Call for Proposals

 see: http://ssaww2012.wordpress.com/ for full details

Key dates:

Monday, February 6, 2012: Proposals due to ssawwconf@gmail.com; see page 2 for directions.

May 2012: Acceptance notifications sent

June 30, 2012: Program schedule announced

Note: Presenters must be members of SSAWW by the “early/discounted” date for conference registration in the fall of 2012.

Participants presenting one formal academic paper may also appear on the program in additional ways (e.g., as a respondent, on a roundtable, or in a “professionalization” session.)

Theme: Citizenship and Belonging

For the fall 2012 Conference of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW), we are issuing a special invitation for session and paper proposals linked to the theme of “Citizenship and Belonging.” As in the past, the conference organizers will welcome proposals on any topic related to the study of American women writers, broadly conceived. However, we are also eager to capitalize on the conference opportunity to promote conversations—both “in the moment” and sustained—around a shared theme.

Why “Citizenship and Belonging”?

Historically speaking, these have been concerns of American women authors from their earliest writings, published and unpublished, and they remain concerns today. Long before the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments, women writers raised questions about how they could participate in the leadership of new American communities; similarly, contemporary women respond to the day’s political events and social trends in many forms of the written word.  Just as women of all backgrounds considered the parameters of “Americanness”—its inherence or its acquisition, its stability or fluidity, its necessity or its superfluity—their contemporary counterparts are using both old-fashioned forms and cutting-edge technologies to reimagine the United States and its people for the 21^st century.  Whether one thinks of Harriet Jacobs pondering her own “sale” in 19^th-century New York, Jhumpa Lahiri imagining connections across seas and generations in her short fiction, or young writers seizing the potential of the internet and social media to create their own publishing worlds, women writers have always, and perhaps always will, wrestle with what it means to belong.

Citizenship—how to claim it, how best to exercise it, and where its boundaries lie—is at the heart of much women’s writing. Citizenship can be constructed in many ways, both legally and culturally, and can be explored in terms of race, class, ethnicity, family, sexuality, economics, religion, place, and region—in short, from multiple perspectives and through multiple lenses.  It can also be investigated as a question of form and genre:  what kinds of writing “belong,” and to what realms or entities do they claim entry?

We hope our fall 2012 conference will provide an array of opportunities for examining these interrelated themes of “Citizenship and Belonging,” even as we continue to honor the many other topics and organizing principles that have made our field so dynamic. So, as we build a strand of theme-related sessions, we encourage SSAWW members to consider these two terms—citizenship and belonging—either together, in dialogue with each other, or individually, as productive lenses for exploring the heritage, current work, and future promise of American women writers.

SSAWW Website: http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/ssaww/index.html
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Society-for-the-Study-of-American-Women-Writers/324215233870

“Family Life & the Fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe.”

Papers are sought on any aspect of family life in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe.  Proposals are welcomed for studies that approach Stowe’s fiction using rubrics such as motherhood, fatherhood, siblings, the figure of the child, slave families, faith and the family, citizenship and the home, family and nation, or politics and family life.

While you need not be a Stowe Society member to submit a proposal, you must become a member to present on the Stowe panel at ALA.

Please submit a one page abstract and a one page CV to Mary Wearn (mary.wearn@maconstate.edu) by January 9, 2012.

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.

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.

I was glad to hear at the SSAWW conference that so many of you are interested in a second Transatlantic Women conference abroad. Although we are in the early planning stages yet, I want to tell you what we’re considering. There are three of us involved in planning the conference: Lucinda Damon-Bach, president of the Sedgwick Society; Sirpa Salenius, an independent scholar in Florence; and myself.

At present the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society and the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society are co-sponsoring the conference. I’ve invited other author societies to join us, but it looks as if it may be just these two societies. As before, however, all scholars will be welcome to join us, and we hope to embrace a wide range of authors and topics related to transatlanticism.

As many of you know, the location of the second conference will be in Florence, Italy. Sedgwick traveled throughout Italy in 1839-40, including a stay in Florence, and Stowe spent the winter of 1859-60 in Florence. Margaret Fuller, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Caroline Kirkland, Julia Ward Howe, Annie Adams Fields, Edith Wharton, Louisa May Alcott, May Alcott, Harriet Hosmer: so many women of letters and arts visited Italy briefly, or spent months or years there soaking up the culture.

The tentative date for the conference is 2013, either at the end of May or early June. Late May would be cooler and probably less expensive than June, but I know some of you may find it harder to travel in May, when some universities are still in session. This is also when the American Literature Association usually has its conference, which may mean a conflict for some of you. We would welcome your thoughts on which month you would prefer.

Thanks to the efforts of Sirpa Salenius, whom some of you met in Oxford at the first Transatlantic Women conference, we have a number of possible venues for the conference. Several American university programs in Florence have expressed interest in the conference, possibly by offering us meeting rooms. Another possibility would be the lovely and historic Centro Arte e Cultura, which is centrally located, or some other historic venue in downtown Florence. Sirpa Salenius is also looking for a historic building in which to hold either an opening reception or a keynote speech. Most of these places are not air-conditioned, and an earlier conference would be probably a cooler one. Since universities in Italy do not have dormitories, we will have to find accommodations in hotels. After we’ve chosen the conference venue, Sirpa Salenius has offered to locate one or more small hotels nearby and to help us negotiate a reasonable price.

If you have a preference for late May or early June 2013, please email me, particularly about university schedules that might prevent attendance at a May conference. Let me know if you have ideas about venues and accommodations, particularly if you have traveled to Florence or lived there. If you would like your name taken off this list, please email me, and I’ll be glad to do so. I’ll post occasional updates for the conference at stowesociety.org.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes,
Beth

Beth L. Lueck, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of English
Department of Languages & Literatures
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
800 W. Main Street
Whitewater WI 53190-1790
Heide 418
262.472.5054
lueckb@uww.edu

President, Harriet Beecher Stowe Society