“Teaching Women Writers’ Edited Texts:

New Pedagogical Approaches to Feminist, Anti-Racist Recovery Work”

sponsored by the Margaret Fuller Society

American Literature Association Conference | May 21–24, 2025, Boston

Margaret Fuller studies will look back at this moment as an inflection point in making her work accessible to new generations of readers. In 2025, two new editions are forthcoming/hot-off-the-press: Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings (Library of America), edited by Brigitte Bailey, Noelle Baker, and Megan Marshall; and Collected Writings of Margaret Fuller (Edinburgh University Press), edited by Leslie Elizabeth Eckel, Sonia di Loreto, and Andrew Taylor. In our first panel at ALA, we will celebrate the launch of the Library of America edition with its editors. 

As feminist and anti-racist teacher-scholars have long demonstrated, editing and teaching are sister recoveries. Ideally, teaching and editing work hand-in-hand: they require one another to shape not just what we read with students but also how. While these new editions will no doubt revolutionize what is possible for futures in Margaret Fuller scholarship, they will also inspire the work teachers and professors do with our students, making her canonical writing all the more accessible and visible—while also introducing new pieces to the world. 

Papers for this panel could engage the following questions, among others:

●      How do teaching and editing support one another as mutual, intersectional practices?

●      How do recoveries—and/or new editions of well-known texts—inspire fresh approaches to feminist, anti-racist, intersectional pedagogies?

●      What kinds of courses and assignments can we design when new editions of women’s writing (by Fuller or other women writers) become available?

●      How does our work with students illuminate or challenge our practices in textual editing and publishing?

●      What kinds of editions do we still need? How does pedagogical work prompt archival/editorial work or the other way around?

●      What kinds of gaps do new editions reveal about our curricula or our pedagogy? What do our curricula/pedagogy reveal about the needs we have for new editions?

●      Who gets new editions? Why? How can we use new editions of long-canonized and/or celebrated authors, like Fuller, to amplify needs for editions of authors who may have no editions in print or on screen at all?

Submissions about Margaret Fuller are, of course, welcome, but proposals need not be limited to Fuller’s life or work. The Fuller Society’s Committee for Racial Justice encourages panel submissions that address anti-racist approaches to scholarship, pedagogy, and community engagement. Scholars of color and early career scholars are—as always—especially invited to apply.

Please send 300-word proposals or questions to Mollie Barnes at mbarnes2@uscb.edu with “ALA 2025 Proposal” in the subject line by January 20, 2025.