Event Announcement: New Book Conversation with Justine Murison and Kristin Allukian on Oct. 12

Please join the Lydia Maria Child Society for a New Book Conversation with Justine Murison and Kristin Allukian. 

Justine will discuss her book, Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). Kristin will discuss her book, Slavery, Capitalism, and Women’s Literature: Economic Insights of American Women Writers, 1852-1869 (University of Georgia Press, 2023).  Both authors will highlight the role of Lydia Maria Child in their books. Questions and conversation will follow. 

This event will be held over Zoom on Thursday, October 12th at 7pm (Eastern). 

Please register here: https://utoronto.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZArdu6uqzIrGN3Kbx3CTKhVdciOfk_Paq_v

CFP ALA 2023

Social Justice Pedagogy Roundtable

American Literature Association Conference in Boston, MA
25–28 May 2023 at the Westin Copley Place

(https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-annual-conference/)

The Lydia Maria Child Society seeks participants for a roundtable on pedagogy, social justice, and American literature. Considering contemporary social justice concerns ranging from the Black Lives Matter movement to the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy to persistent gender inequities and xenophobia made all too apparent by the 2016 presidential election and the resulting anti-woman and anti-immigrant policies, the Child Society feels strongly that many of the issues for which Child fought so passionately remain deeply relevant today. To honor her lifelong commitment to both education and writing as ways to attain social change, we ask that our selected panelists prepare briefpresentations (approximately 10 minutes) on how they address the above issues and/or others within the literature classroom, before engaging in what we hope will be a fruitful and wide-ranging open discussion on social justice pedagogies and American literature. What texts and social issues have proved particularly pertinent to your students’ lived experiences of activism, marginalization, etc.? How do you productively draw parallels between the concerns of the literary works you teach and those we are facing in the world outside the classroom? What specific lesson plans, textual pairings/groupings, and/or other pedagogical approaches might you recommend to colleagues striving to make their syllabi and classrooms more socially conscious and engaged?

Please send 200-word abstracts of your proposed presentation, as Word documents, to lydiamariachildsociety@gmail.com by January 20, 2023.  Note that while we, of course, welcome proposals that engage with Child’s work, Child need not be included for your proposal to be considered.

2019 LYDIA MARIA CHILD SOCIAL JUSTICE AWARD NOMINEES & WINNERS

The Lydia Maria Child Society is delighted to once again recognize three outstanding scholar-activists with our social justice awards. Now in their third year, these awards are presented to three individuals (one high school or undergraduate student, one graduate student, and one professor or independent scholar) who continue Lydia Maria Child’s tireless work toward a more just and equitable world. As in years past, this year’s nominees were without exception extraordinary, each one serving as a powerful and heartening reminder of the ways in which academia and activism at their best can overlap and intertwine. We hope you’ll be as inspired as we were by this year’s three award recipients.

The winner in the high school and undergraduate student category is Anto Rondón, a philosophy and international relations double major at Boston University. Anto, who was born in Venezuela, is deeply committed to spreading awareness of and working to ameliorate her home country’s turbulent political landscape. She has organized events to educate her fellow BU students about the issues in Venezuela and has been a media manager for Cuatro Por Venezuela Foundation, which provides the country humanitarian aid. She’s also a volunteer for the Refugee Freedom Program, which works to support refugees around the globe, and she’s been an intern at the National Endowment for Democracy, where she focused on how Latin American countries compare to other parts of the world. As if all that isn’t enough, she’s also the Editor-in-Chief of BU’s Hoochie Media Project, an intersectional feminist “thought project” that includes a print journal, a digital blog, and activism for feminists on campus and beyond.

Our graduate student award goes to David Puthoff, a Ph.D. candidate at New Mexico University. David’s dissertation focuses on grassroots interracial solidarity as represented in nineteenth-century African American literature, and his own commitment to solidarity is broadly evident. He is working to make the process of teaching writing more accessible and social justice-oriented in his roles as Core Writing Coordinator in his department and executive board member of the New Mexico chapter of the National Council of Teachers of English, which advocates for social justice in literacy practices. He volunteers with the childcare collective FAM (Free Access to Movements), members of which have presented to and collaborated with his classes alongside Save the Kids, an organization that works to end the school-to-prison pipeline. Finally, David is a founding member of the John Brown Breakfast Club, which provides warm meals and know-your-rights trainings to the Albuquerque community, housed and unhoused, documented and undocumented.

