Trouble and Recovery:  Health in Margaret Fuller’s Life and Society

The Margaret Fuller Society is pleased to sponsor a panel for the upcoming Thoreau Society Annual Gathering in Concord, MA, July 8-12, 2026, complementing the overall conference theme, “Living Well: Thoreau, Health, and Flourishing.” Both health and the forces opposing it had powerful resonance in Fuller’s life and thought. As she wrote in the New York Tribune, “cancer on the body must in time affect the head and heart also.”*  The words of our title, “Trouble and Recovery,” encompass both obstacles to health and its restoration, in Fuller’s personal life or the family and society within which she lived, in body or “head and heart,” whether descriptive or metaphoric in significance. Proposals might, for example, focus on her struggle with headaches, early experiences of loss, record of dreams, nursing experience in Rome, pregnancy and childbirth, strategies of recovery and reform. So might they focus on any method of treatment she experienced, traditional or experimental, on the circumstances beyond recovery at the end of her life, on her analysis of societal ills and cures in the United States or Europe, or on her representation of health in Woman in the Nineteenth Centuryor other writing.

We also invite paper proposals that draw comparisons between Margaret Fuller and other women writers and movements, or other Transcendentalists. Contributions exploring the material dimensions of nineteenth-century women’s writing about health, as well as questions of archival recovery, are welcome. Early and independent scholars of Fuller are invited to propose their work as well as those more seasoned. Please submit a 300-word abstract and brief curriculum vitae to Phyllis Cole (pbc2@psu.edu) and Alice de Galzain (alice.degalzain@gmail.com) by December 31.

 

*Bean and Myerson, eds., Margaret Fuller, Critic, p. 103.