Call for Papers (CFP): Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society

2025 Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) Conference

Letters from Abroad by Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Others

The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society invites paper proposals for a panel at the 2025 Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) Conference, to be held in November 2025 in Philadelphia, focusing on Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad (1841) and other travel texts by American women writers.

Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad, written during her travels in Europe, offers a fascinating exploration of her reflections on politics, culture, gender, and national identity, providing a rich context for critical engagement with her work. In Letters from Abroad, Sedgwick not only recounts her experiences traveling through Europe but also critiques aspects of American society, often through implicit contrasts with the political and cultural structures she encounters abroad. Her reflections on the American democratic experiment, class dynamics, and women’s roles in both Europe and the United States offer a complex, nuanced vision of an ideal America.

This panel seeks papers on Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad and/or on other American women travel writers. We are particularly interested in papers that explore how Sedgwick and other women writers positioned themselves as critical observers of their own country and how their travels influenced their thoughts on American values, ideals, and potential.

We invite papers that address the following themes:

• Sedgwick’s critique of American culture as presented in Letters from Abroad, with a focus on her commentary on democracy, class, and the role of women in the U.S. during the early 19th century.
• Comparative studies of Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad with other 19th-century American women’s travel writing, focusing on themes of national identity, cultural difference, and gendered travel experiences.
• Sedgwick’s and other authors’ visions for an ideal America, particularly in terms of social progress, gender equality, and democratic ideals.
• Women authors’ reflections on European political movements and how they influenced these authors’ perspectives on American society.

We welcome interdisciplinary approaches, including feminist, historical, and transatlantic frameworks.

Please submit proposals of no more than 250 words to Maureen Tuthill (Maureen.tuthill@liu.edu) by February 20, 2025, with the subject line “CMSS SSAWW Proposal.” Include a brief biography (100 words) and specify any audio-visual or technical requirements for your presentation.

For more information about the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society, please visit cmsedgwicksociety.org

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Call for Papers (CFP): Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society

2025 Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) Conference

Prisons and Confinement in the Writing of Catharine Maria Sedgwick and 19th-Century American Women Writers

The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society invites paper proposals for a panel at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) Conference, to be held in November 2025 in Philadelphia. This panel will explore representations of prisons, confinement, and rehabilitation in the works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick and other 19th-century American women writers.

As the first director of the Women’s Prison Association of New York, Catharine Maria Sedgwick played a pioneering role in the early prison reform movement, advocating for the better treatment of incarcerated women and the importance of rehabilitation. Her work with the Women’s Prison Association not only shaped her views on justice, but also influenced her writing, particularly her exploration of themes related to social responsibility, moral reform, and social inclusion of formerly incarcerated individuals. Sedgwick’s novels, including Hope Leslie and The Linwoods, reflect her engagement with issues of confinement, justice, and the role of society in addressing the needs of incarcerated persons.

We invite papers that address the following themes:

• The impact of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s work with the Women’s Prison Association of New York on her writing, especially in her treatment of confinement and social justice in works like Hope Leslie, The Linwoods, and her short fiction.
• The moral and social implications of imprisonment in the works of 19th-century women writers, with a particular focus on how they interrogated society’s responsibility toward imprisoned individuals.
• Comparative studies of Sedgwick’s portrayal of imprisonment alongside representations of incarceration in the works of other 19th-century American women writers (e.g., Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, or Fanny Fern).
• The intersections of gender, race, and class in literary representations of incarceration, and how these works contribute to ongoing conversations about the treatment of marginalized populations within the criminal justice system.
• Investigations into how women writers engaged with the prison reform movements of the 19th century, advocating for better treatment and rehabilitation of the incarcerated.
• Incarceration and imprisonment in the context of slavery and Jim Crow, and how women writers engaged the racial, gendered, and economic realities of confinement both within and outside the criminal legal system.
• The role of women writers in using their literary works to critique or reform societal systems of punishment and confinement, particularly with regard to the ethical treatment of imprisoned women.

We encourage papers that explore these themes through feminist, historical, and interdisciplinary lenses. Contributions that investigate how Sedgwick’s and other 19th-century women writers’ representations of imprisonment remain relevant to contemporary discussions of social responsibility and justice are especially welcome.

Please submit proposals of no more than 250 words to Maureen Tuthill (Maureen.tuthill@liu.edu) by February 20, 2025 with the subject line “CMSS SSAWW Proposal.” Include a brief biography (100 words) and specify any audio-visual or technical requirements for your presentation.

