UPCOMING EVENTS
—2023—
January 28, 2023
Zoom Presentation by students of Dr. Jason Solinger, 18th Century scholar, University of Mississippi
11:00 AM-12:30 PM Pacific
Register here for free Zoom presentation
Join us in a special Zoom Presentation on January 28, 2023 at 11:00 AM Pacific as Dr. Jason Solinger, Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi and his students share 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.
February 11, 2023
IN-PERSON REGIONAL MEETING
Jane Austen Afterlives
Registration now open!
Link to register and pay online: JANE AUSTEN AFTERLIVES
PRESENTER BIOGRAPHIES:


All events are open to JASNA-SW members as well as non-members.
COVID Restrictions will continue to be in effect for our in-person meetings until May 2023. Our board made the decision to follow the CDC guidelines once we reopened our in-person events beginning in May 2022. We require vaccination and updated booster shots for those in attendance to our events. Some people are more likely than others to get very sick if they get COVID-19. This includes people who are older, are immunocompromised, have certain disabilities, or have underlying health conditions. We have board members, speakers, and JASNA members who are included in the above list. We seek to promote good health to all who wish to gather with us in our shared admiration of Jane Austen.
Registering for this event signifies acceptance of JASNA Southwest’s vaccination policy and Community Guidelines and acknowledgment that failure to comply will result in being barred from attendance without refund.
Want more to do after the event? The city of Whittier is full of history! Please investigate these opportunities early to make sure they are currently open. Some sites require advance notice. You can check out:
-The Whittier Museum — Whittier Museum (Open on Saturdays from 1-4 p.m.)
-The Pio Pico State Historic Park
-The Whittier Art Gallery — Whittier Art Association and Gallery (whittierartgallery.org)
-Historic Uptown Whittier — Whittier Uptown Association
|
Coverture and Marriage Law in Early America
Zoom Presentation by Dr. Catherine Allgor, President, Massachusetts Historical Society
11:00 AM-12:30 PM Pacific
Save the Date: March 4, 2023
11:00 am to 12:30 pm Pacific Time
for a Zoom presentation:
“Coverture and Marriage Law in Early America” by
Dr. Catherine Allgor
Coverture—a legal holdover from British colonial days—held that married women did not legally exist. During the American Revolution, with ideas of freedom, inalienable rights and Enlightenment everywhere, some women had hoped that this ancient oppression would be addressed. It was not, and the new nation began with coverture in place. It remains, like a ghost in our legal machine. Find out how coverture still haunts us and what we can do about it. The answer may surprise you!
As the president of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Catherine Allgor is a noted historian, non-profit leader, and public history innovator. Previously, she had been the Nadine and Robert Skotheim Director of Education at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, and a former Professor of History and UC Presidential Chair at the University of California, Riverside.
Allgor attended Mount Holyoke College as a Frances Perkins Scholar and received her Ph.D. with distinction from Yale University, where she also won the Yale Teaching Award. Her dissertation received a prize as the best dissertation in American History at Yale and The Lerner-Scott Prize for the Best Dissertation in U.S. Women’s History. She began her teaching career at Simmons College and has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a Visiting Professor of History at Harvard University.
Her first book, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (University Press of Virginia, 2000), won the James H. Broussard First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association Annual Book Award. Her political biography, A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (Henry Holt, 2006), was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. In 2012, she published Dolley Madison: The Problem of National Unity (Westview Press) and The Queen of America: Mary Cutts’s Life of Dolley Madison (University of Virginia Press).
President Obama appointed Allgor to a presidential commission, The James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation. Allgor also serves on boards and committees for the National Women’s History Museum, the Organization of American Historians, the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute, among others.
MISS AUSTEN GOES TO WASHINGTON: JANE AUSTEN AND POLITICS
In-Person Full-Day Event concluding with an optional tour: Mission Inn Hotel and Spa, Riverside
Featured speakers: Congressman Mark Takano (D-Riverside), former high school English teacher who launched a Jane Austen reading group on Capitol Hill; Dr. Danielle Spratt, Professor at Cal State Northridge on “Austen and the Politics of Resistance”; and Susan Straight, acclaimed author and Riverside native.
Riverside has many attractions for you to enjoy on your own, including the recently-opened Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture. A curated list of interesting activities will be made available.
To book your room at the Mission Inn Hotel and Spa, call the hotel’s reservation department at 800-843-7755 or 951-784-0300 and reference the Jane Austen Society Southwest Region.
Saif Islam (on recorded program) on his project to resurrect the lost art of Dhaka Muslin, the precious fabric popularized in the late 18th century created in and imported from what was then Bengal (now present-day Bangladesh)