Jane Austen and the Future of the Humanities

Of all Austen’s writings, Emma is the most concerned with the practice and difficulties of living in community. The novel is set in Highbury, “the large and populous village, almost amounting to a town,” and the heroine, whose perspective we follow throughout the narrative, lives both a privileged life and a rather static life. The community of Highbury can appear small, contained, and content, but it’s also a community marked by challenges, changes, and even a few disruptions. In this episode, we consider a vital humanities experience that Austen's Emma helps us to appreciate: the challenges of living in community.
Episode 7 features parts of my interviews with various writers, scholars, and artists, including (in order of appearance):

Dr. John Mullan, University College, London
Dr. Janet Todd, Newnham and Lucy Canvedish Colleges, Cambridge
Mahesh Rao, award-winning author of Polite Society
Dr. Claudia L. Johnson, Princeton University
Sam Brooks, Journalist and Playwright, Auckland, NZ
Dr. Jennie Batchelor, University of York
Dr. Julia Romeu, Brazilian scholar and translator of Emma
Laura Rocklyn, historical interpreter, playwright, actor, and scholar
Dr. Devoney Looser, Arizona State University
Dr. Patricia A. Matthew, The Race and Regency Lab, Montclair State University
Vanessa Kelly, best-selling author of The Emma Knightley Mysteries
Dr. Vivek Sachdeva, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University

In this special episode of Jane Austen and the Future of the Humanities, Samantha Holland speaks about the Moore family, an Australia family with a longstanding affinity for Jane Austen. Frances, Natalie, Hannah, and Teresa are four women across three generations, who share a special relationship with Austen, her works, and her legacy. Through their conversations about characters like Mrs. Bennet and Charlotte Lucas, the Moore women share how their perspectives on Austen’s novels have evolved through re-readings and meaningful family discussions. They discuss how they built a supportive and loving community with and through their engagement with Austen, including sewing dresses for the Jane Austen Society of Australia conference. Their experiences reveal how Austen brings women together across generations and serves as a resource for female relationships and sisterhood.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Resiliency has become one of the most popular concepts within academic circles over the past decade or so. Scholars from various disciplines, including Engineering, Health, Politics, Religion, Biology, and Education have adopted the ideas of resilience and resiliency to explain the ways in which institutions, technologies, communities, and individuals might rebound from hardship, recover from stress or overuse, and regain an original shape and condition. In our diverse conversations about resilience, we almost always assume that resilience is positive--i.e. that we should feel good or emboldened about the very experiences or processes of resiliency. But some of the most resilient systems, structures, and institutions in our world have been massively disturbing, including patriarchy, militaristic violence, religious fanaticism, and white male supremacy. Jane Austen's Mansfield Park helps us observe a fundamental humanities experience: resilience can be disturbing. In this episode, I reflect on how Austen's Mansfield Park demonstrates the disturbing resilience of the Bertram family. I specifically explore how the Bertram family employs specific strategies that have proven successful for ensuring the resilience of patriarchy. Resiliency can sometimes be disturbing, and Austen invites us to observe this vital humanities experience.

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is one of the most beloved novels in the English language--and one of the most popular love stories in the world. It is also a great story of change in which Austen details prominent cultural changes, characters discuss important changes, and the hero and heroine learn to change their minds. Change can be hard, transformative, and frustrating; it can also usher in new opportunities, including new kinds of relationships. Austen shows us characters and communities learning to deal with change, engaging in challenging conversations, and even modeling forms of civil discourse. Austen's novel demonstrates a vital humanities experience from which we must learn in an age of cultural extremism: how to embrace, discuss, and negotiate the challenges of inevitable change through civil discourse.

In Episode IV of Jane Austen and the Future of the Humanities, I talk with writers, scholars, and artists as we discuss how Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility models a vital humanities experience: the messiness of human relationships. We think through how Austen’s first published novel helps us to ask questions about, build connections between, and precisely observe the various messes of our lives, including our family relations, our sexual relations, and the processes of engaging with new relations.

Guests include Soniah Kamal, Dr. Claudia L. Johnson, Francine Mathews, Dr. Olivia Murphy, Maan Jalal, Dr. Mandakini Dubey, and Dr. Meenakshi Bharat.