Lastly, the award in our professor and independent scholar category goes to Dr. Debby Rosenthal, who’s a professor in the English department at John Carroll University. Debby’s work has focused on an impressive array of social justice issues represented in nineteenth-century American literature, including anti-slavery, temperance, and the power of performative speech to enact social change. For the past several years, she’s taught a course entitled Poverty in American Literature, which combines traditional literary analysis with weekly service-learning projects that connect students with individuals facing poverty in their community—in prisons and juvenile detention centers, homeless shelters and refugee resettlement agencies. She and her students have also worked alongside Samaria Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice who in 2014, at age 15, was shot and killed by Cleveland police as he played in a gazebo near his home. Together, they’ve established the Tamir Rice Foundation, which aims to provide arts, cultural, educational, and civic programming to youth living below the poverty level.

We are so grateful to Anto, David, and Debby as well as to our other amazing nominees for their deeply valuable work on the page, in the classroom, and in the broader community. This year’s nominees also include:

Emily Gowen and Andrew Donnelly

Rebecca Kling

Regina E. Mason

Lisa Woolfork

Xine (Christine) Yao

This work matters, and the Lydia Maria Child Society is honored to be able to support it. Thank you.

Join Us at the ALA in Boston, 2019

For those of you traveling to Boston for the upcoming American Literature Association conference, we invite you to join the LMCS for the events listed below. We are excited and thankful to be partnering with the Louisa May Alcott Society this year.

LM Child and LM Alcott Walking Tour of Reformist Boston:  Thursday, May 23

Join us for a history tour of 19th-century women’s and antislavery sites important to Alcott and Child. As you’ll see below, the tour begins at 10 am and will end at approximately 12:30, allowing time for those who wish to return to the Westin hotel for sessions that begin at 1:30. We’ll be ending in the busy Boston Common Park St. area, where you will also find several restaurant options for lunch, if you choose.

Our thanks to Melissa Pennell and Jane Sciacca for their careful planning of this walk and their wise suggestions regarding weather and tour length! They are also preparing a handout and map of the sites to give you as the walk commences.

Thurs., May 23, 10 am: Meet at/begin tour at Shaw/54th Regiment Memorial on Beacon Street (near corner of Beacon and Park). You can a) walk there (approx. a half mile) from the Westin hotel; or b) take the Green Line from Copley to Park and walk up the hill on the Common to the Shaw Memorial.

Please wear comfortable and sturdy walking shoes. Much of the pavement, including brick walks, cobblestones, etc., is uneven and, especially on Beacon Hill, makes for challenging walking at times. There is also much construction going on on Beacon Hill (both house renovations and street/sidewalk work), so we may make slight alterations in our route, depending on what is happening next week.

Because of scaffolding over some sidewalks and the narrowness of some, it would be better for you to wear rain jackets with hoods or rain hats, rather than trying to use umbrellas. While we are hoping that rain gear won’t be needed, it is May in Boston, and that can mean anything from warm and sunny to wet and chilly.

If Thursday morning weather is a steady downpour and/or thunderstorms, the walk will be canceled.

Not every stretch of the tour will have access to restroom facilities.

Thank you to Sandy P. for drafting the vast majority of this message, and to Melissa and Jane and Sandy B. for their additional assistance.

Fun will be had! We look forward to seeing many of you there,

LMA and LMC Societies

 

LM Child Round Table + LM Alcott and LM Child Panel

Thursday, May 23, 2019—4:30 to 5:50 pm

Session 6-E     Social Justice Pedagogy Roundtable (Great Republic)

Organized by the Lydia Maria Child Society

Moderator: Karen L. Kilcup, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

1. “Teaching the Past, Writing the Present,” Laura Mielke, University of Kansas
2. “Leading with Letters: Social Justice in the Literature Classroom,” Lydia G. Fash, Simmons University
3. “On the Topic of Indigenous Peoples: Some Practical Ways to De-colonize and Begin Shedding White Privilege,” Jamie Logsdon Kuehnl, Northern Michigan University
4. “Freedom Summer Collegiate and Social Justice Pedagogy Beyond the University,” Emily Gowen, Boston University

 

Friday, May 24, 2019—2:10 to 3:30 pm

Session 11-E     Notorious Women, Sensational Texts: The Lives, Writings, and Reforms of Louisa May Alcott and Lydia Maria Child (Essex NE)

Organized by the Lydia Maria Child and Louisa May Alcott Societies

Co-Chairs: Sandra Burr, Northern Michigan University; and Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, Penn State Altoona

1. “Queer(ed) Kinship and the Sketch: A Genealogy of Political Care in Child and Alcott,” Elizabeth Dean, Rutgers University
2. “Writers, Reformers, and Neighbors: The Ties that Bind Lydia Maria Child and Louisa May Alcott,” Jane Sciacca, Wayland Historical Society and Minutemen National Historic Park, The Wayside
3. “The Spectacle of the City and the Drama of Charity in Child’s and Alcott’s Writings,” Monika Elbert, Montclair State University

 

Thanks and hope to see many of you in Boston!

