Janine Barchas, Professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin, will visit Carleton from Sep 30-Oct 1. Professor Barchas is the author of Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge, 2003) and Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity (Johns Hopkins, 2012). She’s also the creator of the website What Jane Saw, a digital recreation of the retrospective of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s paintings that Austen saw at the British Institute in the spring of 1813, and is co-curating an upcoming Folger Shakespeare Library exhibition “Will & Jane.” As she describes it, “The exhibit will examine the parallel afterlives of Shakespeare and Austen and look into the construction of literary celebrity.”
Professor Barchas’s visit to Carleton will include the following public events:
Tues Oct 1, 12-1, Weitz 131, “Curating and Mounting DH Exhibitions”, Digital Humanities lunch
Tues Oct 1, 4-5, Athenaeum, “Jane Austen between the Covers”, illustrated lecture.
And here is an overview of her lecture on Oct 1:
“Jane Austen between the Covers”
A historian of graphic design in the early novel as well as a scholar of Jane Austen, Professor Janine Barchas takes us on a visual tour through the history of the Jane Austen book cover, from 1833 to now. Timed to coincide with Austen’s current bicentennial celebrations and our own library’s exhibit about 200 years of Pride and Prejudice (1813), Professor Barchas will track roughly two centuries of Austen covers. During the 1830s, publishers first began to sell ready-bound books in sturdy no-nonsense cloth bindings. With the advent of these so-called publishers’ bindings, book covers transformed into marketing canvas. Barchas will lead us through the surprising history of the Austen cover—from Victorian schmaltz to Kindle-era nudity—speculating about what such an extraordinary range of marketing strategies tells us about the shifting cultural opinion of Austen and her work.