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Call for Papers - Harriet Beecher Stowe Society - 35th Annual American Literature Association Conference
Deadline: January 20, 2024
May 23-26, 2024 | The Palmer House Hilton | 17 East Monroe Street, Chicago, IL 60603
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Society invites proposals for the 35th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association. The conference will take place at The Palmer House Hilton in Chicago from May 23 to 26, 2024. We welcome a wide range of paper topics that delve into various aspects of Harriet Beecher Stowe's life, works, and influence. Contributors are encouraged to explore innovative approaches to Stowe.
Potential Topics Include:
Deadline: January 20, 2024
May 23-26, 2024 | The Palmer House Hilton | 17 East Monroe Street, Chicago, IL 60603
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Society invites proposals for the 35th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association. The conference will take place at The Palmer House Hilton in Chicago from May 23 to 26, 2024. We welcome a wide range of paper topics that delve into various aspects of Harriet Beecher Stowe's life, works, and influence. Contributors are encouraged to explore innovative approaches to Stowe.
Potential Topics Include:
- Stowe's Impact Beyond Literature: Exploring Harriet Beecher Stowe's Influence on Social Movements and Activism
- The Intersection of Faith and Activism in Stowe's Works: Analyzing Religious Themes and Social Critique in Stowe's Writing
- Stowe's Legacy in Global Contexts: Examining the International Reception and Influence of Stowe's Works
- Gender Dynamics in Stowe's Literature: Revisiting Feminist Themes and Gender Representations in Stowe's Novels, Letters, and Other Writings
- Stowe and Visual Culture: Investigating Adaptations, Illustrations, and Visual Representations of Stowe's Works in Different Media
- Stowe's Literary Craftsmanship: Exploring Narrative Techniques and Stylistic Innovations in Stowe's Writing
- Stowe's Impact on American Literature: Tracing Stowe's Influence on Subsequent Generations of Writers and Literary Movements
- Environmental and Nature Themes in Stowe's Writing: Ecocritical Approaches to Stowe's Works
- Email your 250-word abstract and a brief CV to LuElla D’Amico at ldamico@uiwtx.edu by January 20, 2024.
- Membership in the Stowe Society is required for all presenters.
- Please use the subject line: "ALA Submission: [Your Chosen Topic]"
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CFP for SSAWW 2021: Harriet Beecher Stowe and her Circle
Deadline: Wednesday, February 17, 2021
Contact: Allison Speicher, Eastern Connecticut State University
Email: speichera@easternct.edu
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Society invites paper proposals for the SSAWW 2021 Triennial Conference, to be held on November 4-7, 2021 in Baltimore, Maryland. Submissions can focus on any aspect of Stowe’s work or on the work of members of her circle, including her famous family, fellow participants in the Semi-Colon Club, and her many correspondents. Papers that connect to the conference theme “American Women Writers: Ecologies, Survival, Change” are especially welcome. Please send a 250-300 word abstract, a biographical statement (no longer than 60 words), and a brief CV to Allison Speicher (speichera@easternct.edu) by Wednesday, February 17.
A Connecticut Abolitionist in King Arthur’s Court:
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s British Reception
deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2019
full name / name of organization:
Jude V. Nixon
contact email:
jnixon@salemstate.edu
For the Northeast Modern Language Association’s (NeMLA’s) 51th Annual Conference, 5-4 March 2020, in Boston, MA, Shaping and Sharing Identities: Spaces, Places, Languages, and Cultures, this session is seeking proposals addressing the topic, A Connecticut Abolitionist in King Arthur’s Court: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s British Reception. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s radical views on slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) took the western world by storm. Nowhere was the response more impassioned than in Great Britain. This panel aims to explore British reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the ways the novel fueled public debate over the “Negro Question,” including the plights of blacks and the labor economics of the west, which slaves, so-called “black gold,” bankrolled to help advance Western industrial development.
Please submit a one-page proposal along with a brief bio no later than 30 September 2019. Proposal MUST be submitted via the NeMLA portal (https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/Login). Direct questions or queries to the organizers, Jude V. Nixon (Jnixon@salemstate.edu) and Nancy L. Schultz (nschultz@salemstate.edu)
American Literature Association 2019
Panel 1: Teaching Stowe in the 21st Century: A Roundtable
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Society invites proposals for innovative approaches to teaching Stowe. We are especially interested in proposals that focus on engaging the current generation of college students to appreciate Stowe’s influence and literary acumen. Service-learning, digital humanities projects, and experiential approaches to teaching Stowe are all welcome, as are considerations about how teaching Stowe might enhance the undergraduate curriculum whether students encounter her work in their required or elective coursework.
Panel 2: Stowe in Conversation
The Stowe Society invites proposals that consider Harriet Beecher Stowe’s texts in conversation with other writers. While this may include writers in the nineteenth century, the society also welcomes proposals that compare Stowe’s works to more contemporary problems and authors.
Email 250-word abstracts, along with a brief CV, to LuElla D’Amico at ldamico@uiwtx.edu by December 14, 2018. Membership in the Stowe Society is required of presenters. Please write either “Teaching Stowe at ALA” or “Stowe in Conversation at ALA” in the subject line.
Harriet Beecher Stowe Up and Coming Scholar Award
The Stowe Society would like to recognize graduate students who are currently working on scholarship on Harriet Beecher Stowe. We are sponsoring an outstanding paper award of $100 that will help contribute to conference travel and that will guarantee a slot on one of our Stowe panels at ALA. To submit a paper for the award, please send an essay of no more than eight pages to ldamico@uiwtx.edu by December 14, 2018. Papers should not have your name or any identifying information on them, as they will be anonymously reviewed by Stowe Society members. We will announce the awards in January on our website as well as via email. We look forward to reading your submissions!
A Step Closer to Heaven:
Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife. An Anthology of Essays.
