Last year, as George Floyd’s murder sparked a racial reckoning around the globe, the public humanities collaborative Jane Austen & Co. sponsored “Race & the Regency,” a series of nine Zoom talks examining Austen’s life, times, and influence through the prism of race.
Now the same organization, a partnership between the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Jane Austen Summer Program and the Chapel Hill Public Library, has announced another fascinating look at Austen and her times from an underexplored angle: “Asia & the Regency,” a series of ten lectures starting on November 18 and continuing through next April.
Only the first three programs have been announced, covering Austen’s influence on Japanese literature, the impact of the Indian textile trade on Regency fashion, and the eighteenth-century writer Horace Walpole’s fictionalized portrayal of China. Later talks will cover nineteenth-century Indian women writers and Bollywood adaptations of Austen, according to an emailed announcement about the series.
You have to register to get the Zoom link, but the talks are free. New insights into Austen’s global connections are, of course, priceless.