Louisa May Alcott Society

The Alcott Society is offering up to three travel grants of $400 each to support students and non-tenure-track members of the Society to attend present on Alcott at an academic conference in the 2025 calendar year.  These grants, supported financially by the Alcott Society and its members and donors, are meant to encourage Alcott scholarship and to honor the career and memory of Sarah Elbert, a literary historian whose important research charted exciting new paths for Alcott scholarship. Applying is easy. Please just send the abstract for your paper, information about its acceptance and conference venue, and a one-page vita to Marlowe Daly-Galeano at hmdalygaleano@lcsc.edu. We encourage students and NTT members of the Society to see these travel grants as a possible source for financial support for sharing their Alcott research with a larger audience.

The following Emerson Society CFP may be of interest to some of our members.  Ralph Waldo Emerson Society  Emersonian Revolutions Today   Thoreau Annual Gathering,  July 9 – 13, 2025    Bronson Alcott in 1871 wrote that “He helps us most who helps us to answer our own questions. [Emerson] gets us to do our own work, does not do it for us. He does his work well, for he never produces any finished piece of work. That is his great excellence.”  As well, Theodore Parker notes that “Emerson belongs to the exceptional literature of the times – and while his culture joins him to the history of man, his ideas and whole life enable him to represent also the nature of man, and so the write for the future.” We might say that for Emerson, revolution was an ongoing process, a particular way of seeing the world. How and where do we see Emerson’s revolutionary processes in the world today? Papers might consider Emerson’s work in social and political reform (women’s r...

Please see the following CFP for the  Thoreau Annual Gathering to be held in Concord, Mass., this coming summer (9-13 July). It is a tight deadline, I’m afraid, so I would much appreciate your responses as soon as possible. The Alcotts: A revolutionary family   The theme of this year’s Thoreau Annual Gathering is  Thoreau’s Revolutions : an opportunity to address Thoreau’s attitude towards the American revolution, but also to explore broader interpretations of revolution in his life and writing. The Alcott family were at the heart of the revolutionary changes in Concord, Boston, and beyond, with each member of the family contributing to the rapid change of 19 th -century America. The Louisa May Alcott Society (LMAS) would therefore like to invite proposals for a panel based on the revolutionary activities of the Alcott family. Possible topics might include:   Education (Bronson’s educational reforms; Louisa’s Plumfield; May’s teaching of formerly enslaved people and ...