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Jennifer Tuttle, Ph. D., Dorothy M. Healy Chair in Literature & Health and professor of English, presented her work and chaired two sessions at the Transatlantic Women II Conference, which was held in Florence, Italy June 6-9, 2013. 

Tuttle’s presentation, titled “Recovering the Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman; or, Reading Gilman in Rome,” argued that a transatlantic framework is necessary for understanding the practice of recovery, or bringing Gilman’s work back into print, since her death in 1935.  Specifically, Tuttle argued that critics need to give attention not simply to reprints of Gilman’s writing in the United States and Anglophone countries, but also to the translations of her work abroad.  Focusing on Italy as a case in point, Tuttle analyzed Italian translations of Gilman’s fiction and assessed the recent upsurge of interest in Gilman’s feminist social philosophy in the waning years of the Berlusconi administration.

Beyond presenting her own work, Tuttle organized and chaired two additional panels at this conference.

The first, hosted by the Maine Women Writers Collection, was on the topic “Beyond the Regional: Maine Women and Transatlanticism.”  As a gateway to French Canada and the North Atlantic world, Maine, with its 3,500 miles of coastline, has functioned as a site of cross-cultural and cross-Atlantic exchange, and its writers have been similarly inclined toward the transnational; the papers on this panel employed such a global framework in new readings of work by three Maine women: Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat, Elizabeth Akers Allen, and Laura Richards.  Presenters on this panel were Charlene Avallone, Independent Scholar; Esther Gordon Ginzburg, of Bar Ilan University, Israel; and Jennifer Putzi, of the College of William and Mary.

The second panel was hosted by Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, of which Tuttle is the editor.  The panel, titled “Redefining Recovery in a Transatlantic Context,” explored many dimensions of recovery, not merely publishing out-of-print or never-before-published works by women but also, in many cases, bringing women writers of the past out of unmerited obscurity. 

The papers on this panel shifted the point of view usually used to discuss writers from the United States, employing a more hemispheric framework; presentations ranged from 17th-century Ursuline nuns to the 19th-century African American-Chippewa sculptor Edmonia Lewis and turn-of-the century writers Anne Hampton Brewster and Madeline Pollard.  Presenters on this panel were Tamara Harvey, of George Mason University; Shirley Samuels, of Cornell University; Etta Madden, of Missouri State University; and Elizabeth De Wolfe, chair and professor of UNE's Department of History & Philosophy.