B. The President will serve as the head of the Executive Board.

C. The Vice President will serve as the Society’s official contact person with the American Literature Association and propose topics for the annual Society sessions at the ALA. The Vice President may choose to chair and organize this session or work with another society member to do so.

D. The Secretary will serve as the society’s official contact person with the Society for the Study of American Women Writers and propose topics for SSAWW conferences, as needed. The Secretary may choose to chair and organize this session or work with another society member to do so. In addition, the secretary will be responsible for overseeing elections and the rotation of officers.

E. The Treasurer will collect membership dues, keep membership records, and oversee the Society’s budget and financial records.

F. The Newsletter Editor will prepare, publish, and distribute The Stowe Society Newsletter. The newsletter may be distributed via regular mail service or electronically via the internet. The Newsletter Editor may choose to work with other members in order to maintain a web site and distribute information about the society.

“Eliza Crossing the River”

Description: A Song Inspired by Stowe’s Poem
Composition and Music: Neal Edelberg
Vocal: Elisabeth Darnell

Domestic Biographies: Stowe, Howells, James, and Wharton at Home presents comparative domestic biographies of four American Realist writers: Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Drawing upon extensive primary sources to reconstruct the authors’ private lives, Domestic Biographies illuminates how they lived when no one was looking. In particular this book examines how the authors worked and wrote at home and how their home life in turn made its way into their novels and non-fiction. Domestic Biographies offers an innovative and exciting architectural and domestic lens through which to study the lives and literature of America’s best-known Realists.

Elif S. Armbruster, Assistant Professor of English at Suffolk University, received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University.

9:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m., Registration and Coffee: (Hawthorne-Longfellow Library)

10:45 a.m.-12:00 p.m., Stowe and Maine
Chair:  Jennifer S. Tuttle, University of New England/Maine Women Writers Collection

• Rita Bode, Trent University, “A Meeting of Two Harriets”
• Denise Kohn, Baldwin-Wallace College, “Tyranny and Trials: Portrayals of the Unhappy Marriage in Stowe and Curtis Bullard”
• Marianne Noble, American University, “Candor Plus Tact Equals Sympathy:  The Regional Influences on Sympathy in The Minister’s Wooing and The Pearl of Orr’s Island“

12:00-1:00 p.m., Lunch

1:00-2:30 p.m., Stowe and Home
Chair:

• Charles Nero, Bates College, “Screening ‘Justice in the Home’ in Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
• Maura D’Amore, St. Michael’s College, “‘[T]o Build, as Trees Grow, Season by Season’: Henry Ward Beecher’s Domestic Inoculation”
• Jennifer Harris, Mount Allison University, “‘No work of art can compare with a perfect home’: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Katharine Seymour Day, and the Historic House Museum Movement”
• Gail Smith, independent scholar, “Pink and White Pyrenees; or, Alpine Sunsets and the Sensuality of Color in The Minister’s Wooing”

2:45-4:15 p.m., Stowe’s Politics
Chair:

• Catherine Saunders, George Mason University, “Innocence and Responsibility: Nina Gordon and the Difficulty of Creating Sympathetic Female Slaveholders”
• Amanda Benigni, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, “She’ll Make a Beautiful Corpse: Naturalism and Feminine Death in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Pearl of Orr’s Island“
• Andrea Holliger-Soles, University of Kentucky, “War and Riot in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ‘The Lady Who Does Her Own Work’”

4:30-5:30 p.m., Reception

5:30-6:45 p.m., Dinner

Friday, 24 June 2011

9:15-10:30 a.m., Stowe’s International Influences
Chair:

• Theresa Lindsey, Wayne State, ““The Treatment of the Mulatto/a as a Threat to Establishing a National Identity in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés”
• Hisayo Ogushi, Keio University, “”Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Japanese Modernization: Michiyo Nagayo and ‘Good Old Moral Value’”
• Sayaka Moue, Boston University, “Harriet Beecher Stowe in Japan:  How Changing Cultural Values Shaped Translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin”

10:45 -12:00 p.m., All in the Family: Stowe and Family Matters
Chair:

• Melissa Kowalski, Lehigh University, “Family Values, Community Influence:  Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Depiction of the Elderly in Poganuc People”
• Kimberly VanEsveld Adams, Elizabethtown College. “‘This Brother Who Was not a Brother’:  Sibling Relationships in Stowe’s Fiction.”
• Chris Diller, Berry College, “A Twentieth-Century Beecher: John Beecher”

12:00-1:00 p.m., Lunch

1:00-2:30 p.m., Faith, Fiction, and the Nation
Chair:

• Magnus Ullén, Karlstad University, “The Fiction of Faith: Reading in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Antebellum Novels”
• Marilyn Squier, Clark University, “President Edwards’s New England: Edwardsean Calvinism in Oldtown Folks”
• Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Salem State University, “Stowe’s ‘principal of toleration’: Home, Nation, and the Place of Catholicisms in the Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe”
• David Weimer, Harvard University, “What is Stowe Doing Here? Rhetorical Questions and Character Typology in Stowe and her Predecessors”

