The Race and Regency Lab, an intriguing new scholarly project that aims to “reimagine our understandings of race” in Jane Austen’s era, kicks off tomorrow afternoon, with a half-day conference at Brown University in Providence, R.I.
The conference is free and open to the public, and sessions can be accessed virtually (sign up here). Sessions feature a dozen speakers, including academics, archivists, and an author of Austen fanfic.
The Race and Regency Lab is led by Patricia A. Matthew, an English professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey, who will be a plenary speaker at this fall’s annual conference of the Jane Austen Society of North America. The lab “speaks to the vibrant intersections of history, art, and popular culture and will serve as an incubator for new approaches to understanding the Regency,” according to Matthew’s website.
The past few years have seen an upsurge of interest in the issue of race in Austen’s England, as everything from the Black Lives Matter protests to the multiracial casting of Netflix’s Bridgerton series and Hallmark’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility has given the issue new prominence. In 2021, the Jane Austen & Co. online lecture series presented a “Race & the Regency” program featuring nine speakers, including Matthew.
It’s not yet clear to me what kinds of projects the Race and Regency Lab plans to undertake, but I’m looking forward to hearing more about this new direction in Austen studies.