The Trouble Begins Lecture Archives

twain-park-church
Mark Twain in front of the Park Church, Elmira, New York, 1907

In 1985, the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies inaugurated The Trouble Begins at Eight lecture series. The title comes from a handbill advertising Mark Twain’s October 2, 1866 lecture presented at Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco.

The lectures are now held in the Fall and Spring of each year, in the Barn at Quarry Farm or at Peterson Chapel in Cowles Hall on Elmira College’s campus.  

In 2016, CMTS expanded the series, creating the Park Church Summer Lectures Series, located in the Park Church.  Founded in 1846 by a group of abolitionists, The Park Church has been a strong presence in Elmira’s history and some of its congregation were close friends and family members to Mark Twain. Known for its striking architectural features, The Park Church contained Elmira’s first public library and has a long history of charitable service to the Elmira community.

The Trouble Begins and Park Church lectures are free and open to the public.

2023

Spring Trouble Begins Lecture Series

  • Steve Courtney, “‘Somewhere between where you live and where I live is the place where we ought to live’: The Friendship between the Revs. Thomas K. Beecher and Joseph H. Twichell” (May 10, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Jessica C. Jordan, “Between Mark Twain and Bella Z. Spencer: Satire and Sentiment on the Subscription Book Market” (May 17, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Ann M. Ryan, “The Dangers of Loving Mark Twain” (May 24, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Larry Howe, “Mark Twain, Property, and Poetry” (May 31, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)

Park Church Summer Lecture Series

  • Alexander J. Ashland, “The Ruins, Relics, and Reshapings of Mark Twain’s Mississippi Memory” (July 12, 2023 – The Park Church)
  • Bernard J. Dobski, “Twain’s Machiavellian Princess: Personal Recollections and Political Philosophy” (August 2, 2023 – The Park Church)
  • Stephen Rachman, “The Monetary Imagination of Mark Twain: From the Nevada Mines to the £1,000,000 Bank-Note” (August 16, 2023 – The Park Church)

Quarry Farm Symposium “Mark Twain: Invention, Technology, and Science Fiction”

  • Nicole Amare and Alan Manning, “Twain to Twilight: Latter-day Saint Motifs in Fantasy and Science Fiction Writing (October 7, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Max Chapnick, “Mark Twain vs. Christian Science and Empire” (October 7, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Edward Guimont, “Shadow of the Comet: Celestial Speculation in Twain’s Lifetime” (October 7, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Anjalee Gunaratnam, “Aliens of Our World: Nineteenth-Century Naturalists in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine and John Clare’s Bird Poems” (October 7, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • James D. Keeline, “Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone and H. Gernsbeck and E. Ruhmer and the Telephot” (October 7, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Ronny Litvack-Katzman, “Science Fiction and Boundary of Genre” (October 7, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Judith Yaross Lee, “Responses to Todd Nathan Thompson and Chander Shekhar: Technology and Imperialism in Mark Twain’s Novels” (October 7, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Bruce Michelson, “AI and Technological Seductions of Mark Twain’s World” (October 7, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Patrick Prominski, “‘The Diamond Lens’ and Fitz-James O’Brien’s Imagined Order” (October 7, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Matt Seybold, “The World-Empire” (October 7, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Chander Shekhar, “Navigating Whites’ Utopia: An Active Reader’s Response to Puddn’head Wilson” (October 7, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Todd Nathan Thompson, “Weapons of Mass Distraction: A Comic Genealogy of A Connecticut Yankee‘s Speculative Exceptionalism” (October 7, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Sheila Williams, 2023 Quarry Farm Symposium Keynote Address (October 6, 2023 – Elmira College Campus)

Fall Trouble Begins Lecture Series

  • Nathaniel Williams, “Mark Twain and Kenneth Robeson: Missouri Writers of Two Generations” (October 4, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Robert E. Cray, “‘The Wickedest Man in New York?’: Mark Twain and the 1868 Water Street Sham Revival” (October 18, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Stephen Cushman, “Mark Twain and the Civil War Memoir Boom” (October 25, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Barbara E. Snedecor, “Gravity – A Conversation” (November 30, 2023 – Elmira College Campus)

