oakes Smith made women’s equal opportunity to gainful employment the key to the emancipation of her gender and the recuperation of the “sanctity of marriage.” Alcott scholars and others might find Oakes Smith’s career-long arguments repeated and expanded not only in Alcott’s novel Work: A Story of Experience (1870) but likewise in the details of Alcott’s struggle for income as a woman writer in earlier decades. A similar study might consider Oakes Smith’s arguments in relation to Ruth Hall and the career of Fanny Fern.

• Team Transcendentalist—scholars such as Tiffany Wayne, Dorri Beam, Mary Louise Kete and to some extent Elissa Zellinger have argued for the inclusion of Oakes Smith’s work in the progress of transcendentalist thought, but the interpersonal dimensions of Oakes Smith’s relationships with key figures in the movement have yet to be fleshed out. If Thoreau’s journal reflections on his conversations with Oakes Smith were none-too-promising on December 31, 1851, the evening she delivered her lecture “Womanhood” at the Concord Lyceum, is there an archival record (journal, diary, newspaper) of what other transcendentalists Oakes Smith name-checks in her late lecture on Emerson and his circle (1884) may have thought of her work?

Inquiries or Abstracts of 250 words should be emailed to Secretary of the Oakes Smith Society, Rebecca Jaroff, at rjaroff@ursinus.edu or President of the Society, Timothy H. Scherman, at t-scherman@neiu.edu by January 15.

*Many of the links in this CFP invite scholars to consider the development of the Elizabeth Oakes Smith website, along with the appearance of the first volume of Elizabeth Oakes Smith: Selected Writings in 2023 and the arrival of the second volume early in 2024, all of which afford established scholars and their students at all levels the opportunity to incorporate Oakes Smith’s work into current critical debates and revise literary histories already established.

The Oakes Smith Society invites you to use (or order!) these new resources and become part of this major 19th century woman’s recovery—for our ALA panel and beyond.

CFP: Lydia Maria Child Society (2 panels) at ALA 2024 (Deadline: 1.15.2024)

The Lydia Maria Child Society is issuing two CFPs for ALA 2024:

American Literature Association Conference in Chicago, IL
23–26 May 2024 at The Palmer House Hilton
https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-annual-conference/

1. Social Justice Pedagogy Roundtable

The Lydia Maria Child Society seeks participants for a roundtable on pedagogy, social justice, and American literature. Considering contemporary social justice concerns ranging from the global rise of white supremacism to persistent gender and racial inequities accentuated by COVID-19’s disproportionate impact on Black, Hispanic, and Native American and Alaska Native people, and by various state- and community-based oppositions to, and banning of, K–12 books and public-school curricula about race or gender, the Child Society feels strongly that many of the issues for which Child fought so passionately remain deeply relevant today. To honor her lifelong commitment to both education and writing as ways to attain social change, we ask that our selected panelists prepare brief presentations (approximately 10 minutes) on how they address the above issues and/or others within the literature classroom, before engaging in what we hope will be a fruitful and wide-ranging open discussion on social justice pedagogies and American literature. What texts and social issues have proved particularly pertinent to your students’ lived experiences of activism, marginalization, etc.? How do you productively draw parallels between the concerns of the literary works you teach and those we are facing in the world outside the classroom? What specific lesson plans, textual pairings/groupings, and/or other pedagogical approaches might you recommend to colleagues striving to make their syllabi and classrooms more socially conscious and engaged?

Please send 200-word abstracts of your proposed presentation, as Word documents, to lydiamariachildsociety@gmail.com by January 15, 2024.  Note that while we, of course, welcome proposals that engage with Child’s work, Child need not be included for your proposal to be considered.

