The Constance Fenimore Woolson Society was founded in 1995. There are no membership dues nor a fee to join. Members are encouraged to check this website for information on conferences and announcements of new publications.

Woolson Society’s Founders’ Prizes

At the 25th anniversary conference in 2019, the Woolson Society inaugurated five prizes named in honor of the five scholars who have done the most to promote the work of Woolson and the society founded in her name.

Kate Reich launched the Woolson Society at Rollins College, where the first conference was held in 1995. Victoria Brehm kept the fledgling association alive at Mackinac, with all the promise of the island’s Grand Hotel and the first collection of essays published shortly thereafter. Cheryl Torsney, Sharon Dean, and Anne Boyd Rioux then carried the new society’s members on their publishing shoulders with monographs, collections of essays as well as selections of Woolson’s oeuvre, a volume of her complete letters, and a new biography. 

Any article, book, or creative venture on Woolson that was accepted for refereed publication or performance during the years since the Society’s last conference is eligible for submission and review, and for a monetary award if the author attends the conference in which winners are celebrated.

2022

The Kate Reich prize to Sidonia Serafini for “’sit still and remember’: Woolson’s Keepers and the Problem of the Archive,” in Secret Histories: A New Era in Constance Fenimore Woolson Scholarship (University of Georgia Press, forthcoming).

The Victoria Brehm prize to Jacqueline Justice for “Landscapes of Resistance: Polar Allusion and the Northern Frontier in the Fiction of Constance Fenimore Woolson,” ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture 66, no. 3 (2020): 409-44.

The Cheryl Torsney prize to Lisa Nais for “Constance Fenimore Woolson and Cultural Difference in Harper’s Monthly Magazine,” in Secret Histories: A New Era in Constance Fenimore Woolson Scholarship (University of Georgia Press, forthcoming).

The Sharon Dean prize to Kris Comment for “‘Dear Mr. James . . . do not leave it merely implied’: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Jupiter Lights as response to Henry James’s The Bostonians,” in Secret Histories: A New Era in Constance Fenimore Woolson Scholarship (forthcoming).

The Anne Boyd Rioux prize to Theodora Tsimpouki for “Agency in Complicity: The Aesthetics of Trauma in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s ‘Miss Grief,’” which appeared in Literature and Psychology: Writing, Trauma and the Self (Cambridge Scholars, 2019), 154-74.

2019

The Kate Reich prize to Jane M. Aman for “Gothic Spaces and the Nation in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Tales of the Great Lakes and Reconstruction,” in American Women’s Regionalist Fiction: Mapping the Gothic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 253-68.

The Victoria Brehm prize to Kathleen Diffley for “Numbered, Numbered: Commemorating the Civil War Dead in Woolson’s ‘Rodman the Keeper,’” American Literary History 30, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 488-507.

The Cheryl Torsney prize to Timothy Sweet for “‘You Talk Like a Book’: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Civil War Poetry and the Regionalization of Speech,” J-19: The Journal of Nineteenth Century Americanists 5, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 129-50.

The Sharon Dean prize to John Lowe for Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature (University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

The Anne Boyd Rioux prize to Jacqueline Justice for “The Lesson of the Storm: Shipwreck, Providence, and American Identity in the Great Lakes Fiction of Constance Fenimore Woolson,” Studies in American Fiction 45, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 19-37.