Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society Session
American Literature Association Annual Meeting
May 22 - 25, 2003
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Beaux Ideals?: Masculinity in Early Nineteenth-Century Fiction by Women

The topic of masculinity has only recently begun to enter contemporary critical dialogue on nineteenth-century American women writers. For ALA 2003, the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society invites proposals for papers addressing representations of masculinity in women's fiction published from approximately 1820-1860.

The Society particularly encourages proposals that include works by Sedgwick, but papers on any of Sedgwick's fellow women writers are welcome. Comparative approaches, including comparisons to male writers, and all theoretical approaches, including gender and queer theory, are also welcome.

Panelists will be selected through a blind reading process. Send a cover letter and separate proposal by November 1, 2002, to:

Jenifer Elmore
12324 Gingerwood Lane
Wellington, FL 33414

or e-mail your letter with the proposal attached as a Word document to jelmore@gate.net



Catharine Maria Sedgwick Symposium
June 13-15, 2003
Stockbridge, Massachusetts

This symposium, sponsored by the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society, is designed to call forth the most recent scholarship on Sedgwick's works, career, and historical contexts. The organizers especially invite scholarship on Sedgwick's lesser known works, but also welcome new approaches to her better known works and scholarship on her historical milieu, including scholarship on Sedgwick's life and the lives of her family members.
Topics might include, but are not limited to:
  • Sedgwick's "circle": connections to the writings of her American contemporaries, such as Bryant, Child, Cooper, Hawthorne, Fuller, Melville, Kirkland, Poe, Simms
  • Sedgwick and her works in U.S. regional contexts: New England, New York
    City, the South
  • Sedgwick in trans-Atlantic literary contexts: More, Edgeworth, and Scott as influences, her relationship with Harriet Martineau, her translations from Italian, connections to de Tocqueville through her nephew Theodore
  • Her works in all genres: novels, tales and sketches, didactic fictions, travel writing, letters, biography, social commentary, advice writing
  • Sedgwick as an influence on later writers
  • Sedgwick and religious movements and controversies: Unitarianism, evangelical Protestantism, Puritanism, Shakerism, Catholicism
  • Sedgwick and her family in political contexts, including slavery and the sectional crisis, Indian removal, Irish immigration, electoral politics
  • Sedgwick and social reform: prison reform, Sunday schools, literacy, poor relief
  • Sedgwick and the History of the Book: women's authorship, the gift books, periodical publishing, relationships with publishers
  • Teaching Sedgwick: curriculum and pedagogy

Submit your 500 word abstract
(for a 20-minute presentation)
by January 17, 2003 to:
 Melissa J. Homestead
Department of English
University of Oklahoma
760 Van Vleet Oval, Room 113
Norman, OK 73019
(405) 325-7848
Please send either hard copy or an e-mail attachment in Word to: mjhomestead@ou.edu

Symposium participation will be limited to approximately 50 people.
Previously published material should not be submitted.

(Please forward this information to anyone who might be interested.)

The symposium will be held at The Red Lion Inn, an eighteenth-century inn built two years before Sedgwick's birth and just a few steps away from her family's home on Main Street in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

(Stockbridge is in the Berkshire Mountains, 45 minutes away from Albany, New York; 2 hours from Boston; 4 hours from New York City). Attendees will be able to visit sites in several of Sedgwick's novels--including The Ice Glen (of A New England Tale), the Hancock Shaker Society (featured in Redwood), and Monument Mountain and Laurel Hill (of Hope Leslie).


Please note that the deadline for this call for papers has been extended until October 7, 2002. Please post this call for papers in your department and share it with colleagues, friends, and students. Thank you.


Sedgwick Society Panel
Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference
Fort Worth, Texas
September 24 - 27, 2003

The Choice of a Lifetime: Marriage and Singlehood in Catharine Sedgwick's Writings

As her writings attest, Sedgwick was deeply interested in the personal and social implications of marriage and of remaining single - for women and men.

For SSAWW 2003, the Sedgwick Society invites proposals for papers exploring Sedgwick's writings - fiction, non-fiction, correspondence, or other personal writings-on matrimony and spinster/bachelorhood as institutions with distinct and often gendered
advantages and disadvantages for individuals and for society.

Panelists will be selected through a blind reading process. Please send a cover letter and three (3) unsigned copies of your proposal to:

Jenifer Elmore
12324 Gingerwood Lane
Wellington, FL 33414

or send an e-mail with your proposal attached as a Microsoft Word document to jelmore@gate.net

Postmark deadline: October 7, 2002

 
Send comments about this web site to: Lucinda Damon-Bach
English Department at Salem State College - ©2002