This summer Professor Devoney Looser will be directing a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers, “Jane Austen and Her Contemporaries.”
The seminar’s 16 participants will seek significant new insights about Jane Austen by reading her closely alongside now understudied (but once well-known) writers of her own day. The class will meet from June 18-July 20, 2012, at the University of Missouri in Columbia, MO.
Despite valuable scholarship that considers Austen alongside Sir Walter Scott, Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, or the so-called “big six” Romantic poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats), there remains a tendency to write and teach about Austen in a restricted frame of reference, in single-author studies or major author courses.
These seminars, which come with a stipend of $3,900, are designed primarily for those who teach American undergraduate students, although qualified independent scholars are also eligible to apply. Two spaces in the seminar are reserved for graduate students.The need to deepen our claims about Austen has arisen at least in part because, in recent years, the scholarly landscape for Austen studies (and, indeed, for most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers) has changed radically. We will work together to make sense of when to use emerging digital technologies to attempt to answer scholarly questions and when to seek out paper-based materials, both print and manuscript.
For further details see the program website (http://nehseminar.missouri.edu)for further information about the program, to determine your eligibility, and for directions about how to apply.
The deadline for application is 1 March 2012. Please don’t hesitate to contact Dr. Looser with any questions you may have:
Devoney Looser, Professor of English
Co-Editor, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies
Tate Hall 114
Department of English
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211
573-884-7791
FAX: 573-882-5785
looserd@missouri.edu
Jane Austen's World 
I Impresses with this Post Really
I would love to apply. But the restrictions limit the kind of people who apply, I’m still an undergrad. :( unjust doesnt begin to cover it.
Let’s hope the publications that result from the seminar will be available to us all!
Psst. Vic? None of my business, but you should probably stick a “will” in that first sentence before Ruth W reads this post. No rush. She lives in Seattle. She won’t be up for a couple of hours yet.
I’ve had a number of things on my mind this week, Nick. This is my third mistake, which proves that blogging requires one’s full attention. Thanks for the tip.
Not to worry, Vic — I’ve got your back.
Readers tend to forget that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818, just after Jane Austen died, and The Last Man which some consider the first work of science fiction in 1826 and her vision couldn’t be have been more different than Austen’s.
The Last Man received the worst reviews of anything Mary Shelley wrote. It was ahead of its time.