The English Department is pleased to announce that our 2018 Joseph M. Duffy Lecturer is Deidre Shauna Lynch, the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University. Professor Lynch's lecture, "The Unwritten History of the Woman of Genius (Austen, Staël, Siddons): What She Says, Goes," will take place at 5:30 pm Thursday, September 20, in the Eck Visitors Center Auditorium. A reception will follow.
Deidre Lynch has published widely on the literature and culture of late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century Britain, the history of women’s writing, the theory and history of the novel, and the history of reading. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of Inner Meaning won the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book in 1999. She is the editor of Cultural Institutions of the Novel, Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees, the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Austen’s Persuasion, the Norton Critical Edition of Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the Romantic Period volume of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, and a 2016 edition of Austen’s Mansfield Park for Harvard University Press. Early 2015 saw the publication of her Loving Literature: A Cultural History. Lynch has won several teaching awards, including the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools Teaching Award.
The Duffy Lecture Series honors the great teacher-scholar Joseph M. Duffy (1924-1988), who taught at the University of Notre Dame from 1954 to 1988.