Public Research Talk: The Reformist Language of Plants: Marianne Dwight’s Botanical Watercolors with Alice de Galzain
Common Room, CSWR, 42 Francis Ave.
Cambridge, MA
Mon., Oct. 19, 2026, 12 – 1:30 p.m. 
Registration is required.
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Shortly after moving to the Transcendentalist utopian community of Brook Farm in April 1844, Marianne Dwight Orvis joined the “Fancy Group,” a collective of women who hand-painted goods for sale in Boston. She described the project as seeking the “elevation of woman to independence, and an acknowledged equality with man” (Letters from Brook Farm, 32). This talk examines how Dwight, by binding flowers into “books,” used the language of flowers to narrate her experience with Fourierism. It situates her botanical watercolors within the broader context of antebellum women’s engagement with reform and shows how her floral books symbolically articulated both the harmony with nature sought by Transcendentalists and the feminist possibilities of socialist communalism and labor reform.
Alice de Galzain is a postdoctoral researcher and former Marie Skłodowska-Curie Seal of Excellence Fellow at Sorbonne Université (2024–2026). She is a Visiting Scholar with the Transcendentalism Initiative at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School for the 2026–27 academic year.
Her book project, tentatively titled Cultivating Feminism: Brook Farm and the American Women’s Movement, examines the feminist subculture that emerged within Transcendentalist utopian communities. She is Associate Editor of The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies and Associate Editor of Margaret Fuller, Periodical and Other Writings (2 vols.), forthcoming in the Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Writings of Margaret Fuller.
Her scholarship has appeared in Transatlantica, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, The Dial, The Concord Saunterer, and Legacy. Her essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller appears in Hawthorne Inside Out (Nanterre UP, 2026), and her forthcoming essay, “Margaret Fuller on Gender and Greek Mythology,” will appear in The History of Platonism in the Modern Age, Vol. V (Cambridge UP).
Programming Series: Transcendentalism
Gazette Classification: Art/Design, Diversity and Inclusion, Humanities, Lecture, Religion
Sponsor: Center for the Study of World Religions
Contact: Bhaswar F. Khan, Assistant Director, CSWR
More info: cswr.hds.harvard.edu…