Call For Papers

Jane lies in Winchester, blessed be her shade!
Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made.
And, while the stones of Winchester—or Milsom Street—remain,
Glory, Love, and Honour unto England’s Jane!

Rudyard Kipling, “Jane’s Marriage,” 1924

The Southwest Region of the Jane Austen Society of North America looks forward to receiving breakout proposals for the Annual General Meeting, “Jane Austen in Paradise: Intimations of Immortality,” commemorating the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, which occurred on July 18, 1817.  The aim of these proposals should be to celebrate two hundred years of her unique and profound contribution to the culture and literature of not only her native England, but the world.

When Rudyard Kipling penned his poem excerpted above, England was honoring the Centennial of Jane Austen’s death.  Now, nearly one hundred years later, we reflect on Jane’s “afterlife” again, this time considering her impact on readers, writers, academics, and artists in the years since her death, how she has been adopted, adapted, idolized, denigrated, re-interpreted, used, and refashioned.  The committee welcomes a wide range of breakout topics considering the academic, artistic, historical, and social influences of her novels over the past two hundred years.  The following questions are intended to spur your imagination to think about Jane Austen’s immortal influence:

Academic: How has Jane Austen (both the author and the woman) lived on in the academic world?  How have her innovations in character, plot, and narrative style transformed the literary landscape?  What are innovative ways in which the novels are taught to all ages and in which they might be taught in the future?  How is it that the original words and ideas in Jane Austen’s novels still ring true and find an audience in the twenty-first century?

Artistic: How have Jane Austen’s novels inspired subsequent writers, filmmakers, and artists?  How have contemporary remakes and reinventions introduced Jane Austen’s novels to new generations?  How have new forms of media reimagined Jane Austen’s novels, their plots, characters, and themes?  How might emerging forms of media interpret the novels in the future?

Historical: How has what we know (or don’t know) about Jane Austen’s life (her letters, her biography, the world in which she lived, her family legacy) influenced the way we read her novels, and/or the way we understand the messages we find within her novels?  How might that have changed as we come to understand history in different ways and as new information about her life and world is discovered?

Social: How has the idea of Jane Austen—the nineteenth-century woman writer—influenced social movements (such as the Janeites during the first World War, the suffragettes at the turn of the twentieth century, and feminist scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries)?  How has the continuing Jane Austen commercial industry influenced the way we see and read the novels?

AGM audiences enjoy speakers who present new and thoughtful insights in clear, compelling, and lively language; we encourage speakers to talk with rather than read to the audience, and we encourage sessions that offer a balanced combination of lecture and media.  Breakout speakers should plan presentations of no more than 40 minutes in length, in order to accommodate at least 10 minutes questions/answers.

Your one-page proposal should include an abstract of your presentation, including a description of its format.  If you anticipate using AV equipment, please specify what kind of equipment and explain why it is essential.  (AV will be available for those presentations that rely on sound and/or images and must be reserved in advance.)

Along with your proposal, please submit a separate cover letter with your name, affiliation (if any), mail, and email addresses, telephone numbers, and a brief biography. Please also identify any former AGMs you have addressed. Electronic submissions in Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat PDF files are preferred.  The deadline for submissions has been extended to November 14, 2016.  Submissions should be sent to Dr. Lynda A. Hall at lhall@chapman.edu or

Dr. Lynda A. Hall
Department of English
Chapman University
1 University Drive
Orange, CA 92866
(714) 325-2429