Contacts:
Jennifer McFarlane Harris, Xavier University
Emily Hamilton-Honey, SUNY Canton
Contact e-mails:
mcfarlaneharrisj@xavier.edu, hamiltone@canton.edu
Abstract
While a great deal of scholarly work has been done to recover the writing of nineteenth-century American women, and sentimental fiction has become its own scholarly category, the explicitly theological nature of these texts is often overlooked. Even spiritual autobiographies and sermons are too often read through the lens of religion as only a coping mechanism for women to deal with racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression, when these texts are also expressions of the lives and dynamic minds of women who developed sophisticated, systematic spiritual and textual approaches to the divine, to their denomination(s) or religious tradition(s), and to the mainstream culture around them.
Authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Julia Foote, Martha Finley, Amanda Berry Smith, Isabella Alden, Zilpha Elaw, Susan Warner, Julia Collins, Maria Ruiz de Burton, S. Alice Callahan, Maria Cummins, and others wrote not only as a commercial venture, not only to survive, but also to have a voice in the moral debates that were consuming churches and national politics: social issues like slavery, temperance, suffrage, the basis of marriage, domestic abuse, divorce, child custody, land ownership, missionary ventures, and colonialism. Each of them, regardless of religious sect, believed that religion was necessary to maintain a morally healthy nation – even while they put forward ideas about revising their particular religion. Though they each believed in different ways to reach the afterlife, they were all working to make earth a step closer to heaven, to convert others to a life after moral reform. They sought to level race, level social class, level gender differences, and create social change in ways that were unprecedented.
This anthology seeks to put lived theologies at the center of discussion of nineteenth-century women’s writing. Women do not simply apply, or live out, theologies authored by men. Rather, this anthology is grounded in the radical notion that the theological principles crafted by women and derived from women’s experiences, intellectual habits, and organizational capabilities are foundational to American literature itself.
Please send proposals of 250-300 words and a brief bio to Emily Hamilton-Honey and Jennifer McFarlane Harris at the e-mails above. Deadline for proposals is March 1, 2019; finished chapters of 4,000-8,000 words will be due by August 15, 2019.
CFP for SSAWW 2018: Stowe’s Resistance, Resisting Stowe
Deadline: February 13, 2018
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Society invites paper proposals for the SSAWW 2018 Triennial Conference, to be held in Denver, Colorado November 7-11, 2018. This panel will focus on the complexity of Stowe’s legacy, from her exemplary role as a vocal critic of social ills to the occasions when modern readers wish to resist her political views. We welcome papers on the social issue with which we most commonly associate Stowe—slavery—as well as papers that explore her responses to other social issues or illuminate her impact on other protest writers. Given the conference theme, “Resistance and Recovery across the Americas,” we particularly welcome papers that focus on Stowe’s lesser-known works. Please send a 250-300 word abstract, a biographical statement (no longer than 60 words), and a brief CV to Allison Speicher (speichera@easternct.edu) by Tuesday, February 13.
Harriet Beecher Stowe Up and Coming Scholar Award
Graduate students are eligible to apply for the Harriet Beecher Stowe Up and Coming Scholar Award, which comes with a $100 prize to help offset the cost of conference travel. To submit a paper for this award, please send an essay of no more than eight pages and a brief CV to speichera@easternct.edu by Tuesday, February 13. Papers should not have your name or any identifying information on them, as they will be reviewed anonymously by Stowe Society members. Applicants do not need to have submitted an abstract to present on the Stowe Society panel, but the essay should focus on some aspect of Stowe’s work, life, or legacy.
Gendered Ecologies and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers
Jillmarie Murphy and Dewey W. Hall, Editors
Union College and California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
Call for Papers Deadline: August 31, 2017
If ecology is without nature, as Timothy Morton provocatively argued in 2007, then one may wonder of ecology without the feminine as a corollary. For nature, much like the feminine, has been fetishized, exoticized, and romanticized as a signifier emptied out—a sort of lacuna. If we can be at ease with the gap, vacancy, or interval and, perhaps, theorize about the unfilled space while sorting out the inconsistencies of what it means to represent nature, the feminine, and androgyny, then we might begin to trace the valuable contributions of nineteenth-century women writers to the development of the term oecologia coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866 and beyond.
Gendered Ecologies and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers invites article-length typescripts (e.g., abstracts and/or 15-20 page drafts) that consider the spaces and places women writers have occupied as part of gendering the term ecology—whether masculine, feminine, or androgynous. Indeed, examples may span from Dorothy Wordsworth’s gendering of nature and the floating island as feminine to Susan Fenimore Cooper’s keen observations of flora and fauna in Rural Hours to Margaret Fuller’s “ecology of self” in Summer on the Lakes to Octavia Hill’s preservationist action in the Lake District among many other women writers. The edition will feature three guiding principles: transhistorical, transatlantic, and transcorporeality (Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2010). Topics may include:
New Materialist Ecologies:
*Transcending the Binary Materialism of Gender and Ecology
*Animating Asexual Natures
*Gender Hierarchy and Environmental Degradation
Feminist Political Ecologies and Built Environments:
*Ecofeminism vs. Ecopaternalism
*Nineteenth-Century Girlhood and Ecological Spaces
*Feminist Philosophy and the Biology of Gender
*Ecology and anarcha-Feminisms in the Nineteenth Century
*Racialized Ecologies and Gender
Gendered Ecologies and Androgyny:
*Destabilizing Gendered Ecological Systems
*Pantheistic Femininisms and/or Masculinities
*Queer Ecologies
*Posthumanism and the Question of Gender
Submissions must include the paper title, abstract (200 words), c.v., and, preferably, a 15-20 page typescript sent to murphyj@union.edu and dwhall@cpp.edu by 8.31.17 for consideration. If accepted, then completed typescript aligned closely with the scope of the edition will be due by 1.15.18. Submit unpublished writing that will address the cfp directly.
Call for Papers: International Conference
Transatlantic Women 3:
Women of the Green Atlantic
Dublin, Ireland
Royal Irish Academy
21-22 June 2018
Sponsored by the Catherine Maria Sedgwick Society and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society
“Since every wind that blows brings to our shores a fresh swarm of these people, who are to form so potent an element in our future national character, it behooves us to study them well, and make the best we can of them.”
