Making History Come Alive
INNOVATIVE PUBLIC HUMANITIES PROGRAMMING
Jane Austen & Co. is a free public Zoom series focused on the life, histories, material culture, and writings of women living in the transatlantic eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
All of our programs are free and open to the public!
Beginning as a library-based book group in Durham, North Carolina, we now offer a diverse array of lectures, Q&As, and digital programming. Part of the Jane Austen Summer Program, our mission is to bring engaging and informative humanities programming to audiences both within our local Triangle Region of North Carolina and beyond.
Since Summer 2020, and with the help of a variety of public humanities grants, Jane Austen & Co. has offered biennial series of online webinars and discussions. They are recorded live with participant questions and answers, and afterwards available for free on our website.
Here is a sampling of our offerings:
"Staying Home with Jane Austen" explores domestic life, labor, and practices during the Regency, including dress, music, embroidery, gardening, and gaming.
"Race and the Regency" 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.
"Conversations with Austen Adaptors" 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).
"Asia and the Regency" 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.
"Reading with Jane Austen" explores authors contemporaneous with Austen and authors that Austen is likely to have read.
"Everyday Science in the Regency" offers insight into the science that undergirded every-day tasks in the Regency, such as time telling, home cures, sea bathing, silk production, and maritime travel.
Upcoming Topics:
Adapting Austen for YA audiences
The American Founding and its Reception in England
All of our programs are free and open to the public!
Got ideas for a new series? Let us know...
WHO WE ARE
Inger Brodey
COFOUNDER &
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Inger S.B. Brodey is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Affiliate Professor of Asian Studies, Adjunct Professor of Global Studies, and Director of the Office of Distinguished Scholarships. 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. She is co-founder and co-director of the Jane Austen Summer Program.
Anne Fertig
COFOUNDER &
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
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.
Susan Allen Ford
CO-HOST, READING WITH JANE AUSTEN
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.
Malika Amoruso
TECHNICAL DIRECTOR
Malika Amoruso is a third-year student in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She specializes in 19th Century British and Comparative Literatures with interests in gender & sexuality studies, adaptation theory, women writers, and the intersections between literature and science. She serves as the Technical Director for Jane Austen & Co.
Sage Holden
PUBLICITY INTERN
Sage Holden is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying English and Communications Studies. She is currently serving as a publicity intern for JASP and Jane Austen and Co.
Elizabeth Leonard
CREATIVE PROGRAMMING INTERN
Elizabeth Leonard is a third-year undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She's an English and Communication Major with concentrations in creative writing and media production, respectively. She is the creative programming intern for JASP 2022.
Danielle Christmas
CO-HOST, RACE AND THE REGENCY
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, ASIA & THE REGENCY
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.