2. Celebrating Hobomok (1824) at 200: New Directions, New Reflections

The year 2024 marks the 200th publication anniversary of Lydia Maria Child’s novel Hobomok (1824). Set in early 17th-century Puritan New England, the book features a taboo marriage between Puritan Mary Conant and indigenous Pokanoket Hobomok and Mary’s eventual re-assimilation, with their mixed-race child, into Puritan society.  The Lydia Maria Child Society welcomes new ideas about, or inspired by, this novel. How might its treatments of religious intolerance, racial strife, and gendered rebellion against a religious patriarchy offer new ways of understanding our own times?  How might using Hobomok in the writing, literature, history, education, or fine arts classroom introduce fresh perspectives about community, prejudice, and understanding?  Ever wonder about “the beautiful grey fox of the Mississippi” (ch. 12)?  How might focusing on the natural world—plants, animals, weather—in Hobomok or other writings help us reconceptualize or resituate human agency vis-à-vis that of other life forms?  What might nonhuman life suggest about the choices that human life forms make?  If neither Hobomok nor Child lie within your areas of expertise, how might your own work be in conversation with either?  What fresh surprises await us through our connections to Hobomok or Child or the 19th century US?    

Please send 200-word abstracts, as Word documents, to Sandy Burr at sburr@nmu.edu by January 15, 2024.  Early submissions welcome!

LMC Society

Melissa Gniadek, President
Sandy Burr, VP of Programs

Gia Coturri Sorenson, VP of Membership & Records
Sarah Olivier, VP of Communications
Lori Robison, VP of Inclusive Excellence & Social Action

listserv: lmcs-listserv@googlegroups.com

CFP: Louisa May Alcott Society at ALA (Deadline: 1.15.2024)

The Louisa May Alcott Society is sponsoring three panels for the 35th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association, to be held May 23-26, 2024, at The Palmer House Hilton, 17 East Monroe, Chicago, IL 60603.

Session 1: Democracy and Gender in Alcott and Whitman

This session aims to pull together critical reflections on Walt Whitman’s and Louisa May Alcott’s thinking about democracy. We are especially interested in comparative papers that explore the role of gender in theories of democracy—for instance, the ways Whitman links democracy to “manly love” in the Calamus cluster or the ways Alcott imagines a more inclusive society in terms of “a loving league of sisters” in Work. We also welcome proposals that consider examinations of Whitman’s and Alcott ideas about democracy in relation to race, queer and trans identities, and contemporary political thought and media.

This session is co-sponsored by the Whitman Studies Association and the Louisa May Alcott Society. One-page proposals may be sent to Stephanie Blalock (stephanie-blalock@uiowa.edu) and Gregory Eiselein (eiselei@ksu.edu) by January 15, 2024.

Session 2: “I Had a Stage-Struck Fit”: Alcott, the Stage, and Performance

Charles Dickens said it best: “Every writer, though he may not adopt dramatic form, writes, in effect, for the stage.” Louisa May Alcott is the embodiment of that statement. From the plays she and her sisters wrote and performed as children under their father’s watchful and encouraging eye (later published as Comedic Tragedies) to her “Scenes from Dickens” and “Mrs. Jarley’s Wax Works” that she wrote and performed to raise money for various causes, Alcott’s love for the theatre permeated her life and everything she wrote. This panel centers Alcott’s love for all aspects of the theatre and explores how her works consistently utilize theatrical elements. Possible topics might include (but are not limited to) the following:

• The influence of Bronson Alcott on his daughter’s performance and playwriting
• Alcott’s use of the tableaux vivant in her juvenile writings and later fiction
• Alcott’s use of theatrical devices such as dramatic monologues, setting, make-up, masking, costuming, etc. in her fiction
• Alcott’s creation of stage adaptation in her fiction (Little Women as a five-act revision of The Pilgrim’s Progress, for example)
• Sources Alcott used for theatrical scenes (Idylls of the King in A Modern Mephistopheles, for example)
• Alcott’s use of actresses as protagonists, especially in her sensational tales
• Examinations of Alcott’s writings in light of recent performance theory

Please send one-page abstracts to Debra Ryals (dryals@pensacolastate.edu) by January 15, 2024.

