Plenary Speakers

Reflecting the breadth of the literary, cultural, and political influences on Jane Austen and her work, the 2024 AGM will feature five eminent plenary speakers.

Amanda Vickery

Carole Medine Moss Keynote Lecturer

Was Austen Political?

“Growing up in a matriarchal mill town, where wives historically worked out of the house as well as in, fostered my love of social and economic history and fascination with the warp and woof of work and family, power and emotion.”


Dr. Amanda Vickery is professor of early modern history at Queen Mary, University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is a historian, radio and television presenter, and author. Among her many publications are the widely acclaimed The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (winner of the Whitfield prize, the Wolfson prize, and the Longman-History Today prize, Yale University Press, 1998) and Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (Yale University Press, 2009). Her television productions include At Home with the Georgians (2010), and The Many Lovers of Jane Austen (2011), which included footage from JASNA’s 2011 AGM in Fort Worth, Texas. As a plenary speaker at the Louisville AGM in 2015, Professor Vickery spoke about the plight of single women in Georgian Britain. She has wide interests in the history of British society and culture, including women’s history, love and power, house and home, and consumerism and fashion. Her latest research project is “What Women Wanted: Women’s Hopes in Britain, 1945-c.1970.” She is a regular commentator and reviewer for BBC Radio 4, BBC2, Channel 4, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement.

Peter Sabor

2024 JASNA North American Scholar

“The capital pen of a sister author”: Reading Frances Burney with Jane Austen

Dr. 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. A Life Member of JASNA, he has been a speaker at many JASNA conferences. From 2016 to 2018, he was JASNA’s Traveling Lecturer for the Eastern Zone. His publications include Jane Austen’s Juvenilia (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jane Austen’s Manuscript Works, co-edited with Linda Bree and Janet Todd (Broadview, 2013); and The Cambridge Companion to Emma (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He has also published extensively on Frances Burney, Samuel Richardson, and Horace Walpole. He is the Principal Investigator for Reading with Austen, a digital recreation of Godmersham Park Library: www.readingwithausten.com.

Patricia A. Matthew

"I should infinitely prefer a book": Some Thoughts on Reading Austen for Others

Photo courtesy of Joel Elliott at the
National Humanities Center

Dr. Patricia A. Matthew is associate professor of English at Montclair State University, specializing in British Romanticism, the history of the novel, abolitionist literature, and women's writing. She co-edits the Oxford University Press series Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture and is editing Mansfield Park for W. W. Norton's Norton Library Series. She is also currently writing a book about sugar, gender, and British abolitionist culture.

Her research has been published in Women’s Writing, the Keats-Shelley Journal, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. She has written about race, the Regency, and popular culture for The Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Times Literary Supplement, and Slate. She edited Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) as well as special issues of several academic journals.

Thomas Keymer

Jane Austen and the Jurassic

Dr. Thomas Keymer is the author of Jane Austen: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2022) and Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics (OUP, 2020). He is the Chancellor Henry N.R. Jackman University Professor of English at the University of Toronto and directs the university’s Graduate Program in Book History & Print Culture. He is a Supernumerary Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Royal Historical Society, and the English Association. His research and teaching center on Restoration, eighteenth-century, and Romantic-era British and Irish literature. His ongoing editorial projects include The Oxford Handbook of Henry Fielding and The Cambridge Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, as well as contributions to several edited volumes.

Susan Allen Ford

"So Potent and So Stimulative": Jane Austen's Reading

Dr. Susan Allen Ford is Editor of JASNA’s journals Persuasions and Persuasions On-Line and is Professor of English Emerita at Delta State University. She has spoken at many AGMs and to many JASNA Regions and has published essays on Austen and her contemporaries, gothic and detective fiction, and Shakespeare. She was a plenary speaker at the 2016 AGM in Washington, D.C., and has served as a JASNA Traveling Lecturer. Her book, What Jane Austen’s Characters Read and Why, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2024.