In 2011 the Stowe Society will join with the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in celebrating Harriet Beecher Stowe’s two hundredth birthday.  The year will mark the first time the Stowe Society and the Stowe Center have collaborated on programming.  The year’s highlights will include a birthday celebration on 14 June 2011 at the Stowe Center in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Stowe Society’s first national conference at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, directed by Tess Chakkalakal, secretary of the Stowe Society, who is an assistant professor in Africana Studies at Bowdoin.

All the sites that played a significant role in Stowe’s life will be part of the celebration, including Hartford, Connecticut; Brunswick, Maine; Cincinnati, Ohio; and New York City.

The Stowe Society also hopes that the bicentennial will stimulate interest in two major scholarly enterprises related to the author:  the launch of a Stowe Society journal as either a print publication or an e-journal, and work towards the long overdue publication of Stowe’s letters, building on the E. Bruce Kirkham Collection of her letters available at the Stowe Center.  Others have expressed interest in a PBS-style film on Stowe, perhaps by an independent production company.