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.