Saturday, October 31, 200910:00 a.m. at Alumni Hall
Who are these monsters and why do we love to fear them? Stephen Arata, Professor of English, and Susan Tyler Hitchcock, former U.Va. faculty and nonfiction author, team up to tell Frankenstein and Dracula’s long, strange and intertwined life stories. A perfectly chilling way to start your Halloween celebrations!
Bios
Susan Tyler Hitchcock studied English literature at the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia, from which she received a Ph.D. in 1978, writing her dissertation on the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. For more than a decade, she taught humanities in the U.Va. School of Engineering and Applied Science, and it was during that time that her interest turned from Percy Bysshe Shelley to his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, best known as the author of Frankenstein. For years she has collected books and objects related to Frankenstein, and that collection resulted in 2007 in a book published by W. W. Norton, Frankenstein: A Cultural History, and, in 2008, in an exhibition sponsored by the Rare Book School in the Rotunda, The Monster Among Us: Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to Mel Brooks. Hitchcock is known to U.Va. alumni for writing and editing many alumni publications over the years, including the pictorial history of the University of Virginia published by the University Press, which she wrote in 1999. She works now as a senior book editor at the National Geographic Society and lives in Albemarle County.
Stephen Arata has been on the faculty of the English Department at U.Va. since 1990, where he is currently the NEH Mayo Distinguished Teaching Professor and the Associate Chair of the Department. His teaching and writing focus on British literature between 1800 and World War II. Recent publications include classroom editions of works by George Gissing, William Morris, and H. G. Wells for W. W. Norton and for Broadview Press. He is also a General Editor of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, which (assuming everyone lives long enough) is scheduled to be published in 38 volumes by Edinburgh University Press between now and 2016. A youth misspent watching horror movies led him, twenty years ago, to write an essay on Bram Stoker’s Dracula which, to his surprise and gratification, was well-received and which continues its weird undead existence through the citations of subsequent (very much alive) critics. Recommended Readings:
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