For more information about the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society, please visit cmsedgwicksociety.org

Call for Papers (CFP): Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society

2025 American Literature Association Conference

The 40th Anniversary of Judith Fetterley’s Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century American Women and Its Enduring Impact

The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society invites submissions for a special panel at the 36th Annual American Literature Association (ALA) Conference dedicated to exploring the lasting influence of Judith Fetterley’s Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century American Women, which marks its 40th anniversary in 2025. Fetterley’s groundbreaking anthology, first published in 1985, revolutionized the way we engage with and understand 19th-century American women’s literature. This milestone presents an opportunity to reassess the text’s impact on the field of American literary studies, particularly its role in fostering feminist literary criticism and its contribution to the rise of women author societies in the decades that followed.

We invite papers that address any aspect of Fetterley’s Provisions and its influence, including but not limited to:

· The impact of Provisions on the development of feminist literary criticism and theory in American literary studies.

· How Provisions reshaped the canon of 19th-century American literature and the scholarly recognition of women authors of the period.

· The role of Provisions in encouraging the formation of women author societies, reading groups, and academic networks focused on 19th-century American women writers.

· Comparative analyses of Provisions alongside other feminist anthologies or critical works in the 1980s and beyond.

· Reflections on how Provisions has influenced subsequent generations of scholars, educators, and readers in their understanding of women’s writing in the 19th century. Please submit proposals of no more than 250 words to Maureen Tuthill (Maureen.tuthill@liu.edu) by January 27, 2025, with the subject line “CMSS ALA Proposal.” Include a brief biography (100 words) and specify any audio-visual or technical requirements for your presentation. For more information about the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society, please visit cmsedgwicksociety.org

The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society solicits proposals for two sessions to be presented at the 2024 American Literature Association Conference. The conference will take place May 23-26 at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago, Illinois. 

1. Sedgwick and her Contemporaries in Context

Despite her minimal formal education, Catharine Maria Sedgwick was highly self-educated and unusually well-read for a woman of her era. Her writings are rife with references to major bodies of knowledge—literature, history, philosophy, social science, art—which she employs strategically to contextualize her ideas. Her breadth of reading, as displayed through epigraphs, analogies, allusions, etc., establishes her as a writer with authority, one who is familiar with the long view of history, art, nature and the law, as well as the trends of her contemporary culture, both American and Transatlantic. How did Sedgwick and her contemporaries employ their learned references as a means of winning the confidence of educated readers? Were these references religious, classical, scientific, artistic, literary, political, philosophical? What weight did these contexts give to their writings?  What effect were they intended to produce? What affinities do these writers attempt to establish with their readers? Why were these contexts so important to 19^th-century audiences?

Please submit proposals of around 250 words to Maureen Tuthill (Maureen.tuthill@liu.edu) by January 23, 2024.

2. Sedgwick Workshop: Teaching Hope Leslie After Recovery

Nearly four decades have passed since recovery efforts began on Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s 1827 novel Hope Leslie; or Early Times in the Massachusetts.  Significant progress has been made in re-establishing Sedgwick’s place in the history of early American literature and affirming the pedagogical richness of teaching Hope Leslie to current generations of students. Given that Hope Leslie and Sedgwick herself are now officially recovered, what is next? How do we elevate our teaching approaches to Hope Leslie? Where does the novel intersect with the concerns of digital natives and the rising Generation Alpha? Which focal points and instructional approaches will keep Sedgwick alive in the 21^st-century American literary imagination?

This session will take the form of a workshop where presenters and attendees will work together to collect ideas and develop new strategies for teaching Hope Leslie. Those who wish to be listed in the ALA program as presenters should submit a teaching approach of around 100 words and a sample assignment to Maureen Tuthill (Maureen.tuthill@liu.edu) by January 23, 2024.

The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society solicits proposals for two panels to be presented at the 2023 American Literature Association Conference. The conference will take place May 25-28 at the Westin Copley Place in Boston, Massachusetts.

The society seeks papers on the topic of mental illness and mental health in early national and antebellum America. We welcome proposals that address Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s own works (including her published works, her letters and journals, and her manuscript autobiography) or writings by her contemporaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Suggested topics might include (but are by no means limited to):

– Mental illness in the Sedgwick family (including Catharine’s mother Pamela and her brother 

Henry)

– Depictions of mental illness in Sedgwick’s works (“crazy” Bet in A New-England Tale, Bessie Lee in The Linwoods, Aunt Sarah and Mrs. Tallis in Married or Single?, Seton in Clarence)

– Marriage, domesticity, and mental illness

– Mental health treatment (or lack thereof) in the early national antebellum periods

– Race and class in the construction of mental illness

– Religion and mental health (“gloomy” Calvinism, Shakers and other new religious movements)

– Criminality, corporal punishment, and mental illness 

– Seduction, sexual assault, and the construction (and destruction) of women’s mental health

Submit proposals of around 250 words to Ashley Reed (akreed@vt.edu) by January 15th.

