UD Saturday Symposium Discussion
"Celebrating Mr. Dickens"
February 18, 10:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Gore Hall (room 103), University of Delaware
Morris Library, University of Delaware
Join UD alumni and friends for the 3rd Saturday Symposium in honor of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. The program will include faculty talks on Dickens and his world, a tour of two special exhibits on Dickens in the University Library, and a performance of Dickens’s most celebrated public reading, “Sikes and Nancy.”
Following coffee, participants will first hear Margaret D. Stetz, the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of Humanities, speak on “He wanted a wife and a family: Charles Dickens and Women.”
The second speaker will be Thomas Leitch, Professor of English and Director of the Film Studies Program, speak on “Dickens, Dickens, and Adaptation.”
Following the two morning sessions, a buffet lunch will be served. Participants will then visit the University Library and tour exhibits of rare books and Dickens memorabilia in Special Collections and in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection: "Dickens at 200: 1812–2012," exhibition in the Special Collections Gallery (Morris Library, 2nd floor) on view January 24 - June 8 and "Dickens and the Late Victorians," exhibition in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection (Morris Library 115A) on view January 24 - March 1.
The third talk of the day will be by Heidi Kaufman, Associate Professor of English and Jewish Studies, who will speak on “The Fagin Myth.”
Following Professor Kaufman’s talk and a break for coffee and tea, Iain Crawford, Acting Chair of English, will introduce Dickens’s public readings and a performance of “Sikes and Nancy” by Mic Matarrese from UD’s professional acting company, the Resident Ensemble Players (REP).
The Symposium will conclude at 4:30 p.m.
This Symposium has been made possible by the generous support of Mark Samuels Lasner and by the assistance of the University of Delaware Library.
Registration for first 25 full-time students and staff is free (lunch not included), space is limited and in order for students and staff reserve space, please contact the Department of English by phone at 302-831-2362 or by emailing nwarren@udel.edu.
Register now for this event
Margaret D. Stetz is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware, where she teaches courses on women and education, dress, and warfare, as well as on women's literature. She has published more than one hundred essays and reviews in scholarly journals and has been curator or co-curator of ten exhibitions related to late-Victorian print culture at galleries and museums. Among her recent books are Gender and the London Theatre, 1880-1920 (2004) and Facing the Late Victorians (2007).
Thomas Leitch is a Professor of English and Director of the Film Studies Program. Trained as a literary scholar at Columbia College and Yale University, he has taught courses in cinema studies for over twenty-five years. His most recent books are Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ and A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, coedited with Leland Poague. He is currently working on a book on Wikipedia.
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Heidi Kaufman is an Associate Professor of English and Jewish Studies at UD. Her research and publications focus on the intersection of 19th century literary culture and Jewish cultural studies. She is completing an edition of the first novel by an English Jew, Fiction Without Romance (1830), which was written by the East End writer, Maria Polack. Kaufman is also engaged in a study of how 19th century writing produced the infamous place known as “the East End.” This project examines well known East End texts, such as Oliver Twist, alongside lesser known print and material texts by East End residents.
Mic Matarrese is an actor in the UD Resident Ensemble Players (REP) and an undergraduate instructor. Mic’s recent roles include the Commandant in Way to Heaven, Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Reverend Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest, Sam Craig in Our Town, The Actor in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Happy in Death of a Salesman and Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He has appeared in regional theatres in roles such as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire at Artists Repertory Theater (Portland); Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment at the Chamber Theater; Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater; Talthibius in Trojan Women at Renaissance Theaterworks and Henry Albertson in The Fantasticks at the Skylight. PTTP audiences may remember Mic as of Vanya in Uncle Vanya, Andrew Undershaft in Major Barbara, Guildenstern in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and the title role in Tartuffe.
Iain Crawford, Acting Chair of English, is a Dickens scholar who was trained in the Victorian Studies program at the University of Leicester, England. He has published extensively on Dickens and his contemporaries and is currently working on a book-length study of Dickens’s relationship with Harriet Martineau.