Catharine Sedgwick, “The Little Mendicants” (1846)
The third meeting of Transatlantic Women will take place in Dublin, Ireland, on 21-22 June 2018 at the Royal Irish Academy. It will focus on Irish/American crosscurrents of the long nineteenth century, on the transatlantic stream of writers, reformers, and immigrants crossing over the Green Atlantic who were engaged in refuting but also perpetuating stereotypes and racist beliefs that troubled Irish-American relations. Such authors as Catharine Sedgwick, for instance, wrestled with contradictory conceptions created of Irish immigrants who appear in many of her writings, including “Irish Girl” (1842) and “The Post Office: An Irish Story” (1843). In a different context, “An Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of Women” (1852) pointedly addressed American women as the “sisters” of women from both Great Britain and Ireland; although Harriet Beecher Stowe never traveled to Ireland, she met deputations from that country during her first visit to Europe (1853). In “What Is a Home?” (1864) and “Servants” (1865), she expressed concerns about the Irish in the United States similar to those of Sedgwick.
This transatlantic gathering will celebrate, and question, nineteenth-century women who crossed the Green Atlantic, wrote about it, or in other ways connected the United States with Ireland through networks, translations, transatlantic fame, or influence. As Peter D. O’Neill and David Lloyd demonstrate in The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas (2009), people from Ireland, as well as from Africa and the United States, crossed the Atlantic as slaves and servants, as cultural and political exiles or activists. Many women, active in travel writing, pamphleteering, writing fiction, newspaper articles, speeches, fairy tales, and ghost stories, were promoters of women’s rights and the figure of the New Woman, and were engaged in philanthropy, temperance, abolitionism, social commentary—and simply just in sightseeing and enjoying themselves. Among the most prominent figures to build bridges between the United States and Ireland around activism are such well-known Americans as Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony (on the Irish Question), Frances Willard, Ellen Craft, Ida B. Wells, and the Irish Frances Power Cobbe; among those who have received less attention are, for example, the African American Sarah Parker Remond and the poet Frances Osgood. And the exchange went both ways: fiction by Irish writer Maria Edgeworth, for instance, influenced Sedgwick, among others.
The Transatlantic Women 3 conference brings together scholars representing various countries and disciplines to examine the ways in which these women and their ideas moved, how they resisted oppression and created new ways to conceptualize their identities and the reality surrounding them. We welcome presentations on any topic related to nineteenth-century transatlantic women but are especially interested in those dealing with women of the Irish-American nexus. Some of the key concepts include race, stereotypes, assimilation, immigrant reality; conceptualization of space, distance, and identity; movement, and memory—historical and personal.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
Abstracts, which should be about 250 words, and a short bio, are due by 1 November 2017. They should be emailed to transatlanticwomen3@gmail.com.
We look forward to yet another stimulating transatlantic conversation with you!
Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact any of the organizers:
Beth L. Lueck (lueckb@uww.edu ), Sirpa Salenius (sirpa.salenius@uef.fi ), or Lucinda Damon-Bach (ldamonbach@salemstate.edu).
Everyday Stowe: The Harriet Beecher Stowe Society's 20th Anniversary Conference
Spokane, WA, June 24-26, 2016
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Society announces a conference celebrating Harriet Beecher Stowe—her life and works—at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, our first conference in the Pacific Northwest!
In Stowe’s short work, “The Cathedral,” she suggested that, “To be really great in the little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.” Most often, she linked these “little things” to the cares and domestic duties of women in the nineteenth century, believing that each day was a struggle for women to exert control over their lives. Today, of course, we appreciate Stowe for being one of the first and most successful writers to combine personal sentiment with a drive to transform public policy. After all, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin elicited vast social change by focusing much of its attention on the daily occurrences of the domestic household and familial ties, speaking to Stowe’s attunement to the “little things” in life while still connecting them to broader cultural problems.
This conference will examine ways that Stowe represented the “little things” that made up citizens’ daily lives as well as larger social and cultural issues in the nineteenth century. Conference organizers solicit papers that explore the work of Stowe through lenses such as politics, education, reform, race, and religion. Studies on the works of Stowe’s family members—Henry Ward Beecher, Calvin Stowe, Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Catharine Beecher—are also welcome.
In addition to scholarly presentations, dramatic performances, readings, and informal conversations are welcomed.
For further information about the conference, contact the on-site conference director: LuElla D’Amico (ladmico@whitworth.edu). Email 250-word proposals for individual papers (750 words for complete panels) by March 15, 2016 to the chair of the program committee and co-conference director: Marlowe Daly-Galeano at stoweconference2016@gmail.com.
Note: Housing will be provided by the Whitworth University dorms at approximately $40.00 per night.
ALA, May 26-29, 2016, San Francisco, CA
Stowean Legacies
2016 marks several anniversaries relevant to Harriet Beecher Stowe scholars, notably the 120th anniversary of Stowe’s death, the anniversary of the Collected Works, and even the twentieth anniversary of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society. To acknowledge these anniversaries, this panel seeks papers that explore legacies of Stowe’s life, publication, and work, as well as those that consider the evolution of Stowe scholarship and the author’s position in the canon and literary history, broadly conceived.
Possible topics might include:
Historical treatments of Stowe, her family, or her contemporaries
Canon-making and canonical revision
Publication history
Historical and contemporary responses to Stowe’s work
Stowe as literary influence
Stowe as social or political influence
Teaching Stowe in the 21st century
Issues of the Archive
Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s legacies
Adaptation and Appropriation
Stowe’s collaborators and protégés
Stowe and Religion
Stowe and Women
Anti-slavery narratives in film and other media
Critical approaches
Transatlantic conversations
Global conversations
Evolving constructions of gender, race, or nation
Please send 250-word abstracts to Marlowe Daly-Galeano at hmdalygaleano@lcsc.edu by January 18, 2016.
