Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights
by Robin Bernstein
Just published!  Available in the Stowe Center Museum Store

Robin Bernstein is a familiar face in the Stowe Center Library.  Her book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, relied heavily on artifacts and materials in our archives.
Come meet Bernstein as she and Beth Burgess, Stowe Center Collections Manager, show you some of the rarely seen items featured in Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights.  Bernstein will discuss her book and illuminate the conclusions of her research.
Robin Bernstein is associate professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University.

Racial Innocence addresses the racial connotations of material culture in the construction of childhood portrayals  in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

A reception and book signing will follow. Stowe Center members will receive a 20% discount on purchases of Racial Innocence.
RSVP: 860.522.9258 x 317 or Info@StoweCenter.org

MORE!
While here, catch a sneak preview of our new exhibit, Who is Uncle Tom?

This exhibit explores the evolution of Stowe’s title character in the public consciousness – from inspiration for the 19th-century’s abolitionist movement to today’s racial slur. Discover how this “large, broad-chested, powerfully-made man..”, this “good, steady, sensible, pious fellow…” became synonymous with a subservient sell-out, often depicted as feeble, old and weak.

Who Is Uncle Tom? amplifies and extends the story told in the exhibit, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: A Moral Battle Cry for Freedom.

Save the date:  June 14 the traveling exhibit THEM: Images of Separation, from the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University will open at the Stowe Center as part of  Stereotypes: Designed to Degrade.

THEM showcases items from popular culture used to stereotype different groups. The negative imagery — found on postcards, license plates, games, souvenirs and costumes — promoted stereotyping against such groups as Asian-Americans, Hispanics, Jews and poor whites, as well as those who are “other” in terms of body type or sexual orientation.
Stereotypes: Designed to Degrade coordinates with Race, Rage & Redemption, concurrent exhibits and programs offered at The Mark Twain House & Museum.

Harriet Beecher Stowe Center
77 Forest Street
Hartford, CT 06105
HarrietBeecherStowe.org

For more details, see the PDF below!

2012 Student Stowe Prize Announcement

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.

“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.