Call for Executive Officers

July 1^st of this year will mark a new term for the LMCS Executive Board. We are therefore in real need of volunteers to fill our Executive Officer positions, and we strongly encourage you to consider volunteering. Participation on the Executive Board is an excellent way to build your network and forge connections with scholars, educators, and community organizations. It also provides opportunities for engaging with our social justice mission.

We seek volunteers for the following positions and are especially in need of volunteers for President and VP of Membership & Records.

President

Vice President of Membership & Records

Vice President of Digital Resources

Vice President of Inclusive Excellence & Social Action

Vice President of Communications

Vice President of Programs

Officer positions are filled on a volunteer basis for three-year terms. In the event that two or more volunteers request to serve in the same position, an election involving all LMCS members will be held. For full descriptions of the positions, please see below and visit: https://lydiamariachildsociety.wordpress.com/constitution-and-by-laws/.

If you have questions about serving as an Executive Officer or would like more information, please don’t hesitate to contact us at lydiamariachildsociety@gmail.com.

If you would like to volunteer for a position, please send a written statement (300 words maximum) explaining your interests and qualifications to lydiamariachildsociety@gmail.com by May 1, 2019.

Descriptions of Executive Officer positions are as follows:

President

The President shall preside at the LMCS’s annual meeting and call additional meetings when necessary; shall attend conferences and Society events; shall facilitate communication and collaboration amongst Executive Officers and members; shall consult with the advisory board; shall create and implement policies, programs, and operations that further the LMCS’s mission and promote the LMCS with assistance from the Executive Board; shall build partnerships with other academic societies and community organizations; and shall work collaboratively with the VP of Communications to create and edit a Society newsletter or appoint another officer or member to do so.

Vice President of Membership & Records

The VP of Membership and Records shall process new memberships and renewals; shall update and maintain all records/receipts of member dues and financial transactions of the LMCS; shall advise the Executive Board on budgets for programming; shall prepare an annual financial report to be presented at the LMCS’s annual meeting; shall manage subscriptions to the LMCS listserv (i.e. process new requests to join the listserv); and shall recruit new members with the assistance of the Executive Board.

Vice President of Digital Resources

The VP of Digital Resources shall maintain and grow the LMCS website, blog, and other digital projects; shall build social media platforms and help promote society events; shall assist in the development of online resources for teaching and studying Child as well as encouraging social justice pedagogies and projects; and shall recruit and appoint members to assist in any or all of these duties.

Vice President of Programs

The VP of Programs shall create and organize programs and activities for the LMCS; shall organize LMCS panels for national conferences (or shall appoint another member to organize), including the ALA and the SSAWW conferences, by sending out calls for papers, helping to secure a chair, and establishing a fair review process; and shall plan and implement programming that reflects the LMCS’s commitment to social justice with the assistance of the Executive Board.

Vice President of Inclusive Excellence and Social Action

The VP of Inclusive Excellence and Social Action shall create and organize programs and initiatives that are rooted in principles of social justice and equality with the assistance of the Executive Board; shall oversee and organize the annual Lydia Maria Child Society Justice Awards; shall provide guidance to the Executive Board on creating and maintaining exemplary standards of inclusive excellence in membership, programming, and operations; shall advise in the creation of culturally diverse panel topics and selections for conferences; and shall lead in the development of social action initiatives that are feasible for the LMCS to undertake.

Vice President of Communications

The VP of Communications shall oversee LMCS communications; shall moderate the listserv; shall send emails and announcements to members; shall assist the Society in building partnerships with other academic societies and community organizations; shall work collaboratively with the President (or the President’s appointee) to create and edit a Society newsletter; and shall assist the VP of Digital Resources in creating and maintaining web and blog content and other digital media.

