January 28, 2023
Zoom Presentation by students of Dr. Jason Solinger, 18th Century scholar, University of Mississippi
11:00 AM-12:30 PM Pacific
We held a special Zoom Presentation on January 28, 2023 at 11:00 AM Pacific with Dr. Jason Solinger, Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi and his students as they shared highlights from an experimental seminar “Reading Jane Austen for Fun” featuring videos, podcasts, social media and work in the medical humanities. The seminar produced a wide range of Austen-centered creative and scholarly work, testifying to Austen’s enduring appeal and pointing to new directions in literary studies. Dr. Solinger and his students Reese Anderson, Alex Bush, Azurrea Curry, Marika Hall, Jose Long, Abi Martin, Casey McCarthy, AG Robinson, Lucie Rowe, Emily Suh and Morgan Whited discuss the ways in which Generation Z continues to be inspired by Austen’s fiction.
Marika Hall, one of Dr. Solinger’s students won 3rd place in JASNA Southwest’s 2022 Young Filmmakers Contest with a film set in downtown Oxford featuring a modern-day encounter between Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth after their eight-year separation, which can be viewed on JASNA Southwest’s YouTube channel.
Dr. Jason Solinger specializes in the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century. His research interests include the early novel, the politics of taste, masculinity studies and the history of criticism. He has published articles on such topics as eighteenth century journalism, the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism, and the afterlives of Jane Austen. His book, Becoming the Gentleman, part of Palgrave Macmillan’s Global Masculinities series, explains why men and women in the eighteenth century were haunted by the question of what it meant to be a gentleman. He is currently working on a book about the entangled histories of reading Jane Austen and the discipline of literary studies. He is a passionate teacher, who strives to instill in his students lifelong curiosity and a love of books as well as the confidence to talk about them. Dr. Solinger presented a highly praised breakout session at the JASNA 2020 Virtual AGM on Anti-Historical Austen: From the History of England to Northanger Abbey.