Join Thursday, January 30 immediately following the performance for our Scholar Social featuring Arianne Chernock and Deidre Shauna Lynch.

Boston University professor of history, Arianne Chernock, and Harvard University professor of english, Deidre Shauna Lynch, will discuss Thackeray’s novel, Vanity Fair, in its many contexts. We will explore its place in the literary canon and its place in history from the perspective of a 21st century audience. After a response to the play from each scholar, conversation will open to the audience.

Arianne Chernock’s research focuses on modern British and European history, with an emphasis on gender, culture, politics, and the monarchy. Her first book, Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism (Stanford University Press, 2010), examined the forgotten but foundational contributions of men to the creation of the “rights of women” in Enlightenment Britain. The book won the 2011 John Ben Snow Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies. Articles based on this project have appeared in the Journal of British Studies, Enlightenment and Dissent, and the edited collection Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Palgrave, 2005). Her second book, The Right to Rule and the Rights of Women: Queen Victoria and the Women’s Movement, has just been published with Cambridge University Press. The book explores women’s rights campaigners’ engagement with Queen Victoria – and the backlash that their engagement precipitated. Material from this project has been published in Victorian Studies, Romantic Circles Praxis Series, and in the edited collection Engendering Women’s History: A Global Project (NYU Press, 2013). In her capacity as a historian of monarchy, Chernock has published numerous opinion pieces and editorials, and provides frequent commentary to a range of print, radio and television outlets. She is a regular contributor to WBUR’s Cognoscenti.

Chernock’s research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, Phi Beta Kappa, Huntington Library, the Humanities Foundation at Boston University, and the American Philosophical Society.

Deidre Shauna Lynch was educated at the University of British Columbia in Canada and at Stanford University, where she took her Ph.D. Formerly Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, she joined the faculty of Harvard University in 2014; she is now Ernest Bernbaum Professor of English Literature at Harvard. She has published widely on the literature and culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, the theory and history of the novel, and the history of books and reading.

Join us for a conversation with Salem State University professor of English Jude V. Nixon and Tufts University professor of English Joseph Litvak on the bridge between the relevance of Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair at its publication in the 19th century and the relevance of Kate Hamill’s stage adaptation to audiences of today. No knowledge of the play or novel will be necessary to enjoy this event!

Jude V. Nixon is Professor of English at Salem State University, habilitated professor in the Polish Academy. His areas of teaching and research are Victorian literature and culture, and Caribbean literature. He has published extensively on the Victorians, especially on Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Henry Newman, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens, appearing in journals such as Victorian Poetry, Victorian Studies, the Carlyle Studies Annual, the Dickens Studies Annual, Times Literary Supplement, the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Texas Study in Literature and Language, Modern Philology, and the Hopkins Quarterly. Author/Editor of four book on Hopkins, and on Victorian science, culture, and religion, Professor Nixon is editor of the Sermons and Spiritual Writings (Oxford 2018). His recent publication, “‘English affairs and Norse’: Carlyle’s Igdrasil, Norse Mythology, and the Myth of British Racial Ancestry,” appeared in the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies (2018). Professor Nixon servers on several editorial boards, among them Victorian Poetry, The Hopkins Quarterly, the Dickens Studies Annual, MIND (Poland), Merope (Italy), and AngloSophia – Studies in English Literature and Culture (Italy).

Joseph Litvak is Professor of English at Tufts University, where he teaches courses on Victorian literature, as well as on literary theory and on contemporary popular culture. He has published books on theatricality in the nineteenth-century English novel, on sophistication, and on the Hollywood blacklist. He is currently writing a book on comedy and terror. He is also a translator, and the works he has translated include two comedies by the French philosopher and playwright Alain Badiou.

Join us for a talkback with the cast and creative team of “Vanity Fair”.

Join us  on  Sunday, February 9 at 1pm for a conversation with Boston University professor of English Joseph Rezek and Vanity Fair director David R. Gammons as we compare Thackeray’s novel, Vanity Fair, with Kate Hamill’s stage adaptation, discussing how each medium informs the other. No knowledge of the play or novel will be necessary to enjoy this event!

David R. Gammons (Director and Scenic Designer, Vanity Fair) is a director, designer, visual artist, and theatre educator. He is thrilled to return to Central Square Theatre, having directed last season’s Frankenstein. David is an Associate Professor at The Boston Conservatory at Berklee and is on the Theatre Arts faculty of MIT. Recent directing projects include The Bald Soprano at the Boston Conservatory and Macbeth for Commonwealth Shakespeare. He has also directed Edward II, The Comedy of Errors, Medea, The Hotel Nepenthe, The Duchess of Malfi, and Titus Andronicus for Actors’ Shakespeare Project; and the New England premieres of Hand to God, Necessary Monsters, The Whale, The Motherfucker with the Hat, Red, and Blackbird at SpeakEasy Stage Company. He helmed the world premieres of The Farm by Walt McGough and The Salt Girl by John Kuntz at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, and the New England premieres of Cherry Docs, The Lieutenant of Inishmore and My Name is Rachel Corrie at The New Rep. His work has garnered numerous awards, including the 2007 and 2017 Elliot Norton Awards for Outstanding Director and the 2012 and 2013 Elliot Norton Awards for Outstanding Production. David is a graduate of the Directing Program of the ART Institute at Harvard and of the Visual and Environmental Studies Department of Harvard University. For more information, please visit davidrgammons.com.

Joseph Rezek is Associate Professor of English at Boston University, where he specializes in transatlantic literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is the author of London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800-1850 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). He teaches Thackeray’s Vanity Fair annually in a survey course on modern British literature. @RezekJoe jrezek@bu.edu 

Join us Tuesday, September 17th for the official press opening party for The Crucible held at La Fabrica.

La Fabrica
450 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139