JASA
The Jane Austen Society of Australia Inc.
2025 Weekend Conference Speakers
Some fabulous international and local speakers are coming to instruct, enlighten and entertain us at our 2025 Weekend Conference in Canberra, celebrating Jane Austen: 250 Glorious Years. See our Programme here.
Devoney Looser
Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, is the author or editor of eleven books, including Sister Novelists and The Making of Jane Austen. A Guggenheim Fellow and an NEH Public Scholar, Looser has published essays in The Atlantic, the New York Times, Salon, Slate, The TLS, and the Washington Post. Her next book, Wild for Austen, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in the US in September 2025. See her website here.
Wild for Austen .. Jane Austen’s often unacknowledged ‘wild side’
Was Jane Austen more wild than mild? In this talk, Devoney Looser will describe Austen’s often unacknowledged wild side, in her life and writings. We’ll dig down into the story of her once jokingly calling herself “a wild beast,” as well as investigating how her heroines align themselves with admirable rebellion.
Almost Pride and Prejudice .. Some film versions of Pride and Prejudice that never happened
Film and TV adaptations of Austen’s most famous novel–from the 1940 MGM film to the 1995 BBC series and beyond—have had a profound and global impact on the author’s reputation. But what about those films and shows that nearly made it? In this talk, Looser will walk us through several surprising failed attempts to bring Pride and Prejudice to the screen, speculating on how they might have changed Janeite history.
Marie Nedregotten Sørbø
Marie Nedregotten Sørbø is Professor of English Literature at Volda University College, Norway. Her many publications on Austen include Irony and Idyll: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park on Screen (2014) and Jane Austen Speaks Norwegian: The Challenges of Literary Translation (2018). Sørbø is also an Austen translator herself, with her Norwegian Northanger Abbey (2022). She contributed chapters to The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe, on Austen (2007) and George Eliot (2016). Her collaborations in projects like DARIAH-EU Women Writers in History have resulted in articles about Hannah More as well as on several Norwegian pioneering women writers. See her website here.
Transmitted or transformed? .. The legacy of Jane Austen’s novels in Norwegian translation
This talk will focus on Jane Austen’s language and tone, and the challenges implied in rendering her novels in other languages. The examples (back-translated) will be taken from 155 years of Norwegian versions of the novels, but the observations are comparable to what happens in any language. Translation turns out to be a prism to reflect Austen’s peculiar style.
Glorious irony .. Jane Austen’s legacy of critical perspectives on women’s world
Jane Austen did not (like some of her contemporaries) write pamphlets in favour of women’s rights. She had, however, her own method of highlighting them. Her novels are narrated as sharp-eyed, keen observations, arch comments, and ironic revelations of characters and situations. This talk will draw comparisons between selected novels and their screen versions. Film/TV adapters may sometimes be tempted to idealise what Austen ironised.
Michael Kramp
Michael Kramp is a scholar of nineteenth-century British Literature, Critical Theory, and Masculinity Studies. He is currently engaged in a multiyear project, ‘Jane Austen and the Future of the Humanities’, using Austen’s work to showcase the importance of the humanities to diverse public audiences; this project involves a podcast, a documentary film, and a public-facing monograph. He is the author of Patriarchy’s Creative Resilience, and Disciplining Love: Austen and the Modern Man and editor of Jane Austen and Masculinity and Jane Austen and Critical Theory. Michael also writes regularly for public venues on topics related to men, masculinity, and contemporary patriarchy. See his website here.
Michael Kramp will speak about this public-facing project that deliberately attempts to leverage the stories and ideas of Austen to communicate the value of the humanities to diverse public audiences. Within universities around the world, the humanities have recently struggled — a struggle that certainly has precedents that date at least to the 1950s. In the diverse regions of Australasia, the humanities have experienced challenges, especially following global economic crises and the COVID-19 pandemic. Jane Austen offers a distinct cultural resource whose narratives and ideas are versatile, accessible, and ostensibly safe, allowing us to deploy them to communicate the importance, efficacy, and ongoing dynamism of the humanities to different communities.
Juliette Wells
Reading Jane Austen in America ..
Juliette Wells will share exciting new discoveries about Jane Austen’s early publication and reception in North America, as featured in the Morgan Library & Museum’s 2025 exhibition ‘A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250 in New York City’, for which she is the guest co-curator.
Body and Mind in Jane Austen ..
Austen and her fellow Georgians believed that health of body and mind were intimately connected. She and her characters were invigorated by long country walks, horseback rides, and evenings spent dancing. How do these practices relate to present-day scientific understandings of the benefits of movement, exercise, and time outdoors?
William Christie
Though Jane Austen was born in the same decade as Wordsworth, Scott and Coleridge, and was only thirteen years older than Lord Byron, her relationship with the Romantic poets, where it has been considered at all and not ignored as irrelevant, has most often been characterised as disapproving – at best, sceptical. Only in Persuasion does she engage with the Romantics directly, and even here her attitude towards them seems ambiguous, if not ambivalent. This lecture revisits Austen on the Romantics in an effort to find out what is really going on between them.