Our Team
Inger Brodey
FOUNDING DIRECTOR and
CO-HOST
Inger S.B. Brodey is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Adjunct Professor in the School of Civic Life and Leadership, Affiliate Professor of Asian Studies, Adjunct Professor of Global Studies. Her primary interest is in the history of the novel in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe and Meiji Japan, and she has published extensively on Jane Austen. Her new book Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness appears in 2024
Eric Bontempo
CO-DIRECTOR and CO-HOST
Eric Bontempo is an Assistant Professor of English at Abilene Christian University. He received a PhD in English & Comparative Literature in 2023 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he began volunteering with the Jane Austen Summer Program. His work has appeared in Essays in Romanticism and the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Writing.
David Palko
CO-DIRECTOR and CO-HOST
David Palko is a PhD student in the English Department at Duke University. He also holds a JD from Harvard Law School and an MA in English from NC State University. His research interests focus on using legal history to explore early modern literature. David has been a speaker at the Jane Austen Summer Program since 2021, and recently was selected as a co-director of Jane Austen & Co.
Susan Allen Ford
CO-HOST
Recently retired as a professor of English from Delta State University, Susan has served as editor for Persuasions, the leading Austen journal, for more than a decade. She has also faithfully attended and contributed to JASP since its founding in 2012 as a presenter and a discussion leader. She is JASP's context corner coordinator and a member of the Board of Directors, as well as a co-host of Jane Austen & Co.
Danielle Christmas
CO-HOST
Danielle Christmas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A Delta Delta Delta Fellow in the Humanities, she holds a Ph.D. in English from University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Auschwitz and the Plantation: Labor, Sex, and Death in American Holocaust and Slavery Fiction. Her interests in Southern history includes Confederate monuments, lynching narratives, and visual art.
Kimiyo Ogawa
CO-HOST
Kimiyo Ogawa is Professor of Foreign Studies in the Department of English at Sophia University in Japan. She is the editor of the upcoming volume, Austen and Asia, with Tristanne Connolly. A great lover of Austen, she has published extensively on early English women writers.
Na'dayah Pugh
TECHNICAL DIRECTOR
Na’dayah Pugh is a second-year student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill pursuing a bachelor’s degree in English and Comparative Literature, with minors in Screenwriting and Creative Writing. She contributed to Jane Austen’s Violent Affections: An edition of Henry & Eliza and Jack & Alice, and volunteered at the 2023 Jane Austen Sumer Program. She is excited to continue exploring the world of Austen, especially regarding its relevancy to the modern day.
Anne Fertig
CO-FOUNDER and CONSULTANT
Anne Fertig is the Digital Projects Editor at the Center for Digital History at the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington. She received her doctorate in English Literature at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she first began volunteering with the Jane Austen Summer Program. In 2019, she started Jane Austen & Co. at Durham Public Library. She was a Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar at the University of Glasgow in 2013 and the co-editor of A Song of Glasgow Town: The Collected Poems of Marion Bernstein.
Our Programs
offers insight into the science that undergirded everyday tasks in the Regency, such as time telling, home cures, sea bathing, silk production, and maritime travel.
explores authors contemporaneous with Austen and authors that Austen is likely to have read.
offers an oft-neglected perspective on contemporary Asian views of Regency life, Asia in the time of the Regency, and Regency (mis)understandings of Asian literature and culture.
explores the role of race, nationalism, colonialism, and identity in the culture of the long eighteenth century, exploring topics such as slavery, abolition, portraiture, and modern representations of historical people of color.
explores domestic life, labor, and practices during the Regency, including dress, music, embroidery, gardening, and gaming.
offers conversations with authors of modern Austen adaptations, including Ibi Zoboi (author of Pride), Margot Melcon and Lauren Gunderson (co-authors of Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley), and Jo Baker (author of Longbourn).
Upcoming Topics
~ Recent Austen adaptations & scholarship
~ The great Austen vs Brontë debate
~ Adapting Austen for YA audiences
~ The American Founding and its Reception in England
Got ideas for a new series? Let us know...