Call for Nominations: Lydia Maria Child Social Justice Award

In keeping with our society’s goal of honoring and continuing Lydia Maria Child’s vision of and work toward social justice, the Lydia Maria Child Society is pleased to offer three awards recognizing scholarship, pedagogy, creative work, and/or activism that furthers social change: one for faculty, independent scholars, and other professionals; one for scholars, artists, and activists at the graduate level; and one for high school and undergraduate students. Child routinely wrote on behalf of the marginalized, emerging as a passionate advocate for slaves, Native Americans, prisoners, prostitutes, and even animals, among a host of others. Our society aims to recognize academic writing, pedagogical endeavors, creative projects, and social outreach that, like Child’s work, speaks to pressing social causes and/or foregrounds the voices of (oftentimes neglected) authors who have worked to produce socially-conscious writing. Winners will receive a monetary award of $100 and may be featured in our society’s newsletter or other programming.

To apply for any of the three awards or to nominate a colleague or student, please send to lydiamariachildsociety@gmail.com by April 1st a letter detailing the ways in which your own or your nominee’s work engages with current social justice concerns, with “Social justice award” as the subject line of your email. If you nominate someone else, please include their contact information so that they may be notified. You are also welcome, though not required, to include a writing sample that demonstrates this engagement. These samples may take the form of essays (or essay excerpts), course syllabi, or descriptions of projects that explore the intersections between American literature/history and social justice outside the academic classroom. Applications should be sent as Word documents and should not exceed 15 pages. While we will be happy to receive submissions that consider Child directly, Child need not be included in order for projects to be eligible; we welcome projects on a variety of authors, genres, periods, and/or concerns.

Winners will be recognized at the upcoming American Literature Association conference in Boston (May 2019), though they need not be present at the conference in order to be eligible for the award. To read about past winners, visit https://lydiamariachildsociety.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/social-justice-award-winners/ and https://lydiamariachildsociety.wordpress.com/2018/06/28/congratulations-to-our-lydia-maria-child-society-social-justice-award-winners-and-nominees/. We look forward to reading your submissions.

CFP: LMCS Panels at ALA 2019

CFP: Lydia Maria Child Society
American Literature Association Conference in Boston, MA
23–26 May 2019 at the Westin Copley Place
(URL: https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-annual-conference/)

The Lydia Maria Child Society welcomes proposals for a panel co-organized with the Louisa May Alcott Society and for a social-justice pedagogy roundtable!

Notorious Women, Sensational Texts:  The Lives, Writings, and Reforms of Louisa May Alcott and Lydia Maria Child    

Organized jointly by the Lydia Maria Child and Louisa May Alcott Societies, this session will examine the lives, writings, and reforms of two enormously popular and prolific nineteenth-century women writers.

Child founded the nation’s first children’s magazine, The Juvenile Miscellany, which she edited from 1826 – 1834, a generation ahead of Alcott’s bestselling books for young people.  Child’s conduct manuals, such as The Frugal Housewife, enjoyed wide attention as well.  Championing disenfranchised peoples, however, triggered critical backlash.  At the age of twenty-two, Child portrayed a marriage between a white woman and a Native American man in her first novel, Hobomok (1824), an audacious choice that reviewers largely disparaged (the book’s poor sales left her deeply in debt).  Yet her career suffered its most devastating setback after she published An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), the first complete history of slavery by an American writer.  Here Child calls for the immediate emancipation of US slaves, a radical stance that she shared with infamous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.  Although Child wrote and edited until she died, her career never recovered from public reaction to her political views.  Undeterred, she tirelessly advocated social reforms in writings such as Letters from New York (beginning in 1841) and A Romance of the Republic (1867).

Writing a generation later, Louisa May Alcott divided her authorial time between books for children, which paid handsomely, and the lurid, anonymously authored fiction that she preferred. In these sensational stories and novels, Alcott (writing as A. M. Barnard) spun tales like Beneath the Mask and “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” in which notorious women take revenge on the men who have wronged them and often claim control over their own lives. Like Child, Alcott was an outspoken advocate for antislavery and women’s rights, with poems, essays, and fiction depicting unsung social reformers as the nation’s true heroes. In Moods (1864), for example, Alcott deliberately challenges notions of the conventional marriage plot, just as Child does with a controversial marriage in Hobomok.

We seek abstracts that consider literary, historical, and biographical connections across the lives and literary outputs of Child and Alcott. What kind of role model did Alcott find in fellow Bostonian Lydia Maria Child? Is Alcott’s choice to mask the women in her sensational fiction a deliberate effort to avoid Child’s fate at the hands of readers and critics? Given that both Child and Alcott edited children’s magazines and wrote specifically for child and adult audiences, how might we compare their stated approaches to or philosophies about writing for children versus adults? In which literary texts do Alcott and Child’s cross-generational reform-mindedness seem to play a similar role? What differences emerge from an analysis of Alcott and Child’s reformist views on topics such as white supremacy, native peoples, American slavery, immigration, women’s physical fitness, and women’s rights?