Call for Nominees:

We will be holding elections for all Executive Board member positions, and we strongly encourage self-nominations. Participation on the Sedgwick Society board is not only personally rewarding, but also an excellent way to expand your service to the profession at the national level and to develop contacts and build relationships with other scholars and educators in the field. For this election cycle, Ellen Foster has agreed to serve as the Sedgwick Society election coordinator. People who are interested in serving as officers must send their candidate statements to Ellen via email— foster.ellen@gmail.com. Candidate statements will be distributed with a link to a ballot.

All officers are elected to three-year terms by simple majority of the members who vote via the official ballot. If you have questions or would like more information about a particular position, or about serving on the Executive Board more generally, we encourage you to contact any of the current executive board members (cmsedgwicksociety.org/executive-board/). The officer team consists of the following positions. See next page for descriptions:

President

First Vice-President, Programs

Second Vice-President, Programs

Vice-President, Communications and Newsletter

Vice-President, Membership and Finance

Vice-President, Digital Resources

Executive Board Position Descriptions

The Executive Board duties are imperfectly listed in the CMSS by-laws. The descriptions offered below give prospective candidates a more specific sense of the officers’ roles.

President

Promotes the Society’s vision and mission of supporting scholarship and exchange on CMS’s life and works, and overall, to increase visibility of society and support productivity of membership by helping to coordinate conference activity, both “external” (reading abstracts, chairing if needed) and “internal” (especially contacting keynote speakers, helping with arrangements); recruiting new members; connecting with other author societies (co-sponsoring conferences and events at conferences to promote scholarly activity); suggesting and generating content for the newsletter (e.g., “annual report,” special articles, membership activity, & soliciting others to contribute); fundraising for symposia; mini- grant writing for special events; contacting/updating Advisory Board members.

First Vice-President, Programs

Organizes a (generally) tri-annual symposium. Working with the CMSS board, identifies a theme and location; creates a CFP and registration information; receives and reviews abstracts; organizes panels and the symposium schedule; identifies the keynote speaker(s) and other outside events; works with food and drink vendors; and generally hosts the symposium itself. While the first VP coordinates all of these tasks, many of them are done by board members, other volunteers, and/or a host institution.

Second Vice-President, Programs

Prepares panels for national conferences, including ALA and SSAWW and MLA (this includes sending out call for papers, selecting abstracts, chairing or choosing a chair, and communicating with organizations and presenters); works with Executive Committee to design conference panel topics, solicit proposals, organize blind review of abstracts, arrange for chairing of panels, communicate with panelists; may prepare or coordinate panels at regional conferences; assists first VP Programs with organizing symposium.

Vice-President, Communications and Newsletter

Produces and distributes the Society’s newsletter (digital format); sends occasional email updates and announcements to the membership; maintains the CMSS affiliates email list, website/blog, and other social media; solicits materials from officers and membership; sends occasional email updates and announcements to the membership.

Vice-President, Membership and Finance

Maintains the CMSS membership list; processes new memberships and renewals; processes registrations for symposia; assists with the planning for symposia with particular emphasis on financial transactions; recruits election coordinator and assists with ballot distribution to current membership.

Vice-President, Digital Resources

Responsible for web design and digital communication, including updating the CMSS website, Facebook page, and other on-line communications as needed.

Proposed Amendment to Article IV: Dues of the CMSS By-laws

At the business meeting during the 2022 CMSS Symposium, members discussed raising our society membership fees in order to keep pace with the rising costs of future conferences.  As much as possible, we want membership in the Sedgwick Society to remain affordable for graduate students and independent scholars. The officers propose the following amendment to increase membership dues in “Article IV: Dues” of the By-laws of the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society.

Existing Dues Structure:

Regular member: $10

Institutional member: $25

Student member: $5

Lifetime member: $200

Proposed Dues Structure:

Regular member: $20

Student, Independent Scholar member: $10

3-year Sustaining membership: $50

Lifetime member: $250

*Eliminate Institutional Member tier at $25

CMSS members will vote on this proposed amendment at the same time they vote for the CMSS officers in November 2022.  Remember, you must be a current CMSS member to participate in the voting process.

