Holiday Gatherings for JASNA Syracuse and JASNA Rochester

“Action Jane” is making her holiday preparations, and so are the Syracuse and Rochester Regions of JASNA! On consecutive Saturdays--December 7 and 14--each region will be hearing a presentation by a distinguished local JASNA member, and celebrating the Winter Solstice holidays and Jane Austen’s 238th birthday (on December 16).

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First, on Saturday, December 7, at 2:00 pm, the JASNA Syracuse Region and the Jane Austen Book Club-CNY will join forces on the third floor of the Colgate Bookstore (3 Utica St., Hamilton) to hear Deborah Knuth Klenck’s presentation “Performing to Strangers: Being, Seeming, and Courting in Pride and Prejudice.” Deborah is Professor of English at Colgate University and has taught there since 1978, providing an array of courses from Shakespeare to Restoration and Eighteenth Century to Survey of British Fiction and seminars on Jane Austen, Samuel Johnson, and other authors. She has also taught in the Women's Studies Program and the Liberal Arts Core Curriculum, and has directed the honors program in English. And she has published numerous papers in JASNA’s Persuasions and other journals, and has given presentations at JASNA’s Annual General Meeting, the Modern Language Association Convention, and other scholarly gatherings. Her December 7 presentation, in fact, will be the breakout session she was unable to give at this year’s JASNA AGM in Minneapolis because of injury--so she and we are eagerly looking forward to this!

For refreshments at the December 7 gathering, as reported earlier, we’re planning a cookie potluck: Each attendee is asked to bring a dozen or so cookies to share. If you haven’t got time to bake cookies personally, that’s OK--we’re not expecting either Lady Catherine de Bourgh or Martha Stewart to barge in and provide a critique. But if you come to “have your share of the conversation,” do bring a share of the cookies! Tea and lemonade will be provided for an early birthday toast to Jane Austen.

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The following Saturday, December 14, at 11:00 am, the JASNA Rochester Region will host its annual Jane Austen Birthday Lunch at the Chatterbox Club, 25 N. Goodman St., Rochester. The program will be a presentation by Nicola Minott-Ahl titled “Game Theorist or Gamester--Is Lydia Bennet the Real Heroine of Pride and Prejudice?” Nicola resides at the western end of the Syracuse Region but works in the Rochester Region: She is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, and is on the Steering Committee of the Media and Society Program, at Hobart & William Smith Colleges in Geneva. She teaches and writes on Nineteenth Century British Literature, and her interests include the Gothic, historical fiction, architecture and novels, and film adaptation of Nineteenth Century novels. She has published articles on William Thackeray, on the architectural novel in France and England, and in the fields of Film and Adaptation Studies; she also has a book forthcoming from Sussex Academic Press.

The birthday festivities will include lunch (featuring the Chatterbox Club’s traditional popovers), dessert, and the beloved toast to Jane Austen from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Janeites.” The cost for the program is $27 per person, and advance registration is required. More information and a registration form are available on the JASNA Rochester blog, at this link.