Send 250-300 word abstracts by January 20, 2019, to Sandy Burr at sburr@nmu.edu; and to Sandy Petrulionis at shp2@psu.edu.

Social-Justice Pedagogy Roundtable

The Lydia Maria Child Society seeks participants for a roundtable on pedagogy, social justice, and American literature. Considering contemporary social justice concerns ranging from the Black Lives Matter movement to the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy to persistent gender inequities and xenophobia made all too apparent by the 2016 presidential election and the resulting anti-woman and anti-immigrant policies, the Child Society feels strongly that many of the issues for which Child fought so passionately remain deeply relevant today. To honor her lifelong commitment to both education and writing as ways to attain social change, we ask that our selected panelists prepare brief presentations (approximately 10 minutes) on how they address the above issues and/or others within the literature classroom, before engaging in what we hope will be a fruitful and wide-ranging open discussion on social justice pedagogies and American literature. What texts and social issues have proved particularly pertinent to your students’ lived experiences of activism, marginalization, etc.? How do you productively draw parallels between the concerns of the literary works you teach and those we are facing in the world outside the classroom? What specific lesson plans, textual pairings/groupings, and/or other pedagogical approaches might you recommend to colleagues striving to make their syllabi and classrooms more socially conscious and engaged?

Please send 200-word abstracts of your proposed presentation, as Word documents, to lydiamariachildsociety@gmail.com by January 20, 2019.  Note that while we, of course, welcome proposals that engage with Child’s work, Child need not be included for your proposal to be considered.

Congratulations to our Lydia Maria Child Social Justice Award winners and nominees!

The Lydia Maria Child Society is proud to announce the winners of its second social justice awards, a project designed to acknowledge and encourage students, scholars, and professionals whose work furthers Lydia Maria Child’s passionate commitment to social progress. This year’s selection committee for these awards was deeply inspired by the number, range, and outstanding quality of the applications and nominations we received. In an era of social and political upheaval, we are heartened by the dedication to justice and equity these awards highlight in scholarship, service, and classrooms across the country. We wish we had the means to recognize all of our tremendously deserving applicants/nominees, and we’re particularly pleased to announce the winners in each of our three award categories.

The winner in our high school and undergraduate student category is Alma Stott of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Alma is a Geography and Environmental and Sustainability Studies major and visual artist who was nominated after she chose to respond to the discomfort of the many minority students at her school in the wake of the 2016 election by creating a series of wood-block posters with messages like “Ningún ser humano es illegal. No human being is illegal. Choose your words carefully” and “Muslim students, you are so loved and valued.” Alma distributed these messages of solidarity around her campus and community, in coffee shops and classrooms, to friends and strangers, asking others to please “put them on your fridge or mail them to your grandmother.”

Our graduate student winner is Kristin Lacey, a third-year English Ph.D. student at Boston University. Kristin writes and teaches about the figure of the madwoman in literature, examining how cultural and gendered expectations impact mental states. She has also organized conferences on Higher Ed in the Era of #MeToo and workshops on transgender inclusion in higher education, and she has been instrumental in her grad student union’s gender equity working group, where she’s campaigned for all-gender rest-rooms and increased sexual assault prevention training on campus.

Finally, our winner in the professor and independent scholar category is Dr. Katy Ryan of West Virginia University. Katy has written and taught extensively on American literature of imprisonment and the death penalty, and she is the founder and director of the Appalachian Prison Book Project, which, since its inception in 2004, has distributed over 13,000 books to prisoners in her region. This project emerged directly from a graduate seminar Katy taught, and many of her former students are still active in the program years later, testifying to Katy’s clear ability to inspire. Katy also volunteers to edit the prisoner-written newsletter of a prison in Illinois.

We extend our most heartfelt congratulations and gratitude to our three winners as well as the rest of our applicants/nominees: Meredith Eliassen, Robert Fanuzzi, Heather Humann, Rebecca Kling, Debra Rosenthal, Randi Lynn Tanglen, Monica Urban, Lindsay Vreeland, and Madeleine Wilkinson. We look forward to sharing more about these extraordinary individuals in future postings. We hope reading about their scholarship and activism inspires you, as it has us, to continue to approach our teaching and academic work in ways that strive to make the world a better and more just place.

