Our Other Programs
Team
Sarah Marsh
DIRECTOR
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Sarah Marsh is Associate Professor of English at Seton Hill University. Her book, Novel Constitutions and the Making of Race: A Literary and Legal History of Slavery in the Anglophone Atlantic, 1688 - 1818, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Sarah has been involved in JASP since its very first year and is delighted to welcome all of our JASP Janeites to Pennsylvania!
Eric Bontempo
DIRECTOR
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Eric Bontempo is an Assistant Professor of English at Abilene Christian University. He received a PhD in English & Comparative Literature in 2023 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he began volunteering with the Jane Austen Summer Program. His work has appeared in Essays in Romanticism and the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Writing.
Breckyn Wood
DIRECTOR
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In addition to serving as a co-director of JASP, Breckyn is the host and producer of Austen Chat, the official podcast of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA). She has presented her research on Austen and linguistics at JASP 2023 and at JASNA's Annual General Meeting in 2024.
Emma Zuder
PROGRAM ASSISTANT
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​Emma is presently the assistant to the Setonian Education Research Program and an adjunct professor of English at Seton Hill University Emma's research is centered on mind and body, gender, and Romanticism in the long eighteenth century. Emma has previously presented at JASP, and currently assists with the blog and now––the JASP 2026 program. As a longtime Janeite and Seton Hill alum, Emma is thrilled for JASP to be hosted at her alma mater!
Maizie Ferguson
REGISTRAR
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Now in her second year as JASP registrar, Maizie finds herself an English Master's student and graduate teaching assistant at the University of Kansas. As a burgeoning scholar, she is most intrigued by British literature of the long 18th century––with emphasis on Jane Austen. In March, she presented on the mimetic significance of letters in Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion at the 2025 Northeast MLA conference.
Heather King
ADAPTATIONS PANEL CHAIR
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Heather King is a professor of English at the University of Redlands in Southern California. Her courses include classes on both Austen and Shakespeare in Adaptation, as well as Eighteenth-Century Literature.
Sheila Gross
CONTEXT CORNER COORDINATOR
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Bio coming soon!
Delicia Johnson
HEAD OF PUBLICITY
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Delicia Johnson is a library assistant in Orlando, Florida. She has a general interest in the long-eighteenth century with a focus on women's writing, female education, and Romanticism. Besides her work with JASP, she is also the lead administrator for the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation.
Featured Presenters
PLENARY
Anne Fertig
Anne Fertig is a literary historian and a passionate public humanist specializing in eighteenth century women’s writing. Known best for her work with the Jane Austen Summer Program, Dr. Fertig co-founded the webseries Jane Austen & Co. in 2019. She is also the writer and host of Finding Jane Austen, a Goodpods Top 100 Books podcast. She currently works in the museum field in Washington, DC.​
PLENARY
Michael Kramp
Michael Kramp is Professor of English at Lehigh University. He is the author of Disciplining Love: Austen and the Modern Man (2007) and Patriarchy's Creative Resilience (2024), and editor of Jane Austen and Masculinity (2017) and Jane Austen and Critical Theory (2021). He is currently working on a long-term, public-facing project, Jane Austen and the Future of the Humanities.
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PLENARY
Juliette Wells
Juliette Wells, Professor of Literary Studies at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, was guest curator of the blockbuster 2025 exhibition A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250 for the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. She is the author of three histories of Austen’s readers and fans, all published by Bloomsbury Academic: A New Jane Austen: How Americans Brought Us the World’s Greatest Novelist (2023), Reading Austen in America (2017), and Everybody’s Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination (2011). For Penguin Classics, she created reader-friendly annotated editions of Mansfield Park (2025), Emma (2015), and Persuasion (2017).
PLENARY
Maria Frawley
Maria Frawley is a Professor of English at the George Washington University, where she teaches courses on Jane Austen, nineteenth-century literature, and the history of the novel. She co-edited the Routledge Companion to Jane Austen and is the author most recently of Jane Austen in 50 Words (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025).
DANCE MASTER
Jeremy Gershman
Jeremy Gershman "Mr. Charles Steplively" has been providing his unique manner of Country Dance instruction, whilst delighting audiences with his scintillating humor, for over a dozen years. Engagements have included leading 18th and 19th century dancing at historic locations such as Battersea in Petersburg, VA, Patrick Henry’s Scotchtown and the Kershaw-Cornwallis House in Camden, SC. Mr. Steplively is the incumbent Dancemaster for the Regency Society of Virginia.
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MASTER OF THE KING'S MUSIC
Mark A. Boyle
Dr. Mark A. Boyle, Director of Choral and Vocal Activities at Seton Hill University and Director of Music Ministries at St. Paul’s UMC, is a highly active guest conductor, poet, and composer. He frequently conducts festivals at the county, district, region, and all-state levels, and is a regular guest conductor for the Ocean Grove Choral Festival. As a poet, his texts have been set to music by esteemed composers including Joseph Gregorio, Ellen Gilson Voth, Melissa Dunphy, Marques L. A. Garrett, Hyun Kook, and Peter de Mets. He lives in Western Pennsylvania with his wife, Jane, and son, Patrick.
JASP TEACHER COORDINATOR
Ashley Honaker
Ashley Honaker holds Bachelor’s degrees in English and History and a Master of Arts in Teaching from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has taught high school English in North Carolina’s public school system for thirteen years. A longtime admirer of Jane Austen, she is an active participant in the Jane Austen Summer Program and works with the program’s initiatives for teachers.
ADAPTATIONS PANELIST
Linda Troost
Linda Troost is a professor of English at Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in British literature, Jane Austen, fantasy literature, and professional writing. She edited the six-volume series Eighteenth-Century Women: Studies in their Lives, Work, and Culture and co-edited Jane Austen in Hollywood. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of London’s Institute of English Studies, and the University of Southampton in England, and serves on the advisory boards of Adaptation, a scholarly journal published by Oxford University Press; The 18th-Century Commons, a public humanities website funded by the NEH; and Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture, a book series published by Routledge.
ADAPTATIONS PANELIST
Sayre Greenfield
Sayre Greenfield is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where he teaches courses in early British literature, the history of the English language, Jane Austen, fantasy literature, and digital studies. He is the author of The Ends of Allegory, co-editor of Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, and co-editor of Jane Austen in Hollywood, the book that established the field of Austen adaptation studies. He has won many awards for his teaching and scholarship as well as received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of London’s Institute of English Studies, and the University of Southampton-Chawton House Library.