Goucher Names 2009-2010 Jane Austen Scholar-in-Residence

Release date: May 06, 2009 |

Juliette Wells, a prominent Jane Austen scholar and associate professor of English literature at Manhattanville College, has been named Goucher College’s Burke Jane Austen Scholar-in-Residence for 2009-2010.

As Goucher College’s Burke Scholar-in-Residence, Wells has been awarded a weeklong research residency in February 2010 that will allow her to use the Julia Rogers Library’s extensive Jane Austen collection, which includes translations, critical studies, audiovisual materials, and literature about Austen’s life and times, as well as first and early editions of the author’s novels.

On Wednesday, February 17, Wells will give a lecture titled "For the Love of Jane Austen," during which she will discuss why present-day Austen fans so often choose to feature the author in their fiction and nonfiction writing. The lecture will be held at 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

Wells has written many scholarly articles about Jane Austen, which have been published in The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club, A Breath of Fresh Eyre: Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre, Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, and other books. She has received numerous grants, fellowships, and academic honors from institutions such as New York University, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale Center for British Art, and Manhattanville College. This summer Wells will complete a fellowship with the Jane Austen Society of North America's International Visitor Program, which supports research at Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton, U.K. 

She is a member of the Modern Language Associate, Northeast Modern Language Association, North American British Music Studies Association, British Women Writers Association, Jane Austen Society of North America, and the Brontë Society. In addition, Wells is working on a book titled Everybody’s Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination.

Goucher established the biennial Burke Jane Austen Scholar-in-Residence program in 2000 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the collection’s donation by Alberta Hirshheimer Burke, a Goucher alumna of the Class of 1928. A special feature in the collection is Alberta Burke’s own notebooks of Austen-related memorabilia and correspondence with Austen collectors and scholars.