The University of Mary Washington’s Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication will host author and professor Juliette Wells on Tuesday, Oct. 20.
Wells will discuss one of Jane Austen’s most recognizable novels, Emma, as it approaches its 200-year anniversary in a lecture titled “Jane Austen’s Emma at 200.” The public lecture will take place at 7:30 p.m. in Lee Hall, Room 411 on the Fredericksburg campus.
Wells, an associate professor of English and chair of the Department of English at Goucher College in Towson, Md., is an expert on 18th- and 19th-century British literature, the novel, women’s writing and Jane Austen.
According to Gary Richards, chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication (ELC), Jane Austen’s works are popular among the students in the ELC department and among its professors. Marie McAllister, professor of English, currently teaches a freshman seminar on Jane Austen and popular culture, and both McAllister and Eric Lorentzen, associate professor of English, teach literature classes on Jane Austen.
“I hope students see how a text from the distant past, such as Emma, still resonates with contemporary audiences and in fact circulates widely in popular culture,” said Richards.
Wells is the author of two books on 18th- and 19th-century British writers. The first, Everybody’s Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination, was published in 2011, and the second, The Brontës in the World of the Arts, coedited with Sandra Hagan, was published in 2008.
Wells’ essays have been featured in print and online publications, including the essay “New Approaches to Austen and the Popular Reader” in the 2012 book Uses of Austen: Jane’s Afterlives, edited by Gillian Dow and Clare Hanson; the article “From Schlockspeare to Austenpop” in the journal Shakespeare in 2010; and “Austen’s Adventures in American Popular Fiction, 1996-2006” in Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal On-Line in 2010. An annotated edition of Emma, in which Wells edited and for which she wrote the introduction, was released by Penguin Classics this year.
Wells’ visit is sponsored by the Wendy Shadwell ’63 Program Endowment in British Literature.
For more information on the event, contact Richards at grichard@umw.edu or (540) 654-2365.
