
John Kessel discussed his book Pride and Prometheus, a mashup of Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein.

Anne Mellor and Victoria Shorr

Jane Boltz and Melissa Buell

The Chapman Library put together a display of materials from Austen and Shelley specially for our event.

A book signing followed the event.

The day also included a white elephant sale.



September 2019

Jane Austen Meets Mary Shelley
September 14, 2019
Chapman University
Speakers:
John Kessel — Mary, Jane and Me
Anne Mellor — Mothering Monsters: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Genetic Engineering
Victoria Shorr — The Midnight Moment
Highlights
Presenters
John Kessel is the author of the novels Pride and Prometheus, The Moon and the Other, Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice and, in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly, Freedom Beach. His short story collections are Meeting in Infinity (a New York Times Notable Book), The Pure Product and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories.
Kessel’s stories have twice received the Nebula Award given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, in addition to the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the Locus Poll, the James Tiptree Jr. Award. His play Faustfeathers won the Paul Green Playwright’s Prize, and his story “A Clean Escape” was adapted as an episode of the ABC TV series Masters of Science Fiction. In 2009 his story “Pride and Prometheus” received both the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award.
With Jim Kelly, he has edited five anthologies of stories re-visioning contemporary short sf, most recently Digital Rapture: The Singuarity Anthology.
Kessel holds a BA in Physics and English and a PhD in American Literature. He helped found and served as the first director of the MFA program in creative writing at North Carolina State University, where he has taught since 1982. He lives and works in Raleigh, N.C., with his wife, author Therese Anne Fowler.
Anne K. Mellor is a Emeritus Distinguished Research Professor of English and Women’s Studies at UCLA and the author of books on Mary Shelley, Romantic women writers (including Jane Austen), William Blake and many other British Romantic poets. Her book Mothers of the Nation – Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780-1830 (2000) argues that women writers were instrumental in shaping public opinion during the Romantic era. She is the author of Blake’s Human Form Divine (1974), English Romantic Irony (1980), Mary Shelley: Her Fiction, Her Life, Her Monsters (1988) and Romanticism and Gender (1993). She edited the first collection of feminist essays on Romantic writing, Romanticism and Feminism (1988), and is the co-editor of an anthology of canon-transforming Romantic writing, British Literature 1780-1830, as well as of The Other Mary Shelley (1993) and Passionate Encounters in a Time of Sensibility (2000).
In 1999 she received the Keats-Shelley Association Distinguished Scholar Award; she has been the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships, three National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Seminar for College Teachers Directorships, and American Council of Learned Societies, NEH, Rockefeller and Australian National University Fellowships in the Humanities. She received the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award in 2002 and was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the English Association in 2004.
She earned her BA summa cum laude from Brown University and her MA and PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.