Concord Festival of Authors 2024

The Joel Myerson Lecture

"The scrolls of the past burn my fingers": Reviving Margaret Fuller in the Library of America and Edinburgh Editions

Presented by Professors Brigitte Bailey (University of New Hampshire), Leslie Eckel (Suffolk University), and Megan Marshall (Emerson College).

Concord Free Public Library
129 Main Street

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

6:00 - 7:30 p.m.

Two prize-winning biographies and a recent documentary film have revived Margaret Fuller as an inspiring foremother in feminism and early American activism. Given Fuller's leadership in the Transcendentalist movement and the range of her achievements in translation, editorial work, journalism, and foreign correspondence, scholars like Brigitte Bailey, Leslie Eckel, Megan Marshall, and their colleagues have committed themselves to creating fresh and comprehensive editions of her work for the Library of America and Edinburgh University Press. Join us to learn more about their goals, challenges, and epiphanies in these new editions as we celebrate Fuller's vision of women's potential in our twenty-first-century world.

An exhibition accompanying the talk will be on view before and after the presentation. A reception will follow the event in the Rotunda.

Brigitte Bailey is a Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of American Travel Literature, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Italian Tour, 1824-1862 (2018), has co-edited two books—Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain (2012) and Margaret Fuller and Her Circles (2013)—and has edited a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Prose on Margaret Fuller (2015). She is co-editing, with Megan Marshall and Noelle A. Baker, the Library of America volume Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings (to be published in 2025). Her current book project examines periodical depictions of metropolitan spaces, especially of New York, in 1830-1860.

Leslie Eckel is a Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston, where she teaches American literature. With Sonia Di Loreto and Andrew Taylor, she is a general editor of the multi-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Writings of Margaret Fuller (to be published in 2025) and the editor of Fuller's manifesto Woman in the Nineteenth Century for that series. Eckel's other projects, including her book Atlantic Citizens (2013) and a new essay on "Emerson, Reluctant Feminist" in the Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2024), explore Fuller's influence as well.

Megan Marshall is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (2013), Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast (2017), and The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (2005), a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Her biographies have been awarded the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction (twice). She is a past president of the Society of American Historians and a recipient of the BIO Award, the highest honor given by the Biographers International Organization to a writer who has advanced the art and craft of biography. She is co-editor with Brigitte Bailey and Noelle A. Baker of the Library of America's forthcoming Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings. Her new essay collection, After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart, will be published in February 2025. She is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor at Emerson College, where she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program.

THE JOEL MYERSON ANNUAL LECTURE SERIES

After Prof. Joel Myerson died in 2021, the William Munroe Special Collections at the Concord Free Public Library, along with representatives from the Louisa May Alcott Society, Margaret Fuller Society, The Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, and The Thoreau Society, launched the Joel Myerson Annual Lecture Series.

The Joel Myerson Annual Lecture Series will engage the public in the study of American literature and literary history, focusing on writers associated with Concord, Massachusetts, and American Transcendentalism, with an interdisciplinary outlook. The series will highlight the work and ideas of emergent scholarship, drawing on the values Myerson personified as a generous mentor, teacher, and public speaker and amplifying the diversity of representation that Joel Myerson exemplified in his textual scholarship and editorial initiatives. The series will promote lifelong learning and the recovery of primary source materials that teach us about the future as well as the past—beginning in Concord and radiating outward to American literature and culture as a means to engage with current events, conservation, and reform.

The Concord Free Public Library Corporation generously sponsors the series.

Joel Myerson Lecture 2024