Harriet Beecher Stowe Up and Coming Scholar Awards
The Stowe Society would like to recognize graduate students who are currently working on scholarship on Harriet Beecher Stowe. If you are a graduate student who plans to present on Stowe at the American Literature Association Annual Conference (May 2015) or the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference (November 2015), we are sponsoring an outstanding paper award of $100 that will help contribute to your travel to the conference and recognize you for your work on Stowe. For ALA, please send conference papers by April 1st and for SSAWW, please send papers by September 15th to ldamico@whitworth.edu. Papers should not have your name or any identifying information on them, as they will be anonymously reviewed by Stowe Society members. We will announce the awards prior to the conference on our website as well as via email. We look forward to reading your submissions!
Between Feeling Unsettled to Feeling Right: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Targeted Liminality
Society for the Study of American Women Writers
Philadelphia, PA, November 4-8, 2015
In The American Porch: An Informal History of an Informal Place, Michael Dolan asserts that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin served its purpose, namely to heighten certain contradictions inherent in American life.” He proceeds to point out that many of the novel’s key scenes of emotional potency take place outside of the domestic confines of a home and on a porch, “positioning that ordinary liminal space as a site of enormous transformation” Thus, Stowe’s novel can be seen as one that self-consciously worked to disrupt the binaries that defined antebellum America. Under Stowe’s scrutiny, binaries such as race, politics, gender, and even public and private space were used to pique and incite a nineteenth-century audience’s oft conflicted emotions so as to help them to “feel right.”
Keeping with the SSAWW 2015 theme, “Liminal Spaces, Hybrid Lives,” the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society invites papers that explore Stowe’s self-conscious application of liminality throughout her writing career. Possible topics include:
Stowe’s Treatment of Mixed-race Characters and/or Passing
Protestantism versus Catholicism
Sentiment versus Rationality
Constructions of Public and Private Space
Constructions of Public and Private Life
Constructions of Gender
Transatlanticism and/or Transcontinentalism
Please send abstracts (250-500 words) and a brief bio to LuElla D’Amico (ldamico@whitworth.edu) by January 5, 2014. While you do not need to be a SSAWW member to apply for a panel, presenters must be or become SSAWW members to participate in the conference.
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American Literature Association 26th Annual Conference
Boston, MA, May 27-30, 2015
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Society will sponsor to two sessions at the upcoming ALA in Boston, MA.
Stowe’s “Friendships”
Harriet Beecher Stowe once stated famously that “Friendships are discovered rather than made; there are people who are in their own nature friends, only they don’t know each other: but certain things like poetry, music, and paintings are like the Freemason’s sign—they reveal the initiated to each other.” The Stowe Society invites papers that reveal these underlying “friendships” in Stowe’s own writing: in what ways was Stowe influenced by other likeminded writers, and in what ways did she influence them? As literary scholars, what “signs” can we read to indicate Stowe’s relationship with other writers both in her day and beyond?
Please email abstracts of 250-300 word proposals to ldamico@whitworth.edu by January 5, 2015. Presenters must be members of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society. Information about how to join the society can be found here:
http://www.stowesociety.org/join.html
Teaching Stowe Roundtable
The Stowe Society also invites participants for a roundtable on teaching Stowe. We welcome any and all perspectives, but we are especially interested in discussions about ways of integrating undergraduate research and/or digital media in the teaching of Stowe, as well as how Stowe can be taught in conjunction with other nineteenth-century authors. Please send 250-300 word proposals to hmdalygaleano@lcsc.edu by January 5, 2015. Presenters must be members of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society. Information about how to join the society can be found here:
http://www.stowesociety.org/join.html
From Stowe Society Treasurer, Nancy Shultz:
Ties and Knots: Bridges Between Lands and Cultures
Ustroni, Poland
September 18th-20th, 2014
Deadline: April 15th
Co-Sponsored by Salem State University with the Institute of English and American Cultures and Literatures at the University of Silesia, Poland.
ALA, 2014
Washington, DC May 22nd - 25th
Beyond the Paradigmatic Stowe: New Critical and Pedagogical Approaches
In her introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Cindy Weinstein argues that Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin has “become, in recent years, a critical white whale.” She goes on to explain, “And I don’t mean as the bearer of interpretive capaciousness, but rather as an object to be spatially isolated (in terms of [Stowe’s] career), hermeneutically contained, and thereby classified once and for all.” Indeed Stowe’s famous abolitionist novel seems, at times, caged in its paradigmatic role as the ultimate specimen of nineteenth-century, domestic, sentimental fiction. Critically defined by her white whale of a text, Stowe too seems likewise trapped.
This panel seeks new approaches that challenge or transcend the paradigmatic Stowe. In what ways, for example, do Stowe’s texts move beyond affect and sentimentalism? How do politics muddy Stowe’s domesticity? What are the contradictions in her treatment of Christianity? How does knowledge of her life complicate the reading of her fiction? What new categories of critical inquiry might be brought to bear on Stowe studies? What original pedagogical approaches can inform the Stowe classroom?
ALA, 2013
Boston, MA. May 23rd-26th, 2013
In Oldtown Folks, Harriet Beecher Stowe famously complains that “woman’s nature had never been consulted in theology.” Yet, as the daughter, sister, and wife of clergymen, Stowe was herself steeped in the theology and religious practice of her day. Through her fiction, Stowe sometimes challenges the patriarchal leadership of the Christian Church and articulates an alternative vision of spiritual life that she figures simply as “the Religion of Christ.”
