2023 Ticknor Society Annual Meeting
The 2023 Annual Meeting of The Ticknor Society will take place on June 21st from 6-8pm at Houghton Library, Harvard University. Our featured speaker will be Dr. Julie Dobrow, Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Tufts University and author of After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America’s Greatest Poet.
Dr. Dobrow will speak about Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, who worked on Dickinson’s letters and poetry and were perhaps most responsible for their initial publication after Dickinson’s death. Using family letters and diaries held in archives around New England, Dr. Dobrow was able to piece together the story of their sometimes-controversial lives and decisions, some of which she will share with us in her presentation.
Julie Dobrow is the director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Tufts University, where she also holds faculty positions in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, the Film and Media Studies Program, and the Civic Studies Program. She is a co-principal investigator of the Half the History Project, which uses short-form biography, film, and podcast to tell the untold and under-told stories of women’s lives.
Apart from her social science research, Dobrow shifts gears to work on biography. After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America’s Greatest Poet (W.W. Norton), Dobrow’s dual biography of Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham, came out in 2018. This book was long-listed for a PEN Bograd Prize in biography, short-listed for a Plutarch Award and Massachusetts Book Award, and was named a “Must Read” book by numerous book club organizations in the year it was published.
More recently she has written another dual biography of 19th/20th century writers and Indian policy reformers Elaine Goodale Eastman and Ohíye Sa, Charles Alexander Eastman (upcoming). Her current project focuses on women abolitionists in the 19th century, examining the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society and some of the fascinating and diverse women who were part of this organization. Dobrow’s historical articles on these and other subjects have appeared in Literary Hub, South Dakota History, the Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Journal of the Thoreau Society and other publications. She is on the steering committee of the New England Biography Series for the Massachusetts Historical Society, and serves as president of the Boston Authors Club, an organization that Mabel Loomis Todd helped to found.
Dobrow has also worked as a freelance journalist, writing for the Boston Globe Magazine, Huffington Post, The Conversation, and other publications. She holds an AB in anthropology and sociology from Smith College, and MA and Ph.D. degrees from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
We will begin our evening with the business meeting, which has a full agenda this year, starting with the approval of the minutes from last year’s meeting (view those minutes here). We will then thank our departing board members and vote in the elections of two current and four new board members.
Shannon Struble will complete her term as president and join Mary Warnement as a Past President, Ex Officio. Dale Stinchcomb will cycle off the board after serving excellently for six years, most recently as our ever-efficient membership secretary. Michael Barton will conclude his post-presidency advisory role, with the Society’s appreciation for all his hard work to ensure the smooth running of the organization through difficult times.
Current vice president Drew Griffin will stand for election to fill the position of Ticknor president. Up for re-election is Doriane Ruml, who has enthusiastically served as a member-at-large for two years. Janet Steins will run to re-join the board in the position of vice president after completing two terms as treasurer in 2020:
Janet has been a member of the Ticknor Society since 2008. She served on the board from 2010 to 2020, and as treasurer for four of those years. After a 40+ year career in academic libraries, Janet retired in 2017 from her position as collections librarian at Harvard’s Tozzer Library. Post-retirement, she is a member of the editorial collective that publishes History of Anthropology Review (histanthro.org) and on a small team of researchers compiling a census of all extant copies of Edward Curtis’s masterwork The North American Indian (1907-1930).
Running to fill the position of membership secretary is Matt Hewes:
Matt Hewes is a creative organizer and a discovery enthusiast with a master’s degree in Library and Information Science. He has created information access systems for a moving company, a furniture sculptor, and for his own collection of books and ephemera related to New Directions Publishing. His system of “modern browsing for special collections” was inspired by the desire to physically reorganize large numbers of books and can be viewed here. Matt is thrilled to be a member of the Ticknor Society, and plans to continue developing his skills for the information seeking world.
Prospective board members-at-large are Marie Canaves and Patrick Olson:
Marie Canaves is an art historian and visual artist focused on making artist’s books. She earned her Bachelors of Fine Arts in Painting with Honors at Florida International University and her Masters in Art History from Southern Methodist University. She served as the Curator of Education at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach before moving to Cape Cod to teach full-time at Cape Cod Community College. There she developed the art history curriculum and taught art history and studio arts for nearly 30 years. Additionally, she established the Higgins Art Gallery at the College and served as its first curator and director. After retiring, she moved to Boston, where she co-founded and was the first president of New England Book Artists, along with being an enthusiastic member of The Ticknor Society.
Patrick Olson is proprietor of Patrick Olson Rare Books in Lowell, focusing on early printed European material. He first joined the rare book trade in 2003, while still in college. He went on to spend a decade in libraries, holding a variety of positions working with rare books: as a rare book cataloger at the University of Illinois and MIT, as a curator at the University of Iowa, and then as a curator and eventually Head of Special Collections at Michigan State University. He returned to the trade under his own name in 2018.
Continuing on the board are Chris Morgan as clerk & recording secretary, Lorna Condon as treasurer, and Christian Dupont, Jean Maguire, and Maida Tilchen as members-at-large.
RSVPs are requested by emailing Dale Stinchcomb at ticknorsecretary@gmail.com. The business meeting will begin promptly at 6pm to give Dr. Dobrow time for her presentation and to answer questions at the end. Food and drink will be served throughout. We look forward to a joyful evening of conversation and conviviality at Houghton Library!
Organizer
