If you are sad that there won't be an in-person JASP in June 2024, then this post is for you!
Mark your calendars: Our next JASP will be June 19-22, 2025 in Chapel Hill, NC. Registration will open on Jane Austen's birthday: December 16, 2024. This will be a big birthday bash celebrating Austen's 250th year and the reading will be Austen's first published book: Sense and Sensibility. The topic will be "The Birth of a Novel: Domesticity, Imagination, and Food for Thought." Just as there is an actual birth that takes place in Sense and Sensibility, the novel itself celebrates Austen's birth as a professional, published author. We will look at transAtlantic notions of authorship, domestic life, and food, and consider what stirred Austen's imagination to write.
In 2026, we plan to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with another transAtlantic JASP. This one will take place (fittingly) in a revolutionary location TBA.
The topic will be "Revolution and the Pursuit of Happiness in Pride and Prejudice." Returning to Austen's most popular novel, we will explore its revolutionary nature and its position in relation to historical revolutions in the United States and France. In addition, we will try to understand Austen's own take on the marriage plot.