The Center for Mark Twain Studies (CMTS) continued the 2025 Park Church Lecture Series last night with a talk entitled, “Detecting Twain in Puddn’head Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins” presented by Aliza Theis, University of California, Berkeley.

Mark your calandar for the next upcoming 2025 Park Church Summer Lecture!

• Wed., July 16: “Beyond Mental Telegraphy: Twain’s Late Psychological Fiction” by Thomas W. Howard, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey.

The Park Church Summer Lecture Series is sponsored by CMTS and Park Church. The Trouble Begins and The Park Church Summer Lecture Series are made possible by the support of the Mark Twain Foundation and generous gifts from individual donors

After the first day of trial in Pudd’nhead Wilson, Tom Driscoll—who thinks he is a white enslaver but was actually born to an enslaved mother—boasts that his crime will “take its place with the permanent mysteries” (329). In a revision, Twain added, “and people won’t get done trying to guess out the secret of it for fifty years” (329). He was right, in the sense that scholars continue to inspect Pudd’nhead Wilson for deeper truths about Mark Twain and his post-Reconstruction mindset. Initially a slapstick story of conjoined twins from Italy traveling in the antebellum South, Pudd’nhead Wilson grew into a detective plot complete with fingerprinting, the doubled crimes of familicide and baby-swapping, and the question of how one reads physical evidence of racial identity. After drastically cutting down the manuscript, Twain decided to publish alongside Pudd’nhead Wilson much of its excised material, which he strung together under the title Those Extraordinary Twins. He justified this double publication with a series of remarks which purport to display his own writing process. However, as he added this self-reflexive content, making his authorship the subject of detection, he also took out his more polemical comments on the construction of whiteness. Drawing from the Mark Twain Project and UC Press’s recent “Authoritative Edition,” this lecture examines the relationship between racial and authorial identity making in the combined works.

Aliza Theis is a PhD student in the English Department at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century print culture, landscape, and coloniality. Aliza received a Master’s in Education from Harvard GSE and taught high school English for seven years in Brooklyn and San Francisco. She has presented papers at the National Council of Teachers of English, the Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and she currently serves as a researcher for Samuel Otter.  She is the 2025 Michael J. Kiskis Quarry Farm Fellow.

About The Trouble Begins Lecture Series – In 1984, the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies initiated a lecture series, The Trouble Begins lecture series. The title came from the handbill advertising Mark Twain’s October 2, 1866 lecture presented at Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco. The first lectures were presented in 1985. By invitation, Mark Twain scholars present lectures in the fall and spring of each year, in the Barn at Quarry Farm or on Elmira College’s campus. In 2016, CMTS expanded the series, creating the Park Church Summer Lectures Series.  All lectures are free and open to the public.