CFP: American Literature Association 36th Annual Conference May 21-24, 2025
The Westin Copley Place 10 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02116
The Ralph Waldo Emerson Society invites proposals for two panels at the upcoming ALA conference in Boston.
“Emerson’s Like-Minded Transcendentalists.”
There were many authors, ministers, artists, philosophers, activists, and free thinkers in Emerson’s orbit who have had the term “Transcendentalist” attached to them or appear worthy of the name in retrospect. Through meetings of the “The Transcendental Club,” Emerson’s wide lecture tours, his publications, the distribution of The Dial, and his general national reputation as an American intellectual, his ideas caught on amongst a wide-range of like-minded thinkers. These include his more immediate friends and interlocutors, as well as individuals more indirectly inspired by him: Henry David Thoreau, Frederic Henry Hedge, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, James Freeman Clark, Ellery Channing, Christopher Pearse Cranch, Caroline Dall, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, Jones Very, Theodore Parker, George Ripley, Moncure Conway, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Charles Peirce, and many others. What Emersonian ideas, motivations, and goals do we find in the projects of his lesser-studied peers? How does attending to Emerson’s social circle alter our understanding of his life and works? What counts as transcendentalism?
Please send 300-word abstracts by email to Thomas Howard (thomas.howard@wustl.edu) and Bill Scalia (bscalia@alumni.lsu.edu). The deadline for proposals is Wednesday, 15 January, 2025.