2014-2015 JASNA Massachusetts Meetings

2014-2015 Meetings

These meetings were held between the fall of 2014 and the spring of 2015.

September 21, 2014

Deborah Barnum
JASNA Vermont Regional Coordinator

Deborah presented "My Own Darling Child: 200 Years of Publishing and Collecting Pride and Prejudice", a history of the many varied editions of Jane Austen's books, including foreign languages. The illustation styles ran the gamut, from classic to lurid!

Deborah Barnum is a former law librarian, now a bookseller of fine and collectible books, the Regional Coordinator for the JASNA Vermont Region, and an inveterate reader and collector of bibliographies. Here is a link to the Vermont JASNA region's excellent blog.

November 9, 2014

Iris Lutz
JASNA President

Iris Lutz spoke to us about Houses in Jane Austen's Life and Fiction

Iris Lutz, the current President of JASNA, is a long-time admirer of Jane Austen's work, who discovered JASNA in 1996 when the Tucson-based Southern Arizona Region was being formed. Iris served as the group's Regional Coordinator for five years and coordinated the 2006 Annual General Meeting on Mansfield Park. She has also served JASNA at the national level as Vice President for Regions and Vice President for Conferences. In her work life, Iris has focused on a career in marketing and product management for companies in the computer and software industries.

December 13, 2014

Jane Austen's Birthday Party

The JASNA Massachusetts Players present:

Lady Susan!

The Players will present a delightful and hilarious reading of Jane Austen's early work, Lady Susan, adapted by Robert Moss and performed by members Jill Crowley, Marcia McClintock Folsom, Elizabeth Philipps, and Kirk Companion. After the performance, we will make merry and enjoy a special repast of sandwiches, birthday cake, and the traditional toast to Jane.

March 15, 2015

Marcia Folsom
Chair and Professor of Humanities at Wheelock College, Boston

Teaching Austen's Mansfield Park in the Twenty-first Century: New Contexts, Controversies, and Opportunities

Marcia Folsom is the editor of Approaches to Teaching Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1993) and Approaches to Teaching Austen's Emma (2004) published by the Modern Language Association. She is a frequent speaker at the JASNA Annual General Meeting, and her articles have been published many times in Persuasions. Marcia is a member of the JASNA Massachusetts Region and a member of the Steering Committee.

May 17, 2015

Claudia Johnson

Claudia Johnson is the Murray Professor of English Literature at Princeton University; she is also currently chairperson of the English department. Johnson specializes in Restoration and 18th-century British literature, with a special focus on the novel. She is also interested in feminist theory and gender studies. Johnson is renowned for her books on Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft. She is a very popular speaker at Austen events.

Johnson's major books include Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago, 1988) and Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago, 1995). She also edited The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge, 2002) as well as editions of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (Norton, 1998), Sense and Sensibility (Norton, 2002), and Northanger Abbey (Oxford, 2003).

She is working on her next book: Her Picture in the Exhibition at Last, about the vicissitudes of the controversial "Rice Portrait" of Jane Austen, its likely resolution through digital technology, and its entanglement in larger notions about how we think "classic" authors should look, and about the competing authority of families and museum, with vested interests in their positions and their property.

Claudia Johnson's talk was "'She Was Too Astonished to Speak': Jane Austen and the Unintelligible." She addressed Jane Austen's ability to convey emotions with an economy of words.

This event was held at Gore Place in Waltham, Massachusetts, an historic 1806 Federal mansion. Afternoon tea was served in the mansion, followed by tours of the house. This event was funded in part by a grant from JASNA.

Claudia Johnson was the Avery Fund speaker for this season.

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