Le groupe de recherche A19 (VALE, Sorbonne Université, et ECHELLES, Université Paris Cité) a le grand plaisir de vous annoncer la tenue d’un séminaire dédié à l’autrice féministe transcendantaliste Margaret Fuller (1810-1850).

Le séminaire aura lieu le vendredi 17 avril de 14 à 16 heures à Sorbonne Université, en salle G073, et en ligne (le lien Zoom est disponible ici).

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Sonia Di Loreto, Università di Torino: “Above, Below, and Away from the Nation: Margaret Fuller’s Network of Publications in Europe”

This paper draws from my current manuscript project on Margaret Fuller’s networks of periodical publications in Europe. The aim of the book is to unsettle firmly held concepts, such as the “Americaness” of transcendentalism, or the construction of a single woman author, by moving away from the nation, and engaging with modes of cultural dissemination and movement of ideas that are fueled by radical political commitments. I am interested in looking at Fuller outside of the United States, as being one of the nodes of different circles of public intellectuals for whom collaborative cultural work is fundamental, and where periodical publications work alongside other systems of communication and diffusion of ideas. In those circles it is precisely the pre-condition of exile that allows for a wider political horizon, as well as for complex emotional entanglements, often built outside of the model of the heteronormative family.

Sonia Di Loreto is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Torino (Italy). She teaches and writes on nineteenth century American literature, transatlantic print culture, and maritime studies. She is general editor (with Leslie Eckel and Andrew Taylor) of The Collected Writings of Margaret Fuller for Edinburgh University Press, and she serves on the editorial board of Conversations: A Publication of the Margaret Fuller Society. She is working on a book on Margaret Fuller’s transnational networks and print exchanges, and on another project on shipwrecks and maritime forms of abandonment and recovery.

Leslie Eckel, Suffolk University: “Margaret Fuller and the Ends of Immigrant Inclusion”

This paper will consider Fuller’s understanding of immigration as essential to her vision of an inclusive, progressive America: an understanding that has unusual strengths as well as limitations for a woman writer in her time. The title sets up an interrogation of “ends” as both purposes and limits, as I am curious about what Fuller sees as the purpose(s) of welcoming immigrants to the United States, and I am also invested in discerning where Fuller’s sympathies and inclusive thinking end, or in other words, the ways in which she fails to advocate for specific groups of immigrants and for immigration more broadly. Although Fuller’s birthplace in Massachusetts became a settlement house dedicated to serving immigrant communities, American attitudes toward immigration have always been contradictory, and her work is no exception. My work here is part of a larger project on representations of immigration in the nineteenth century that builds on a service-learning course I currently teach on Immigrant Stories.

Leslie Eckel is a Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston. She is the author of Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World and co-editor (with Clare Elliott) of the Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic LIterary Studies. Together with Sonia Di Loreto, Andrew Taylor, and Alice de Galzain, she is editing the Collected Writings of Margaret Fuller for Edinburgh University Press, to which she will be contributing the first scholarly edition of Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century.