Papers are sought on any aspect of religion, spirituality, or theology in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Possible topics of exploration in Stowe’s fiction include but are not limited to:
Transatlantic Women II: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers Abroad
Florence, Italy. June 6th-9th, 2013
Nineteenth-century American women writers moved—culturally, intellectually, and geographically—in a transatlantic, even a global world. Following the success of our 2008 conference in Oxford, England, Transatlantic Women II relocates to Italy: a scene rich with significance for Stowe, Sedgwick, Fuller, and their contemporaries for travel and Anglophone expatriation; “old world” emblem in classical, renaissance, and romantic traditions; site of revolutions. The conference organizers see Italy also as a takeoff point for investigations further afield. We solicit papers that examine American women writers at any point in the long nineteenth century, engaging as readers or travelers with Great Britain and Ireland, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Areas of interest include:
Deadline: Wednesday, February 17, 2021
Contact: Allison Speicher, Eastern Connecticut State University
Email: speichera@easternct.edu
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Society invites paper proposals for the SSAWW 2021 Triennial Conference, to be held on November 4-7, 2021 in Baltimore, Maryland. Submissions can focus on any aspect of Stowe’s work or on the work of members of her circle, including her famous family, fellow participants in the Semi-Colon Club, and her many correspondents. Papers that connect to the conference theme “American Women Writers: Ecologies, Survival, Change” are especially welcome. Please send a 250-300 word abstract, a biographical statement (no longer than 60 words), and a brief CV to Allison Speicher (speichera@easternct.edu) by Wednesday, February 17.
A Connecticut Abolitionist in King Arthur’s Court:
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s British Reception
deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2019
full name / name of organization:
Jude V. Nixon
contact email:
jnixon@salemstate.edu
For the Northeast Modern Language Association’s (NeMLA’s) 51th Annual Conference, 5-4 March 2020, in Boston, MA, Shaping and Sharing Identities: Spaces, Places, Languages, and Cultures, this session is seeking proposals addressing the topic, A Connecticut Abolitionist in King Arthur’s Court: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s British Reception. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s radical views on slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) took the western world by storm. Nowhere was the response more impassioned than in Great Britain. This panel aims to explore British reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the ways the novel fueled public debate over the “Negro Question,” including the plights of blacks and the labor economics of the west, which slaves, so-called “black gold,” bankrolled to help advance Western industrial development.
Please submit a one-page proposal along with a brief bio no later than 30 September 2019. Proposal MUST be submitted via the NeMLA portal (https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/Login). Direct questions or queries to the organizers, Jude V. Nixon (Jnixon@salemstate.edu) and Nancy L. Schultz (nschultz@salemstate.edu)
American Literature Association 2019
Panel 1: Teaching Stowe in the 21st Century: A Roundtable
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Society invites proposals for innovative approaches to teaching Stowe. We are especially interested in proposals that focus on engaging the current generation of college students to appreciate Stowe’s influence and literary acumen. Service-learning, digital humanities projects, and experiential approaches to teaching Stowe are all welcome, as are considerations about how teaching Stowe might enhance the undergraduate curriculum whether students encounter her work in their required or elective coursework.
Panel 2: Stowe in Conversation
The Stowe Society invites proposals that consider Harriet Beecher Stowe’s texts in conversation with other writers. While this may include writers in the nineteenth century, the society also welcomes proposals that compare Stowe’s works to more contemporary problems and authors.
Email 250-word abstracts, along with a brief CV, to LuElla D’Amico at ldamico@uiwtx.edu by December 14, 2018. Membership in the Stowe Society is required of presenters. Please write either “Teaching Stowe at ALA” or “Stowe in Conversation at ALA” in the subject line.
Harriet Beecher Stowe Up and Coming Scholar Award
The Stowe Society would like to recognize graduate students who are currently working on scholarship on Harriet Beecher Stowe. We are sponsoring an outstanding paper award of $100 that will help contribute to conference travel and that will guarantee a slot on one of our Stowe panels at ALA. To submit a paper for the award, please send an essay of no more than eight pages to ldamico@uiwtx.edu by December 14, 2018. Papers should not have your name or any identifying information on them, as they will be anonymously reviewed by Stowe Society members. We will announce the awards in January on our website as well as via email. We look forward to reading your submissions!
A Step Closer to Heaven:
Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife. An Anthology of Essays.
Contacts:
Jennifer McFarlane Harris, Xavier University
Emily Hamilton-Honey, SUNY Canton
Contact e-mails:
mcfarlaneharrisj@xavier.edu, hamiltone@canton.edu
Abstract
While a great deal of scholarly work has been done to recover the writing of nineteenth-century American women, and sentimental fiction has become its own scholarly category, the explicitly theological nature of these texts is often overlooked. Even spiritual autobiographies and sermons are too often read through the lens of religion as only a coping mechanism for women to deal with racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression, when these texts are also expressions of the lives and dynamic minds of women who developed sophisticated, systematic spiritual and textual approaches to the divine, to their denomination(s) or religious tradition(s), and to the mainstream culture around them.
Authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Julia Foote, Martha Finley, Amanda Berry Smith, Isabella Alden, Zilpha Elaw, Susan Warner, Julia Collins, Maria Ruiz de Burton, S. Alice Callahan, Maria Cummins, and others wrote not only as a commercial venture, not only to survive, but also to have a voice in the moral debates that were consuming churches and national politics: social issues like slavery, temperance, suffrage, the basis of marriage, domestic abuse, divorce, child custody, land ownership, missionary ventures, and colonialism. Each of them, regardless of religious sect, believed that religion was necessary to maintain a morally healthy nation – even while they put forward ideas about revising their particular religion. Though they each believed in different ways to reach the afterlife, they were all working to make earth a step closer to heaven, to convert others to a life after moral reform. They sought to level race, level social class, level gender differences, and create social change in ways that were unprecedented.
This anthology seeks to put lived theologies at the center of discussion of nineteenth-century women’s writing. Women do not simply apply, or live out, theologies authored by men. Rather, this anthology is grounded in the radical notion that the theological principles crafted by women and derived from women’s experiences, intellectual habits, and organizational capabilities are foundational to American literature itself.
Please send proposals of 250-300 words and a brief bio to Emily Hamilton-Honey and Jennifer McFarlane Harris at the e-mails above. Deadline for proposals is March 1, 2019; finished chapters of 4,000-8,000 words will be due by August 15, 2019.
