Faculty Biography
Vitals:
Name: Juliette Wells
Title: Assistant Professor
Department: English
Building: Dammann Hall
Room: G-1
Phone: 914-798-2767
Email: wellsj@mville.edu
Degrees:
B.A. in English, Johns Hopkins
B. Music, Peabody Conservatory
M.A. in Humanistic Studies, Johns Hopkins
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D. in English, Yale
Juliette Wells, Assistant Professor of English at Manhattanville College, has been invited to present her paper Everybody’s Jane, at a Jane Austen study day sponsored by the University of Southhampton in England. The event will be held at Chawton House Library (a home once owned by Jane Austen’s brother) on June 22nd and 23rd. Professor Wells will be one of ten international scholars brought together to discuss Jane Austen and women’s writing. When the event is over, the organizers plan to put the papers into a book.
“The subject of my presentation is Jane Austen in contemporary culture,” Professor Wells said. I am interested in what people are doing and thinking and writing about Jane Austen now. Specifically, I will be discussing fictional novels that imagine Jane Austen as a character.”
Professor Wells developed the course on Jane Austen in popular culture at Manhattanville four years ago when she started teaching at the College. However she wasn’t sure if she would be able to offer that course after the first year. “At the time I did not know if there would be more Austen movies or books,” she said. “But pop culture keeps generating all this stuff about her. The books have gone through many different film adaptations, of which Clueless and Bridget Jones Diary are the better ones. And writers seem to enjoy producing “sequels” to the books as well. There are even dating guides based on them. These authors are typically people who are more familiar with the films than with the books, and who want to imagine themselves into Jane Austen’s world.”
Juliette Wells teaches courses in Victorian literature, women’s writing, the novel, and contemporary literature. She joined the Manhattanville faculty in 2003 upon receiving her Ph.D. from Yale University; she also holds master’s degrees from Yale and Johns Hopkins. She is the author of articles on Jane Austen, George Eliot, and “chick lit,” as well as a co-editor of The Brontës in the World of the Arts (forthcoming from Ashgate).
Other scholarly works that will be published in the near future include:
A Harpist Arrives at Mansfield Park; Music and the Moral Ambiguity of Mary Crawford.
“A fearsome thing to behold”?; the Accomplished Woman in Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice.
“Mothers of Chick Lit; Women Writers, Readers, and Literary History.”