Bard College Berlin News
Ulrike Wagner publishes a new essay on Margaret Fuller in the Transcendentalism Essay Series at the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School.
Margaret Fuller redefined education as a "reproductive" act. In her essay, Wagner examines how Fuller's criticism and series of Conversations translated Romantic philology into a democratic pedagogy, positioning women’s voices as a medium through which knowledge can be remade.
Unlike her male peers, Fuller was denied a formal university education, but “came to regard education as the crucial means by which women and other marginalized groups could gain influence in society.” To that end, she began to host “Conversations” for women in Elizabeth Peabody’s Boston bookshop, using journals and daily newspapers as “efficient instrument[s]” for public education” and literature “as a social glue that can spark communication across temporal, cultural, and social divides.” These meetings became “laboratories where women explored autonomy in decision-making by testing new roles, claiming their voices, and experiencing freedom as something communally and actively exercised rather than passively assumed.”
Unlike formal education at the time, which encouraged rote learning that could be reproduced, Wagner explains how the knowledge created during these Conversations grew to “exemplify a mediating practice between scholarly expertise and a broader reading public, staging a model of intellectual life in which the poetic, reproductive mind becomes the condition for democratic participation in culture.”
Read the full text of the article in the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School.
Post Date: 03-05-2026