Session 3: Teaching Alcott’s Writings/ Teaching in Alcott’s Writings

This panel will provide both a forum for papers highlighting new pedagogical approaches to teaching the work of Louisa May Alcott, as well as papers that engage with how Alcott thematizes pedagogy throughout her writing. Thus we welcome contributors who might present upon fresh classroom strategies and assignments (especially those that use new media technologies), creative syllabi, and course reading lists that place Alcott’s life, times, and texts into dialogue with nineteenth-century and/or contemporary concerns including (though not limited to) abolition; the formation of gendered, sexed, and racialized identities; the persistence of income inequality; the precarity of labor under conditions of Gilded-Age capitalism then and now; or the role of pedagogy itself in the construction of (anti-)democratic subjects. What surprising literary/cultural figures might one pair beside Alcott? What role can the digital humanities or podcasting play in teaching the story of Alcott and her times? How can teaching adaptations of Alcott’s work on film, television, audiobooks, etc., provide students with a reception history of Alcott and her writing? As the daughter of a pedagogical reformer, a student at Henry David Thoreau’s school, and a sometime governess and teacher herself, Alcott’s works are themselves saturated with pedagogical concerns. One thinks of Little Woman’s representations of how didactic fiction like Pilgrim’s Progress can shape human character; Jo’s school for boys at Plumfield as the setting for Little Men; or the role of governesses explored in texts like Work and Behind a Mask. While Bronson Alcott is often remembered for being an innovative pedagogue in his day, how might we read Louisa May Alcott as a powerful theorist of education herself? Anyone who teaches Alcott or thinks about Alcott’s approach to teaching is welcome to submit.

Please send one-page abstracts to Joe Conway (jpc0018@uah.edu) and Jaime Lynne Burgess (jamie@jamielynneburgess.com)  by January 15, 2024. 

Please consider submitting a proposal. We’d love to showcase your work in Chicago in May. If you have any questions, please contact me anytime at eiselei@ksu.edu .

Virtual Event: Celebrating Louisa May Alcott – Sunday, 11.26.2023 at 3:00 pm ET/12:00 pm PT

Hi everyone,

I am writing to invite all of you to the annual Louisa May Alcott birthday celebration, scheduled for next month:

Celebrating Louisa May Alcott

Sunday, November 26, 2023

3:00 p.m. Eastern, 2:00 Central, 1:00 Mountain, Noon Pacific

Via Zoom at https://tinyurl.com/LouAlcott2023

This year’s event will feature our very special guest, Peyton Thomas, Toronto-based journalist and author and host of the Jo’s Boys podcast. There will be lively discussion, socializing, and reconnecting. 

I will attach a flyer for the event. Please share with your networks and listservs and on your social media and, of course, with anyone whom you think might want to join us! It should be a fun event.

Best wishes,

Greg

——-
Gregory Eiselein 
Professor and University Distinguished Teaching Scholar 
Department of English | Kansas State University

Director, Program in Cultural Studies  
President, Louisa May Alcott Society

Lydia Maria Child Society: New Book Conversation with Justine Murison and Kristin Allukian (Virtual Event: 10.12.2023 at 7:00 pm)

Please join the Lydia Maria Child Society for a New Book Conversation with Justine Murison and Kristin Allukian. 

Justine will discuss her book, Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). Kristin will discuss her book, Slavery, Capitalism, and Women’s Literature: Economic Insights of American Women Writers, 1852-1869 (University of Georgia Press, 2023). Both authors will highlight the role of Lydia Maria Child in their books. Questions and conversation will follow. 

This event will be held over Zoom on Thursday, October 12th at 7pm (Eastern). 

Please register here: https://utoronto.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZArdu6uqzIrGN3Kbx3CTKhVdciOfk_Paq_v

Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: Lydia Maria Child Society New Book Conversation with Kirstin Allukian and Justine Murison. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.Join us as Justine Murison and Kristin Allukian talk about their recent monographs, highlighting the place of Lydia Maria Child in their respective books.utoronto.zoom.us