Reading: Thursday, October 9, 2025 • 7:30 pm • Green Drawing Room, Main Building
Mary Favret is Professor of English at John Hopkins University. Professor Favret has been teaching literature for over 30 years to undergraduate, graduate and continuing education students. Her research often considers how experiences that seem distant or beyond our grasp nevertheless penetrate our everyday life and shape our felt reality. A scholar of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, she has studied how the disruptions of political revolution inflect the exchange of private letters (Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters) and how distant warfare filters into the rhythms of home (War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime). This work is interdisciplinary, drawing on literature, feminist and political theory, history, and visual culture. She has written extensively on Jane Austen’s fiction, its reception history, and its translation into film and TV. Currently she is delving into an untold story within the history of reading: the circumstances that make reading hard, painful, or nearly impossible.
Sponsored by: The Department of English and Creative Writing, the Department of Modern Languages, the Dee Hull Everist Visiting Speaker Fund, and Phi Beta Kappa