2018 Lydia Maria Child Social Justice Awards

Call for Nominations:

In keeping with our society’s goal of honoring and continuing Lydia Maria Child’s vision of and work toward social justice, the Lydia Maria Child Society is pleased to offer three awards recognizing scholarship, pedagogy, creative work, and/or activism that furthers social change: one for faculty, independent scholars, and other professionals; one for scholars/artists/activists at the graduate level; and one for high school and undergraduate students.  Child routinely wrote on behalf of the marginalized, emerging as a passionate advocate for slaves, Native Americans, prisoners, prostitutes, and even animals, among a host of others.  Our society aims to recognize academic writing, pedagogical endeavors, creative projects, and social outreach that, like Child’s work, speaks to pressing social causes and/or foregrounds the voices of (oftentimes neglected) authors who have worked to produce socially conscious writing.  Winners will receive a monetary award of $100 and may be featured in our society’s newsletter or other programming.

To apply for any of the three awards or to nominate a colleague or student, please send to lydiamariachildsociety@gmail.com by April 15 a letter detailing the ways in which your own or your nominee’s work engages with current social justice concerns, with “Social justice award” as the subject line of your email.  You are also welcome, though not required, to include a writing sample that demonstrates this engagement.  These samples may take the form of essays (or essay excerpts), course syllabi, or descriptions of projects that explore the intersections between American literature/history and social justice outside the academic classroom.  Applications should be sent as Word documents and should not exceed 15 pages.  While we will be happy to receive submissions that consider Child directly, Child need not be included in order for projects to be eligible; we welcome projects on a variety of authors, genres, periods, and/or concerns.

Winners will be recognized at the upcoming American Literature Association conference in San Francisco (May 2018), though they need not be present at the conference in order to be eligible for the award.  To read about past winners, visit https://lydiamariachildsociety.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/social-justice-award-winners/.  We look forward to reading your submissions.

 

 

CFP: LMCS at ALA San Francisco

Deadlines extended:

 

CFP:  Lydia Maria Child Society

American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco, CA
24 – 27 May 2018 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco, 5 Embarcadero
(URL: americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-annual-conference/)

The Lydia Maria Child Society welcomes proposals for a roundtable and for an open-topic panel at the annual American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco, CA, at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco.

 Social Justice Pedagogy Roundtable

The Lydia Maria Child Society seeks participants for a roundtable on pedagogy, social justice, and American literature. Considering contemporary social justice concerns ranging from the Black Lives Matter movement to the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy to persistent gender inequities and xenophobia made all too apparent by the 2016 presidential election and the resulting anti-woman and anti-immigrant policies, the Child Society feels strongly that many of the issues for which Child fought so passionately remain deeply relevant today. To honor her lifelong commitment to both education and writing as ways to attain social change, we ask that our selected panelists prepare brief presentations on how they address the above issues and/or others within the literature classroom, before engaging in what we hope will be a fruitful and wide-ranging open discussion on social justice pedagogies and American literature. What texts and social issues have proved particularly pertinent to your students’ lived experiences of activism, marginalization, etc.? How do you productively draw parallels between the concerns of the literary works you teach and those we are facing in the world outside the classroom? What specific lesson plans, textual pairings/groupings, and/or other pedagogical approaches might you recommend to colleagues striving to make their syllabi and classrooms more socially conscious and engaged?

Please send 200-word abstracts of your proposed presentation, as Word documents, to lydiamariachildsociety@gmail.com by January 25, 2018.  Note that while we, of course, welcome proposals that engage with Child’s work, Child need not be included for your proposal to be considered.

Open-Topic Panel on Child

The Lydia Maria Child Society values sharing ideas about Lydia Maria Child and her work, particularly the work that has spoken the most to you.  We therefore welcome for our open-topic panel proposals that engage with any aspect of Child’s personal or professional life and endeavors.  Possible topics include:

·       Child and food/cooking

·       Child and animals

·       Child and the Civil War

·       Child and radical democracy/activism

·       Child and politics, especially in relation to current issues

·       Child’s journalism and editorship

·       Child and education

·       Child and the arts (theater, music, visual arts, etc.)

·       Child’s influence on her contemporaries

·       Child’s influence on later writers

·       Child in the K – 12 classroom, continuing education, and beyond

·       Child in the community (local, state, national, international)

Please send 250-word abstracts and a brief CV, as Word documents, to lydiamariachildsociety@gmail.com and to sburr@nmu.edu by January 25, 2018.