Call for Papers | The Global Jane Austen: Celebrating and Commemorating 250 years of Jane Austen Event

Conference details

Austen scholars are invited to the University of Southampton for a conference commemorating Austen's birth in the year 1775.  

In 1976, Juliet McMaster introduced an edited collection of essays resulting from a bicentenary birthday celebration for Austen in the following terms:

To celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth in October, in Western Canada, is no doubt to be guilty of a comic incongruity. But as though to compensate for the misdemeanor, the papers delivered at the conference have a common and exact focus on period and locale.

50 years after the bicentenary conference at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, the scholarly landscape of Austen studies has changed. Where many monographs and edited collections of essays still maintain an ‘exact focus on period and locale’, research informed by book history, the material, archival and linguistic turns in literary criticism, postcolonial studies and adaptation theory (among others) has flourished in the intervening decades. The ever-expanding corpus of adaptations, sequels and prequels has proven fruitful territory for a consideration of Austen’s reception, in its broadest sense. Austen’s transformations into other languages and into other cultures make her a Global author.

We invite the international community to the port city that was Jane Austen’s home from 1806-1809 for a consideration of the Global Jane Austen.

We encourage the broadest possible interpretation of the conference theme, and welcome papers on all aspects of Austen’s writing and life, her posthumous reception, her influences, and her writing alongside that of her contemporaries. We particularly welcome papers on adaptations, translations and creative responses to Austen’s work (written and/or performed in all languages), material and textual transmission of her works, and her reception and reputation in countries outside the Anglophone world. Discussion of the Global within her works (and those of her contemporaries) is equally acceptable.

Application information

We are currently accepting abstracts for individual papers (250 words), or proposals for 3-person panels (1000 words).

To apply, please email your proposal or abstract to Gillian Dow and Katie Halsey . Applications should be sent as either Word or PDF documents.

We have a small amount of funding available to support postgraduate, Early Career Scholars, scholars with no institutional support, and scholars from outside the Anglophone world. Please note on your abstract if you fall into one of these categories, and would like to be considered for such funding.

Additional information

The conference is co-organised by the Universities of Southampton and the University of Stirling. It is kindly supported by the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS) and the Society of the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP)