Noted Austen Scholar Lectures at our Fall Meeting

Thanks to a grant from the national organization and the generosity of Agnes Scott College English Department, we had an excellent meeting on September 18 in Evans Hall at Agnes Scott.

Dr. Juliette Wells of Manhattanville College, NY,  presented her lecture "For Love of Jane Austen." 

Dr. Wells

About the Lecture
In For the Love of Jane Austen  Juliette Wells investigates Austen's popularity today among amateur readers, including the range of activities that she inspires among people who read her works for pleasure. She draws on her own recent research into literary tourism, among other topics, to show what both scholars and fans can gain from thinking more deeply about what Austen means to people in the twenty-first century.

About the Speaker
Juliette Wells is the author of Everybody's Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination, which will be published in spring 2012 by Continuum. The first book to investigate Jane Austen’s popular significance today, Everybody’s Jane considers why Austen matters to amateur readers and how they act out their enthusiasm for her writings and life.

A frequent and popular speaker at JASNA annual meetings and regional events, Wells was named the organization's 2010-2011 Traveling Lecturer for the Eastern Region. She received JASNA's “International Visitor” fellowship in 2009 to support her research at Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton, England. As Goucher College's 2010 Jane Austen Scholar in Residence, Wells was awarded a weeklong research residency to study the Alberta H. and Henry G. Burke Austen Collection. A profile of Alberta Burke, a passionate Austen collector, appears in Everybody's Jane, as do responses from the literary tourists whom Wells interviewed at Chawton.

Wells has published many articles in Persuasions, JASNA's journal, and joined its editorial board in 2011. She is the chair of the Breakout Sessions Selection Committee for JASNA's 2012 Annual General Meeting in New York City, where she will also be featured on a panel of promising young Austen scholars. She has presented on Austen at national and international conferences.

Wells's articles on Austen's cultural legacy have appeared in books including Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, “The Public’s Open to Us All”: Essays on Women and Performance in Eighteenth-Century England, and Peculiar Portrayals: Mormons on the Page, Stage, and Screen, as well as in the journal Shakespeare. She served as features editor for Penguin Classics’ enhanced e-book edition of Pride and Prejudice and co-edited the book The Brontës in the World of the Arts.