K-SAA Interviews: Austen After 200: Reading After the Bicentenaries

We have all read a Jane Austen novel, or undoubtedly watched one of the many adaptations of her works – but is there anything more to say about Austen over 200 years after her books were published? In this interview with Professor Annika Bautz, Dr Daniel Cook, and Dr Kerry Sinanan, the editors of the forthcoming edited collection, Austen After 200: Reading After the Bicentenaries, the K-SAA Comms Team were treated to their musings on Austen in 2021 and beyond, the outstanding and diverse range of contributors to their volume, and, most importantly, which is their favourite Austen text!

Austen After 200: Reading After the Bicentenaries is forthcoming from Palgrave in 2021.

Annika Bautz is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Head of the School of Society and Culture at the University of Plymouth, UK. Her publications include books and essays on Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and George Eliot, and on the history of the book in the Romantic and Victorian periods. For more on Professor Bautz and her research, see here.

Dr Daniel Cook is Reader in English at the University of Dundee, in Scotland, where he teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Recent books include Walter Scott and Short Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), Reading Swift’s Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and (with Nicholas Seager) The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Forthcoming publications include a new edition of Gulliver’s Travels, The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver’s Travels, and, for Oxford World’s Classics, Scottish Poetry, 1730-1830. For more on Dr Cook’s research see here, and to follow him on Twitter, see here.

Dr Kerry Sinanan is Assistant Professor in 18th and 19th-Century transatlantic literature at The University of Texas at San Antonio. She publishes on the Black Atlantic and her most recent articles are on The Woman of Colour (1808) and The History of Mary Prince (1831). In 2021 she received the Rakow Research Grant from the Corning Museum for research on a project on slavery, glass and whiteness. She has co-edited with Daniel Cook and Annika Bautz a forthcoming volume, Austen After 200: New Reading Spaces (Palgrave Macmillan) in which her own essay, “Mr Darcy: Austen’s Imperial Man of Feeling”, discusses the imperial dimensions of Austen’s heroes. She is completing her monograph, Myths of Mastery: Traders, Planters and Colonial Agents 1750-1833, for The University of North Carolina Press and is under contract with Broadview Press for a new edition of The History of Mary Prince (1831). Dr Sinanan teaches courses on The Black Atlantic, Slavery, Race and Literature, as well as survey courses on the period. For more on Dr Sinanan’s research see here, and to follow her on Twitter, see here.

For more K-SAA Interviews, see here.