Goodwin Forum
Main Library129 Main Street, Concord, MA, 01742

Please join us for the annual Joel Myerson Lecture: “Stepping Out of Time: Thoreau, Lopez, and the Question of Transcendentalism Today,” presented by Prof. Laura Dassow Walls.

“Is this who we are?” It’s the question of the day, but generations ago the Transcendentalists asked it as well, as they confronted an America founded on the promise of freedom but mired in the economics of slavery. Their legacy to us is paradoxical: they offer a vision transcending worldly affairs, even as they demand we attend to the burning world. They seem to have stepped out of time into transcendence, even as they have stepped out of their time into ours, bearing urgent messages. This lecture looks at two representative figures, Thoreau and Barry Lopez, as parallel lives poised on this paradox, one deep in our past, the other our contemporary, both of them writing in, and out, of time.

Laura Dassow Walls is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she taught nineteenth-century American literature, particularly the American Transcendentalists, and the history and theory of ecological thought. Previously, she taught at Lafayette College and the University of South Carolina. She has written widely on Thoreau, Emerson, Humboldt, and related figures. She is best known for her award-winning biographies, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, and Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America. Currently, she is working on a literary biography of the American writer Barry Lopez.

THE JOEL MYERSON ANNUAL LECTURE SERIES

After Prof. Joel Myerson died 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, and The Thoreau Society, launched the Joel Myerson Annual Lecture Series.

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.

A reception will follow the event in the Rotunda.

The Concord Free Public Library Corporation generously sponsors the series.