Speakers
Keynote Speaker:
Alex de Steiguer
Photographer · Writer · Musician · Winter Caretaker of Star Island
Alex de Steiguer will deliver the keynote address at Among Thaxter’s Isles. A photographer, writer, and musician, she has served as the winter caretaker of Star Island for nearly thirty years. Working exclusively with black-and-white film, she photographs using a medium-format camera and produces her prints in a traditional darkroom.
Her work is held in the permanent collections of the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. She is a two-time Artist Fellow of the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and her work is represented by the Pucker Gallery in Boston.
As an interdisciplinary artist whose practice reflects many of the forms celebrated in Celia Thaxter’s renowned Appledore salon, Alex brings a lived island perspective to the conference, speaking to the challenges and joys of life and creative work on the Isles of Shoals.
Learn more about her work at
alexdesteiguer.com
Additional Presenters at Among Thaxter’s Isles Conference
Anne Bardaglio:
“‘The sea runs mountains high’: Celia Thaxter’s Winter Island”
Anne Bardaglio is a lecturer in interdisciplinary humanities, writing, and Maine Studies at the University of Maine and a PhD candidate in history at the University of Maine. Her research explores the cultural and environmental history of the Gulf of Maine and Bay of Fundy islands, focusing on the changing sense of place on the islands from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries.
Anna E. Beaudry:
“ Regional Creation Myths: Incarnational World-Building in the Non- Fiction Sketches of
Celia Thaxter and Sarah Orne Jewett”
Anna E. Beaudry received her PhD from Baylor University in 2024. Her research employs material feminism and ecocriticism to examine representations of vulnerable landscapes and lifestyles in 19th century New England regionalism, particularly women writers. She has published in Early American Literature, American Literary Realism, among others.
Chip Badley:
“The Parlor and the Garden: Childe Hassam,
Celia Thaxter, and the Art of Contemplation”
Chip Badley is a lecturer in the English department at the University of California, Davis. He is completing a book manuscript about painting and queerness in nineteenth-century American literature. His writing appears or is forthcoming in American Literary History, Early American Literature, The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and the New England Quarterly.
Hannah J. E. Champion:
“Sappho of the Isles”: Celia Thaxter’s Intimates and Intimacies“
H. J. E. Champion is Associate Professor at Université Bordeaux Montaigne in France. Her research focuses on queer desire, kinship, and ecologies in the work of nineteenth-century neglected women writers. Ongoing projects include a forthcoming publication on the queer gardens of New England women writers.
Maura D’Amore:
“‘After Tea I Hunted Slugs as Usual’; or, Melodrama in the Garden”
Maura D’Amore is a professor of English at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, and the author of Suburban Plots: Men at Home in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture (UMass 2014). In 2021, she published an essay on the paintings Thaxter made on her books in The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists entitled “Something Pathetic as Well as Wonderful.”
Sari Edelstein:
“Celia Thaxter and the Invention of the Coastal Imagination”
Sari Edelstein is professor of English at the University of MA, Boston. Author of Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American’s Women Writing and Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals and she serves as editor of ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture. Sari is now writing a feminist cultural history of the beach entitled Beach Reading.
Tara Kennette:
“‘Wear Away the Edge’: Dissolution of Human/Non-Human Boundaries in Celia Thaxter’s Among the Isles of the Shoals”
Tara Kennette is a PhD Candidate at Temple University, working on a dissertation that examines relationships between women and their environments in work from American Female Regionalist authors. She is particularly interested in discussions that privilege animal or plant perspectives and decenter anthropocentric stances.
Cornelia King:
“Venice in the Mind of Celia Thaxter”
Cornelia King is an Independent scholar, retired from the Library Company of Philadelphia after a career in librarianship and women’s history. Connie graduated from Bryn Mawr before getting degrees from Drexel University (librarianship) and Temple University (history). Her last exhibition at the Library Company was Women Get Things Done: Women’s Activism from 1860 to 1880, 2020. As a teenager, she went to the Unitarian Summer camp at Ferry Beach, in Saco, Maine.
Vesna Kuiken:
“Childe Hassam’s Tidal Impressionism”
Vesna Kuiken is a Lecturer at the State University of New York, Albany. She specializes in the nineteenth-century American literature and ecocriticism. Her book on Celia Thaxter and Sarah Orne Jewett, How Islands Remember: A Study in American Regionalism, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Her work on Jewett, Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Thoreau, and Henry James has appeared in various journals and essay collections.
Don James McLaughlin:
“The Archipelago of Interfaith Consciousness: Environmental Spiritualism in the Poetry and Correspondence of Celia Thaxter”
Don James McLaughlin is an associate professor of English at the University of Tulsa. His research explores the queer past, health humanities, disability theory, and the history of emotions. In 2023, he published a new critical edition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s 1885 novel A Marsh Island; His monograph, Phobia and American Literature, 1705-1937: A Therapeutic History was published in July 2025.
Marianne K. Noble:
“The Underground Aesthetic of Celia Thaxter’s Salons”
Marianne Noble is a professor of literature at American University and the author of The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature and Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson. She earned her PhD from Columbia University in 1994. Among her recent courses are Literature and the Ethical Life, Literature and the Environment, and The Beautiful and Its Politics.
Cécile Roudeau:
“Reading An Island Garden with and against the Grain: Celia Thaxter’s Phyto-Bio(political)-Chemistry”
Cécile Roudeau is a Professor of U.S. Literature at Université Paris Cité. Her work focuses on the articulation between literature and politics in the nineteenth-century. Her first monograph in French focused on regionalism, gender and the notion of place, with a special emphasis on Sara Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.
Ellen M. Taylor:
“Neuralgia and Nasturtium: Celia Thaxter’s Gardening Anti-Rest Cure”
Ellen M Taylor is a professor and coordinator of English at the University of Maine at Augusta. A poet and scholar, her research focuses on ecofeminist and ecocritical perspectives; she has published three collections of poetry, and scholarship on Maine writers Kate Barnes, Elizabeth Coatsworth, Henry Beston, as well as Celia Thaxter’s ornithological activism and the birth of the American salon on Appledore Island.
Denise Xu:
“On the “Terrible Proximity” of Matter: Recovering Celia Thaxter’s Ghost Ship Story”
Denise Xu is an assistant professor of English at UNC-Chapel Hill. She specializes in nineteenth-century American literature, critical ethnic studies, and ecological theory. Her current book project, Enchanted Stems: Human Vegetizing in the Long Nineteenth Century, examines plant-person hybridity in conjunction with the period’s biopolitical constructions of race and empire.