Membership Updates

If you’re not sure whether your CMS Society membership is up to date, then please see this linked spreadsheet, which lists our 2022-2023 members. Remember that you can renew or join anytime at the Sedgwick Society membership page.

Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society at SSAWW 2021

Gender and Genre in the Long Nineteenth Century
The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society seeks papers that explore intersections of gender and genre in American writing from the early republic through the postbellum period. As women writers increasingly entered the literary marketplace after the American Revolution, they embraced a broad array of fiction and nonfiction genres. Economic and social pressures often—though not always—pushed women toward domestic romance and religious narrative and away from genres considered masculine, even as male authors participated in sentimental and reform discourse in genres like the temperance novel and the escaped slave narrative. Meanwhile, anonymous and pseudonymous publication sometimes enabled authors to step beyond the gendered boundaries patrolled by editors and publishers. This panel will showcase recent work that explores gendered aspects of literary genre—or literary aspects of gender—in the nineteenth century. Pedagogical approaches to gender and genre are welcome.
Send 200-word abstracts to Ashley Reed (akreed@vt.edu) by February 15, 2021.

Illness, Disability, Death, and Survival in the Writings of Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Her Contemporaries
Though the times we are living in may be unprecedented for us, financial crisis, political instability, and epidemic disease were regular occurrences for Americans of the early nineteenth century, who experienced debilitating illness, lifelong disability, and early death as everyday facts of life. The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society seeks papers that address these and other questions as they are explored in the work of Sedgwick and her contemporaries:

• How did the experience of illness produce, shape, or inhibit authorship in the nineteenth century?
• How did nineteenth-century authors thematize illness, disability, death, and survival in their writing? 
• How do nursing and other forms of caregiving figure in the writing of nineteenth-century Americans? 
• How has recent scholarship on disability changed our understanding of nineteenth-century writing?
• As teachers of nineteenth-century texts, how do we treat illness, disability, and death in the college classroom?
• Does nineteenth-century writing on illness and death offer resources for us as readers, scholars, and teachers living through COVID-19?

Send 200-word abstracts to Ashley Reed (akreed@vt.edu) by February 15, 2021.

Sedgwick Society Summer Webinars

The Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society announces a series of webinars featuring new works of Sedgwick scholarship. Invited scholars will discuss their recent monographs and address Sedgwick, her career, and her place in contemporary literary studies. 

Webinars are open to the public but registration is required; click the links below to register for each individual event. For more information or to join the Sedgwick Society, visit cmsedgwicksociety.org.

Friday, July 31, 2 pm ET

Lydia Fash, author of The Sketch, The Tale, and the Beginnings of American Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2020)

Joe Shapiro, author of The Illiberal Imagination: Class and the Rise of the U.S. Novel (University of Virginia Press, 2017)

Hosted by Melissa Homestead

Register: https://unl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dN07qBmJQ0m2clm7ytYHsA

Friday, August 14, 3 pm ET

Brigitte Bailey, author of American Travel Literature, Gendered Aesthetics and the Italian Tour, 1824-62 (Edinburgh University Press, 2018)

Sandra Wilson Smith, author of The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an American Literary Character, 1697-1895 (University of Tennessee Press, 2018)

Hosted by Jenifer Elmore

Register: https://unl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dLGWoloFQ-2wrPRuH4rwoA

Friday, August 28, 3 pm ET

Martin Holtz, author of Constructions of Agency in American Literature on the War of Independence: War as Action, 1775-1860 (Routledge, 2019)

Ashley Reed, author of Heaven’s Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell University Press, 2020)

Hosted by Jordan Von Cannon

Register: https://unl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_v3Uw9omHQNWMS8cBRQny4w

As universities set limits on faculty and student travel because of concerns surrounding COVID-19, the Sedgwick Society has worked with Union College and the Doubletree Hotel in Schenectady, NY, to postpone our 2020 Symposium for one year. We want to remain ahead of this evolving situation and anticipate any potential disruptions to our conference attendees and their travel plans for summer.

We received a wonderful response to our CFP, and we hope that everyone who responded this year, along with everyone who has attended in the past, will plan to attend CMSS Symposium 2021. In the near future, we will formally respond to each individual who proposed a paper.
In looking ahead to the postponed Symposium on June 17-19, 2021, we are committed to open conference registration in August 2020, and we will offer a discounted membership renewal/registration bundle for those who register early.

We appreciate your understanding and support, and we hope to see you next year at Union College in Schenectady!

Sincerely,

The Executive Board of the CMSS