Joel Myerson Lecture Series
Joel Meyerson (1945-2021) was a distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of South Carolina. An elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, among numerous scholarly honors and awards, Joel was a premiere scholar and editor of nineteenth century American literature. He authored and edited some 60 books, among them many previously unpublished works by Ralph Waldo Emerson. His work includes several volumes that have been essential to scholarship on Alcott, Emerson, Transcendentalism, and Concord. Joel was a founder and president of the Louis May Alcott Society. He was a frequent user of the William Munroe Special Collections.
After Professor Joel Meyerson’s passing 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. The series is sponsored by the Concord Free Public Library Corporation and takes place in the Goodwin Forum at the Main Library, 129 Main Street, Concord, MA.
The Joel Myerson Annual Lecture Series engages 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 highlights 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 promotes 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.
Previous Lectures
2025: Professor Laura Dassow Walls
Stepping Out of Time: Thoreau, Lopez, and the Question of Transcendentalism Today
October 11, 2025
“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.
2023: Professor Megan Marshall
After Lives: Bringing Una Hawthorne Home
April 27, 2023
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.