The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society and the Lydia Maria Child Society invite proposals for a joint symposium to be held on the campus of the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, June 24-27, 2026.

Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867) and Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) were influential writers separated by a generation but often paired with each other in twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship through their novels Hobomok (1824) and Hope Leslie (1827). This symposium invites researchers to reconsider Child and Sedgwick as individual authors, in their literary and personal relations to one another, in their nineteenth-century context, and in their continuing relevance to literary studies.

The organizers seek individual papers or pre-formed panels addressing the work of Child, Sedgwick, their nineteenth-century contemporaries, or their literary descendants. Proposals might address (but are by no means limited to) the following topics:

Biographical and literary connections

• What can scholars gain from studying Child’s and Sedgwick’s personal and literary relations to one another, including but not limited to their now-canonical works Hobomok and Hope Leslie?
• How might a focus on these authors’ sketches, short stories, stories for children and family reading, and other genres beyond the novel open new points of connection or disconnection between them?
• How might studying Child’s and Sedgwick’s later years and later writings change our understanding of their bodies of work?
• How do these authors’ historical fictions fit into longer histories of this continuously popular genre?

Race, slavery and the South

• How might the symposium’s location in Colonial Williamsburg prompt exploration of Sedgwick’s, Child’s, and other authors’ colonial settings and themes?
• How do Indigeneity, race, and slavery figure in the lives and work of these and other early American authors, in and beyond New England?
• What does it mean to imagine these writers outside of a northeast context and to re-evaluate their relation to regional spaces? How might this bring them into conversation with other women writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, and Harriet Jacobs who are more associated with southern regions?

Women writers, recovery, and reform

• How did Sedgwick’s and Child’s work as literary foremothers and social and political reformers influence their contemporaries, for better and for worse?
• How do histories of recovery illuminate ongoing challenges surrounding other women writers who were popular in their time (such as Mary Wilkins Freeman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, or E.D.E.N. Southworth) but later submerged in the cultural record?
• Whose literary voices continue to be obscured by a critical focus on white women writers, including Sedgwick and Child? Whom should scholars read and listen to as well?

The symposium will feature a keynote address by Dr. Jennifer Putzi, Sara and Jess Cloud Professor of English & Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the College of William & Mary. Other events may include a special collections tour, local excursions, and writing or pedagogy workshops. The organizers welcome proposals for special events or unique sessions to be included in the program; send queries regarding such proposals to cmss.news@gmail.com by January 5, 2026.

Pre-formed panels and individual submissions are welcome. To submit a pre-formed panel or roundtable for consideration, please submit a 300-word description of the panel topic, abstracts of individual contributions (no more than 200 words each), and a brief bio for each participant (100 words or less). For individual paper proposals, please submit an abstract (300 words or less) and a brief bio (100 words or less).

Submit proposals to: cmss.news@gmail.com

By deadline: February 5th, 2026

Questions: Contact Ellen Foster at foster.ellen@gmail.com