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RELEASED: Oct. 30, 2003
DANVILLE, KY—The Centre College English program will present a free lecture titled "Jane Austen's Mafia" by special guest Mary Ann O'Farrell on Nov. 5 at 7 p.m. in the Norton Center Board Room on campus. The talk is part of this 2003-2004 Centre College Reading Series.
O'Farrell will delineate the ways in which the manners and mores of Austen's England mirror those of modern day Mafiosi.
Helen Emmitt, associate professor of English at Centre, comments, "Mary Ann O'Farrell's work on the way that Victorian authors use such seemingly trivial ideas as the blush changed the way I taught Dickens and Bronte. Her work on manners in Jane Austen will no doubt make everyone present rethink their way of looking at both Austen and the modern gangster movie."
Currently an associate professor of English at Texas A&M University, O'Farrell's areas of interest include nineteenth-century British literature, the novel, history and discourses of the body, literary and cultural theory, and popular culture. Her current research involves the persistence of manners as objects of literary and cultural attention.
O'Farrell earned a B.A. degree in English from New York University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley.
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