CFP for SSAWW 2018: Stowe’s Resistance, Resisting Stowe
Deadline: February 13, 2018
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Society invites paper proposals for the SSAWW 2018 Triennial Conference, to be held in Denver, Colorado November 7-11, 2018. This panel will focus on the complexity of Stowe’s legacy, from her exemplary role as a vocal critic of social ills to the occasions when modern readers wish to resist her political views. We welcome papers on the social issue with which we most commonly associate Stowe—slavery—as well as papers that explore her responses to other social issues or illuminate her impact on other protest writers. Given the conference theme, “Resistance and Recovery across the Americas,” we particularly welcome papers that focus on Stowe’s lesser-known works. Please send a 250-300 word abstract, a biographical statement (no longer than 60 words), and a brief CV to Allison Speicher (speichera@easternct.edu) by Tuesday, February 13.
Harriet Beecher Stowe Up and Coming Scholar Award
Graduate students are eligible to apply for the Harriet Beecher Stowe Up and Coming Scholar Award, which comes with a $100 prize to help offset the cost of conference travel. To submit a paper for this award, please send an essay of no more than eight pages and a brief CV to speichera@easternct.edu by Tuesday, February 13. Papers should not have your name or any identifying information on them, as they will be reviewed anonymously by Stowe Society members. Applicants do not need to have submitted an abstract to present on the Stowe Society panel, but the essay should focus on some aspect of Stowe’s work, life, or legacy.
Gendered Ecologies and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers
Jillmarie Murphy and Dewey W. Hall, Editors
Union College and California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
Call for Papers Deadline: August 31, 2017
If ecology is without nature, as Timothy Morton provocatively argued in 2007, then one may wonder of ecology without the feminine as a corollary. For nature, much like the feminine, has been fetishized, exoticized, and romanticized as a signifier emptied out—a sort of lacuna. If we can be at ease with the gap, vacancy, or interval and, perhaps, theorize about the unfilled space while sorting out the inconsistencies of what it means to represent nature, the feminine, and androgyny, then we might begin to trace the valuable contributions of nineteenth-century women writers to the development of the term oecologia coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866 and beyond.
Gendered Ecologies and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers invites article-length typescripts (e.g., abstracts and/or 15-20 page drafts) that consider the spaces and places women writers have occupied as part of gendering the term ecology—whether masculine, feminine, or androgynous. Indeed, examples may span from Dorothy Wordsworth’s gendering of nature and the floating island as feminine to Susan Fenimore Cooper’s keen observations of flora and fauna in Rural Hours to Margaret Fuller’s “ecology of self” in Summer on the Lakes to Octavia Hill’s preservationist action in the Lake District among many other women writers. The edition will feature three guiding principles: transhistorical, transatlantic, and transcorporeality (Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2010). Topics may include:
New Materialist Ecologies:
*Transcending the Binary Materialism of Gender and Ecology
*Animating Asexual Natures
*Gender Hierarchy and Environmental Degradation
Feminist Political Ecologies and Built Environments:
*Ecofeminism vs. Ecopaternalism
*Nineteenth-Century Girlhood and Ecological Spaces
*Feminist Philosophy and the Biology of Gender
*Ecology and anarcha-Feminisms in the Nineteenth Century
*Racialized Ecologies and Gender
Gendered Ecologies and Androgyny:
*Destabilizing Gendered Ecological Systems
*Pantheistic Femininisms and/or Masculinities
*Queer Ecologies
*Posthumanism and the Question of Gender
Submissions must include the paper title, abstract (200 words), c.v., and, preferably, a 15-20 page typescript sent to murphyj@union.edu and dwhall@cpp.edu by 8.31.17 for consideration. If accepted, then completed typescript aligned closely with the scope of the edition will be due by 1.15.18. Submit unpublished writing that will address the cfp directly.
Call for Papers: International Conference
Transatlantic Women 3:
Women of the Green Atlantic
Dublin, Ireland
Royal Irish Academy
21-22 June 2018
Sponsored by the Catherine Maria Sedgwick Society and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society
“Since every wind that blows brings to our shores a fresh swarm of these people, who are to form so potent an element in our future national character, it behooves us to study them well, and make the best we can of them.”
Catharine Sedgwick, “The Little Mendicants” (1846)
The third meeting of Transatlantic Women will take place in Dublin, Ireland, on 21-22 June 2018 at the Royal Irish Academy. It will focus on Irish/American crosscurrents of the long nineteenth century, on the transatlantic stream of writers, reformers, and immigrants crossing over the Green Atlantic who were engaged in refuting but also perpetuating stereotypes and racist beliefs that troubled Irish-American relations. Such authors as Catharine Sedgwick, for instance, wrestled with contradictory conceptions created of Irish immigrants who appear in many of her writings, including “Irish Girl” (1842) and “The Post Office: An Irish Story” (1843). In a different context, “An Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of Women” (1852) pointedly addressed American women as the “sisters” of women from both Great Britain and Ireland; although Harriet Beecher Stowe never traveled to Ireland, she met deputations from that country during her first visit to Europe (1853). In “What Is a Home?” (1864) and “Servants” (1865), she expressed concerns about the Irish in the United States similar to those of Sedgwick.
This transatlantic gathering will celebrate, and question, nineteenth-century women who crossed the Green Atlantic, wrote about it, or in other ways connected the United States with Ireland through networks, translations, transatlantic fame, or influence. As Peter D. O’Neill and David Lloyd demonstrate in The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas (2009), people from Ireland, as well as from Africa and the United States, crossed the Atlantic as slaves and servants, as cultural and political exiles or activists. Many women, active in travel writing, pamphleteering, writing fiction, newspaper articles, speeches, fairy tales, and ghost stories, were promoters of women’s rights and the figure of the New Woman, and were engaged in philanthropy, temperance, abolitionism, social commentary—and simply just in sightseeing and enjoying themselves. Among the most prominent figures to build bridges between the United States and Ireland around activism are such well-known Americans as Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony (on the Irish Question), Frances Willard, Ellen Craft, Ida B. Wells, and the Irish Frances Power Cobbe; among those who have received less attention are, for example, the African American Sarah Parker Remond and the poet Frances Osgood. And the exchange went both ways: fiction by Irish writer Maria Edgeworth, for instance, influenced Sedgwick, among others.
