Join JASNA St. Louis on Saturday, April 30, for a special presentation by professor and author Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, who will discuss “Sanditon, Bridgerton, and David Copperfield: Modernizing the Representation of Black People in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century England.”
Gerzina is presenter of the 2017 BBC Radio 4 series Britain’s Black Past. In this radio series and her 2020 book of essays, Gerzina offers further stories and analyses through the lens of a recovered past, bringing to light hidden people, places, and narratives. She has published nine books, including Black London: Life Before Emancipation and Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved out of Slavery and into Legend. She has been a tenured professor at Vassar College, Barnard College, Dartmouth College, and now the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is the Paul Murray Kendall Professor of Biography and Professor of English. She has appeared extensively on both British and American radio and is currently working on a book about early Black women who married British men.
Learn more about Gerzina at https://gretchengerzina.com/gretchen-gerzina-press-media.html.
This presentation has been made possible by the 2022 North American Friends of Chawton House speaker subscription series, which helps small book clubs or regional literary groups access the type of global expertise that, pre-Zoom, was out of reach due to prohibitive travel costs for speakers. The 2022 speakers will waive their usual honoraria for clubs or groups with a NAFCH subscription in order to raise awareness for Chawton House. All talks connect to the two-pronged mission of Chawton House: to preserve both a historic Austen-family site and the unique legacy of early women writers housed there. All funds raised with these NAFCH subscriptions goes straight to Chawton House in support of their mission.