2:45-4:15 p.m., Intertextualities and Friendships
Chair:

• Mary Wearn, Macon State College, “Stowe, Douglass, and Jacobs:  Abolitionist Politics and the Valences of Race and Gender”
• Mary Louise Kete, University of Vermont, “Between Longfellow and Stowe: The Dismal Swamp of Liberal Desire”
• Beth L. Lueck, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, “The Duchess and the Democrat:  The Transatlantic Friendship Between the Duchess of Sutherland and Harriet Beecher Stowe.”
• Lucinda Damon-Bach, Salem State University, [Sedgwick & Stowe]

4:30-5:45 p.m., Plenary:  Stowe and Her Readers: Appropriation, Adaptation, and Resistance
Chair: Tess Chakkalakal, Bowdoin College

 
• Sarah Robbins, Texas Christian University, “Tracking Contemporary Responses: Students Reading Stowe in Diverse Contexts”
• Barbara Hochman, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, “Reading for Reality: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and African American Readers of the 1890s”
• Robin Bernstein, Harvard University, “‘A Wonderful Defense of Slavery’?: Joel Chandler Harris’s Reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
• Laura Korobkin, Boston University, “‘Overstrained Conclusions and Violent Extremes’: Charles Dickens Reads Stowe”

6:30-8:00 p.m., Banquet

8:15 p.m., Keynote Speaker:  Susan Belasco, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, “Stowe in Her Time and Ours”

Saturday, 25 June 2011

9:15-10:30 p.m., Millennial Stowe
Chair:

• Claudia Stokes, Trinity University, “Home Improvements:  Millennialism and Narrative Form”
• James Heitson, University of Tennessee, “Harriet Beecher Stowe, America, and the Millennium”
• Kevin Pelletier, University of Richmond, “‘Salvation Through Motherly Vengeance’: Sentimental Terror and the Moral Nation in Stowe’s Antislavery Fiction”

10:45-12:00 p.m., Harriet Beecher Stowe and American Culture: A Bicentennial Appraisal
Chair: Katherine Kane, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center

 
• Joan Hedrick, Trinity College “The Spiritual Imaginaries of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Ellen G. White, Prophet of Seventh-day Adventism”
• David Reynolds, CUNY Graduate Center, “Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America”
• Alex Rowe, Artistic Director, Metropolitan Playhouse, “Loving Topsy: Embracing Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the 21^st-Century Stage”

12:00 p.m., Lunch (for those staying at Bowdoin)

12:15 p.m., Bus departs for Maine Women Writers Collection; lunch at MWWC;

1:15-3:30 p.m., Stowe in the Classroom

• Lesley Ginsberg
• Sarah Robbins
• Patrick Rael
• Lucinda Damon-Bach
• Kara McGovern

1:30-2:45 p.m., Assessing the Stowe Archives:  A Roundtable Discussion (in Portland)
Chair:  Cathleen Miller, Curator, Maine Women Writers Collection

• Susan Belasco, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
• Margaret Gaertner, Barba + Wheelock Architecture, Preservation + Design
• Joan Hedrick, Trinity College
• Katherine Kane, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center
• Judith Ann Schiff, Yale University Library
• Adena Spingarn, Harvard University

4:30-5:45 p.m., Uncle Tom’s Cabin in U.S. Theater
Chair:  Robin Bernstein, Harvard University

• Robin Bernstein, Harvard University, “How George Aiken Quoted Artist Hammatt Billings—and Why It Matters”
• John Frick, University of Virginia, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Moral Reform Melodrama”
• Adena Spingarn, Harvard University, “Staging Slavery”
• Respondent:  Elizabeth Young, Mount Holyoke College

5:45-6:45 p.m., Dinner
7:00 p.m., Performances

• Elizabeth Davidson, “Harriet Beecher Stowe:  Literary Soldier”
• Carolyn Gage, “Lady Byron Vindicated”:  Dramatic Adaptation

Sunday, 26 June 2011

9:15-10:30 a.m., Walking Tour: “Stowe’s Brunswick” (Leslie Shaw, Pejepscot Historical Society)

12:00 p.m., Encore:  Elizabeth Davidson, “Harriet Beecher Stowe:  Literary Soldier” at the Theater Project, Brunswick
Notes:  Sunday events are free and open to the public

Schedule allows for 15-20 minute papers for every session and 10-15 minutes of discussion for each session.