The Transatlantic Women 3 conference brings together scholars representing various countries and disciplines to examine the ways in which these women and their ideas moved, how they resisted oppression and created new ways to conceptualize their identities and the reality surrounding them. We welcome presentations on any topic related to nineteenth-century transatlantic women but are especially interested in those dealing with women of the Irish-American nexus. Some of the key concepts include race, stereotypes, assimilation, immigrant reality; conceptualization of space, distance, and identity; movement, and memory—historical and personal.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
- recovering voices of Irish-Americans, or American-Irish women
- struggles of immigrant women
- women pioneers, in professions, activism, innovation
- female networks and sisterhoods—of writers, journalists, travelers
- women activists (abolitionism, anti-lynching, temperance, women’s rights, peace, white slavery, reform, animal rights)
- women travelers and their descriptive gaze
- fictional and realistic descriptions of places, people, and societies
- women’s articulations of transatlanticism and the Green Atlantic
Abstracts, which should be about 250 words, and a short bio, are due by 1 November 2017. They should be emailed to transatlanticwomen3@gmail.com.
We look forward to yet another stimulating transatlantic conversation with you!
Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact any of the organizers:
Beth L. Lueck (lueckb@uww.edu ), Sirpa Salenius (sirpa.salenius@uef.fi ), or Lucinda Damon-Bach (ldamonbach@salemstate.edu).
Everyday Stowe: The Harriet Beecher Stowe Society's 20th Anniversary Conference
Spokane, WA, June 24-26, 2016
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Society announces a conference celebrating Harriet Beecher Stowe—her life and works—at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, our first conference in the Pacific Northwest!
In Stowe’s short work, “The Cathedral,” she suggested that, “To be really great in the little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.” Most often, she linked these “little things” to the cares and domestic duties of women in the nineteenth century, believing that each day was a struggle for women to exert control over their lives. Today, of course, we appreciate Stowe for being one of the first and most successful writers to combine personal sentiment with a drive to transform public policy. After all, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin elicited vast social change by focusing much of its attention on the daily occurrences of the domestic household and familial ties, speaking to Stowe’s attunement to the “little things” in life while still connecting them to broader cultural problems.
This conference will examine ways that Stowe represented the “little things” that made up citizens’ daily lives as well as larger social and cultural issues in the nineteenth century. Conference organizers solicit papers that explore the work of Stowe through lenses such as politics, education, reform, race, and religion. Studies on the works of Stowe’s family members—Henry Ward Beecher, Calvin Stowe, Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Catharine Beecher—are also welcome.
In addition to scholarly presentations, dramatic performances, readings, and informal conversations are welcomed.
For further information about the conference, contact the on-site conference director: LuElla D’Amico (ladmico@whitworth.edu). Email 250-word proposals for individual papers (750 words for complete panels) by March 15, 2016 to the chair of the program committee and co-conference director: Marlowe Daly-Galeano at stoweconference2016@gmail.com.
Note: Housing will be provided by the Whitworth University dorms at approximately $40.00 per night.
ALA, May 26-29, 2016, San Francisco, CA
Stowean Legacies
2016 marks several anniversaries relevant to Harriet Beecher Stowe scholars, notably the 120th anniversary of Stowe’s death, the anniversary of the Collected Works, and even the twentieth anniversary of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society. To acknowledge these anniversaries, this panel seeks papers that explore legacies of Stowe’s life, publication, and work, as well as those that consider the evolution of Stowe scholarship and the author’s position in the canon and literary history, broadly conceived.
Possible topics might include:
Historical treatments of Stowe, her family, or her contemporaries
Canon-making and canonical revision
Publication history
Historical and contemporary responses to Stowe’s work
Stowe as literary influence
Stowe as social or political influence
Teaching Stowe in the 21st century
Issues of the Archive
Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s legacies
Adaptation and Appropriation
Stowe’s collaborators and protégés
Stowe and Religion
Stowe and Women
Anti-slavery narratives in film and other media
Critical approaches
Transatlantic conversations
Global conversations
Evolving constructions of gender, race, or nation
Please send 250-word abstracts to Marlowe Daly-Galeano at hmdalygaleano@lcsc.edu by January 18, 2016.
Harriet Beecher Stowe Up and Coming Scholar Awards
The Stowe Society would like to recognize graduate students who are currently working on scholarship on Harriet Beecher Stowe. If you are a graduate student who plans to present on Stowe at the American Literature Association Annual Conference (May 2015) or the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference (November 2015), we are sponsoring an outstanding paper award of $100 that will help contribute to your travel to the conference and recognize you for your work on Stowe. For ALA, please send conference papers by April 1st and for SSAWW, please send papers by September 15th to ldamico@whitworth.edu. Papers should not have your name or any identifying information on them, as they will be anonymously reviewed by Stowe Society members. We will announce the awards prior to the conference on our website as well as via email. We look forward to reading your submissions!
Between Feeling Unsettled to Feeling Right: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Targeted Liminality
Society for the Study of American Women Writers
Philadelphia, PA, November 4-8, 2015
In The American Porch: An Informal History of an Informal Place, Michael Dolan asserts that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin served its purpose, namely to heighten certain contradictions inherent in American life.” He proceeds to point out that many of the novel’s key scenes of emotional potency take place outside of the domestic confines of a home and on a porch, “positioning that ordinary liminal space as a site of enormous transformation” Thus, Stowe’s novel can be seen as one that self-consciously worked to disrupt the binaries that defined antebellum America. Under Stowe’s scrutiny, binaries such as race, politics, gender, and even public and private space were used to pique and incite a nineteenth-century audience’s oft conflicted emotions so as to help them to “feel right.”
