Inaugural Joel Myerson Annual Lecture Presented by Prof. Megan Marshall
Thursday, April 27, 2023, 6:30 - 8:30 p.m.
Goodwin Forum, Main Library & Live Stream on Zoom
Please join us to launch the Joel Myerson Annual Lecture Series: "After Lives: Bringing Una Hawthorne Home," presented by Prof. Megan Marshall. A link to the LIVE STREAM will be posted here on the event day.
An exhibition to accompany the talk will be on view before and after the presentation. In addition, a reception will be held in the Rotunda following the event.
Megan Marshall is the author of three biographical works: The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, Mark Lynton History Prize, and Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography; Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction; and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), a finalist for the Christian Gauss Prize in Literary Criticism of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Marshall is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor at Emerson College in Boston, where she teaches narrative nonfiction, life writing, and the art of archival research in the MFA Creative Writing Program.
THE JOEL MYERSON ANNUAL LECTURE SERIES
After Prof. Joel Myerson's death in 2021, the William Munroe Special Collections at the Concord Free Public Library, along with representatives from the Louisa May Alcott Society, Margaret Fuller Society, The Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, The Thoreau Society, and The Association for Documentary Editing, launched the Joel Myerson Annual Lecture Series. Megan Marshall's talk will be the inaugural lecture.
The Joel Myerson Annual Lecture Series will engage the public in the study of American literature and literary history, focusing on writers associated with Concord, Massachusetts, and American Transcendentalism, with an interdisciplinary outlook. The series will highlight the work and ideas of emergent scholarship, drawing on the values Myerson personified as a generous mentor, teacher, and public speaker and amplifying the diversity of representation that Joel Myerson exemplified in his textual scholarship and editorial initiatives. The series will promote lifelong learning and the recovery of primary source materials that teach us about the future as well as the past—beginning in Concord and radiating outward to American literature and culture as a means to engage with current events, conservation, and reform.
The series is generously sponsored by the Concord Free Public Library Corporation.
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Other Upcoming Special Collections Programs:
May 17 - May Alcott and the Town of Concord: The Making of an Artist - presented by Prof. Daniel Shealy
June 8 - Mr. Agassiz's Puzzle-Box: What To Do With 19th-Century Science Today - presented by Prof. Irmscher
June 22 - Celebrating Ralph Waldo Emerson: Filmmaker Michael Maglaras and Writer James Marcus in Conversation
March 24 - September 4, 2023 - A Perpetual Invitation: 150 Years of Art at the Concord Free Public Library is on view at the Concord Museum. Curators from the Library's William Munroe Special Collections will lead exhibition tours at 12:00 p.m. on June 16, July 14, and August 18. Please visit the Concord Museum's website for more information.