Plenary Speakers
Juliet McMaster
At the last JASNA AGM on the juvenilia, back in 1987, Juliet McMaster conceived the idea of making a picture book for children out of Jane Austen’s youthful story The Beautifull Cassandra – turning the characters into small animals, à la Beatrix Potter. Working closely on a youthful work, she discovered, provides a special window on an author’s development. So why not introduce the idea to students? And so she founded the Juvenilia Press, specialized to publishing scholarly editions of authors’ early works, always with student participation in the editing process. The Press hos now published many volumes by youthful authors (especially Jane Austen!), and students round the world have benefited from the experience. It’s a special extra pleasure for Juliet that she illustrates a number of them.
No surprise, then, that Juliet’s latest book is Jane Austen, Young Author, devoted to the juvenilia. She has also published Jane Austen on Love and Jane Austen the Novelist, as well as books on Thackeray, Trollope, Dickens, and the eighteenth-century novel; and she is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, and The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf. A speaker at many an AGM, Juliet is well known to JASNA members. She is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta.
Peter Sabor
Peter Sabor, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is Professor of English and Canada Research Chair at McGill University, Montreal, where he is also Director of the Burney Centre.
He is a past president of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and of the Northeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and a Life Member of JASNA. He was coordinator of the 1998 JASNA conference in Quebec City and has been a speaker at several JASNA conferences, including those in Lake Louise (1993), San Francisco (1997), Boston (2000), Philadelphia (2009), Fort Worth (2011), Montreal (2015) and Huntington Beach (2017). From 2016 to 2018, he was JASNA’s Traveling Lecturer for the Eastern Zone. His publications on Jane Austen include an edition of her early writings, Juvenilia (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Manuscript Works, co-edited with Linda Bree and Janet Todd (Broadview, 2013), and The Cambridge Companion to Emma (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is also the Principal Investigator for Reading with Austen, a digital recreation of Godmersham Park Library: www.readingwithausten.com.
Kathryn Sutherland
Kathryn Sutherland's publications include Jane Austen: Teenage Writings from Oxford University Press (2017), and the introduction to the 2014 In Her Own Hand: Volume the First, Volume the Second, Volume the Third. facsimile edition of Austen's juvenilia.
Sutherland is Emeritus Professor, St Anne's College, University of Oxford, as well as a member of the Advisory Board for the British Library's 'Discovering Literature' project. She chairs the Advisory Board of the Arts & Humanities Research Council/British Library Academic Book of the Future Project http://academicbookfuture.org/
She is a trustee of Jane
Austen's House Museum.
"So do I, only I get tired of it before it is finished."
Catharine, or the Bower