Keeping with the SSAWW 2015 theme, “Liminal Spaces, Hybrid Lives,” the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society invites papers that explore Stowe’s self-conscious application of liminality throughout her writing career. Possible topics include:
Stowe’s Treatment of Mixed-race Characters and/or Passing
Protestantism versus Catholicism
Sentiment versus Rationality
Constructions of Public and Private Space
Constructions of Public and Private Life
Constructions of Gender
Transatlanticism and/or Transcontinentalism
Please send abstracts (250-500 words) and a brief bio to LuElla D’Amico (ldamico@whitworth.edu) by January 5, 2014. While you do not need to be a SSAWW member to apply for a panel, presenters must be or become SSAWW members to participate in the conference.
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American Literature Association 26th Annual Conference
Boston, MA, May 27-30, 2015
The Harriet Beecher Stowe Society will sponsor to two sessions at the upcoming ALA in Boston, MA.
Stowe’s “Friendships”
Harriet Beecher Stowe once stated famously that “Friendships are discovered rather than made; there are people who are in their own nature friends, only they don’t know each other: but certain things like poetry, music, and paintings are like the Freemason’s sign—they reveal the initiated to each other.” The Stowe Society invites papers that reveal these underlying “friendships” in Stowe’s own writing: in what ways was Stowe influenced by other likeminded writers, and in what ways did she influence them? As literary scholars, what “signs” can we read to indicate Stowe’s relationship with other writers both in her day and beyond?
Please email abstracts of 250-300 word proposals to ldamico@whitworth.edu by January 5, 2015. Presenters must be members of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society. Information about how to join the society can be found here:
http://www.stowesociety.org/join.html
Teaching Stowe Roundtable
The Stowe Society also invites participants for a roundtable on teaching Stowe. We welcome any and all perspectives, but we are especially interested in discussions about ways of integrating undergraduate research and/or digital media in the teaching of Stowe, as well as how Stowe can be taught in conjunction with other nineteenth-century authors. Please send 250-300 word proposals to hmdalygaleano@lcsc.edu by January 5, 2015. Presenters must be members of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society. Information about how to join the society can be found here:
http://www.stowesociety.org/join.html
From Stowe Society Treasurer, Nancy Shultz:
Ties and Knots: Bridges Between Lands and Cultures
Ustroni, Poland
September 18th-20th, 2014
Deadline: April 15th
Co-Sponsored by Salem State University with the Institute of English and American Cultures and Literatures at the University of Silesia, Poland.
ALA, 2014
Washington, DC May 22nd - 25th
Beyond the Paradigmatic Stowe: New Critical and Pedagogical Approaches
In her introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Cindy Weinstein argues that Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin has “become, in recent years, a critical white whale.” She goes on to explain, “And I don’t mean as the bearer of interpretive capaciousness, but rather as an object to be spatially isolated (in terms of [Stowe’s] career), hermeneutically contained, and thereby classified once and for all.” Indeed Stowe’s famous abolitionist novel seems, at times, caged in its paradigmatic role as the ultimate specimen of nineteenth-century, domestic, sentimental fiction. Critically defined by her white whale of a text, Stowe too seems likewise trapped.
This panel seeks new approaches that challenge or transcend the paradigmatic Stowe. In what ways, for example, do Stowe’s texts move beyond affect and sentimentalism? How do politics muddy Stowe’s domesticity? What are the contradictions in her treatment of Christianity? How does knowledge of her life complicate the reading of her fiction? What new categories of critical inquiry might be brought to bear on Stowe studies? What original pedagogical approaches can inform the Stowe classroom?
ALA, 2013
Boston, MA. May 23rd-26th, 2013
In Oldtown Folks, Harriet Beecher Stowe famously complains that “woman’s nature had never been consulted in theology.” Yet, as the daughter, sister, and wife of clergymen, Stowe was herself steeped in the theology and religious practice of her day. Through her fiction, Stowe sometimes challenges the patriarchal leadership of the Christian Church and articulates an alternative vision of spiritual life that she figures simply as “the Religion of Christ.”
Papers are sought on any aspect of religion, spirituality, or theology in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Possible topics of exploration in Stowe’s fiction include but are not limited to:
- Feminist theology
- Millennialism
- Race and religion
- Gender and religion
- Theology vs. lived religion
- Domesticity and spirituality
- Catholicism
- Representations of the Bible
- The democratization of religion
- Slavery and the Church
- Sentimentality and the representation of religion
Transatlantic Women II: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers Abroad
Florence, Italy. June 6th-9th, 2013
Nineteenth-century American women writers moved—culturally, intellectually, and geographically—in a transatlantic, even a global world. Following the success of our 2008 conference in Oxford, England, Transatlantic Women II relocates to Italy: a scene rich with significance for Stowe, Sedgwick, Fuller, and their contemporaries for travel and Anglophone expatriation; “old world” emblem in classical, renaissance, and romantic traditions; site of revolutions. The conference organizers see Italy also as a takeoff point for investigations further afield. We solicit papers that examine American women writers at any point in the long nineteenth century, engaging as readers or travelers with Great Britain and Ireland, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Areas of interest include:
- Tourism, travel, destinations, geographies in all literary and journalistic expression
- Correspondence, conversation, networks, clubs, salons linking Americans and counterparts abroad
- Reading of English, European, or global texts in the U.S. and of American texts abroad: educational and literary formations, encounters and controversies, reviews, translations
- Exoticism, orientalism, colonialist and anti-colonialist perceptions of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia
- Wars, revolutions, insurrections as experienced, fictionalized, interpreted as politics and history
- Narratives and representations of American immigration
- The body abroad: travel, health, invalidism, sexuality, medical treatments and therapies
- Reform and activist engagements: peace congresses, antislavery meetings, women’s rights and suffrage organizations, labor movements; observations of European education, philanthropies, reform movements
- Literary celebrity tours, ethnic and cultural performances at expositions
- Religious representations: transnational origins, traditions, communities (Catholic, Jewish, Protestant); encounters with non-Western traditions and texts; spiritualism and theosophy; missionary narratives
- Narrations of and perspectives on the Black Atlantic; slavery and American racial politics
- Aesthetics, visual culture, performance art, exhibitions: commentary on art, landscape, architecture, music, theater, opera, ballet, folk performances, museums, commemorative and memorial sites