All residential choices include both housing (in Bowdoin College dorms) and meals (in the college dining room).  There are two main packages for conference participants:  Wednesday night through Sunday morning ($385 plus tax, with meals from Thursday breakfast through Saturday dinner) and Thursday through Sunday morning ($337 plus tax, with meals from Thursday lunch through Saturday dinner).  Both packages include the Friday night banquet.  A separate banquet-only option is available at $45. The partner/spouse rate ($285 plus tax) reflects the fact that the two will be sharing a room.  If you want to bring a child or children, please email the Bowdoin College office directly for information (sumprogs@bowdoin.edu).  There is no childcare available.  All other rooms are singles, with standard pillow, blanket, sheets, and towels provided.  Restrooms, including showers, are designated by gender and located on each floor.

If anyone has specific needs for accommodations that aren’t addressed by this information, contact Beth Lueck (lueckb@uww.edu) or sumprogs@bowdoin.edu (on the registration site).

Those who need a vegetarian option for the banquet should contact me.  The banquet will feature a lobster bake; the price includes wine with the meal.  There will be vegetarian options available at the college dining room for other meals. The Stowe Society is offering graduate students a free banquet; students should contact Beth Lueck (lueckb@uww.edu) to request this.

On site registration will begin on Thursday, June 23rd at 9:15 a.m. The first session will begin on Thursday at 10:45 a.m. The conference will end on the night of Saturday, June 25 with several dramatic performance of Stowe-related material. There will be a walking tour of “Stowe’s Brunswick” on the morning of Sunday, June 26 for those who are interested.

Registration for the entire conference will be $75 per person.  Graduate students pay a special reduced registration fee of $50. To pre-register, please send a check payable to the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society to Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Chair, Department of English, Salem State College, 352 Lafayette St., Salem MA  01970.  Single-day registration is $40. Late registration (after June 1) is $85.

All conference participants must also be current members of the Stowe Society.  Dues are $15/year for full-time faculty; $10/year for graduate students and independent scholars. For more about joining the Stowe Society, visit our membership page.

International scholars may register in-person at the conference.

The Stowe Society’s bicentennial conference at Bowdoin College, 23-25 June 2011, will feature a keynote address by Susan Belasco entitled “Stowe in Her Time and Ours” on Friday night.  The keynote will follow a banquet featuring a lobster bake.

Registration will be available in early February through the Stowe Society website; there will be a link on the site to register for housing and meals, which will be provided at Bowdoin College.

Other featured events include an opening night reception at the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, and a trip to the Maine Women Writers Collection on Saturday.  There will be a book exhibit at the college in connection with the conference.  Saturday night Bowdoin’s Theater and Dance Department will stage an adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The Rosenbach Museum and Library asked me to share this upcoming reading group with our members:

Rosenbach Museum & Library Reading Groups: Your search for scholarly, invigorating Reading Groups is finally over.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Wednesdays, March 23 & 30, April 13 & 27, May 18 & 25.
6:00 – 7:45 pm at the Rosenbach Museum & Library

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was the bestselling novel of the 19th century. This reading group will discuss why the novel proved so powerful for its readers, creating fervent admirers and equally vehement critics. Led by Peter Schmidt, the Chair of the Department of English Literature at Swarthmore College and a specialist in American literature, the group will consider the role of literature as an agent of social change.

Tuition: $250 for non-members* $205 for member

* One year’s membership included in non-member tuition.

Harriet Beecher Stowe at 200
Home, Nation, and Place in the 21st Century

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine
22-25 June 2011
Sponsored by the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society

On the bicentennial of her birth, the Stowe Society announces a conference celebrating Harriet Beecher Stowe—her life and works—at Bowdoin College, where she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Conference organizers welcome participation from scholars, artists, and members of the community.

In The American Woman’s Home, Catherine Beecher and her famous sister Harriet, figure “home” as the “family state.” In fact, the great domestic writer of the nineteenth century, Harriet Beecher Stowe, consistently imagines American cultural geography in terms of family and state—at the intersection of home and nation. This conference will examine how Stowe creates her own place in the world of American letters through her expansive consideration of familial and national life. Conference organizers solicit papers that broadly explore the theme of home, nation, and place in 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, and Catherine Beecher—are also welcome.

Possible topics include:

• The national divide: North and South
• Justice in the home and/or nation
• National religion/religion at home
• Race and family and/or national life
• National and transnational identities
• Reform in the home and/or nation
• Cosmopolitanism and citizenship
• Stowe’s place in letters
• Exile and conceptions of home
• Education in the home and/or nation
• Stowe’s literary lineage: literary ancestors and successors, black and white
  Biological, political, and anthropological constructions of citizenship

In addition to scholarly presentations, dramatic performances, readings, and informal conversations are welcomed.

For further information about the conference, contact the conference director: Tess Chakkalakal (tchakkal@bowdoin.edu). Email 250-word proposals and 1-page CVs by December 1, 2010 to the chair of the program committee: Mary Wearn (marywearn@gmail.com).

All participants must be members of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society at the time of registration.