2022

Spring Trouble Begins Lecture Series

  • Fred L. Gardaphe, “Found in Translation: Mark Twain’s Italian Humor” (May 4, 2022 – Quarry Farm Barn) Lecture Images
  • Charline Jao, “A Yankee in Kennedy’s Court: The Humorous American Story and The Mark Twain Prize” (May 11, 2022 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Timothy J. McFarlin, “A Copyright Ignored?: Mark Twain, Mary Ann Cord, and the Meaning of Authorship (May 18, 2022 – Quarry Farm Barn) Lecture Images
  • Elizabeth Cantalamessa, “‘Our One Really Effective Weapon’: Mark Twain and Humor as a Social Tool” (May 25, 2022 – Quarry Farm Porch)

Park Church Summer Lecture Series

  • Ariel Silver, “‘There was Eden”: Eve in the Time of Twain” (June 22, 2022 – The Park Church) Lecture Images
  • Max L. Chapnick, “Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in Pseudo-Scientific Utopias” (July 6, 2022 – The Park Church) Lecture Images
  • Bill Hunt, “Mutiny on the Ballot: Conversion Narrative in Mark Twain’s ‘The Great Revolution in Pictairn” (July 20, 2022 – The Park Church) Lecture Images

Elmira 2022: The Ninth International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies

  • Jimmy Santiago Baca, “A Sense of Twain” (August 5, 2022 – Elmira College Campus – Keynote Address)
  • Philip Bauer, “For the Sake of Growth: My Inconsistent Look at the Life of Jean Clemens” (August 4, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Donald T. Bliss, “Mark Twain’s Ten Lessons for a Workable Democracy: Or, Keeping the Republic” (August 6, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • David Bordelon, “Huckleberry Finn and 21st Century Hucksters” (August 6, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • George Cabanas, “Avatar of God: Mark Twain versus the Moral Sense and the Implications for the Contemporary World” (August 4, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Elizabeth Cantalamessa, “The Devil and Mark Twain” (August 6, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • James Caron, “Mark Twain Lying In Bed” (August 4, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Rosie Click, “‘The [Real] American Game’: Twain’s Thoughts on Soft Imperialism in Cuba” (August 6, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • John Davis, “The Pursuit of Disappointment: Growth of Status and Growth of Delusion in ‘The $30,000 Bequest'” (August 5, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Maggie E. Morris Davis, “‘[H]e realized the shabbiness of his own self’: Reading Children in Poverty in Twain’s Adaptation Network” (August 5, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Mark Dawidziak, “Big River, Lighting Out for the Tonys” (August 4, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • M.M. Dawley, “‘Only dead men can tell the truth in this world’: The Growth of Mark Twain’s Anger” (August 6, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Kerry Driscoll, “‘Talking is the thing’: Mark Twain’s Bold Experiment in Empowering Women’s Voices” (August 4, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “How Hal Holbrook’s Understanding of Mark Twain Grew and Changed Over Time: The First Decade” (August 4, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Harold Hellwig, “The Political Theater in Mark Twain’s Illustrated Works” (August 6, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Aleksandra Hernandez, “Disgust, Contempt, and Animal Cruelty in Twain’s Later Writings” (August 6, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Thomas W. Howard, “‘Two stories tangled together’: The Double Brain, Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins” (August 6, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Tsuyoshi Ishihara, “Time for Change: Mark Twain in US School Textbooks, 1950s-1960’s” (August 4, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Takuya Kubo, “Mark Twain’s Failures as ‘Neglected Texts'” (August 5, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Virginia Maresca, “‘Treachery on both sides’: Mark Twain’s Lessons to Modern America on White Victimhood” (August 6, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Linda A. Morris, “Susy Clemens: The Final Years (1890-1896)” (August 4, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • L.Terry Oggel, “Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson: The Tragedy of Nineteenth-Century American Race Law” (August 6, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Alan Rankin, “Nina Gabrilowitsch: Actress, Writer, Photographer” (August 4, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Matt Seybold, “Darnella Frazier’s Smartphone & Mark Twain’s Notebook: The Vigilante Origin of American Police (August 6, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Jeff Steinbrink, “Of Time and Quantum Mechanics in Roughing It” (August 4, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Mika Turim-Nygren, “Huckleberry Finn‘s ‘Effect of Indigeneity’: Native Erasure in Law and Literature” (August 4, 2022 – Elmira College Campus)

Quarry Farm Symposium “Abolition Studies”

  • Alex Alston, “Animal Afterlives: 19th Century Abolitionism & The Discourse of Species” (October 1, 2022 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • M. Cecilia Azar, “Liberating the Punchline: Abolitionist Practices in Running One Thousand Miles for Freedom” (October 1, 2022- Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Srimayee Basu, “The Entanglements of Emancipation and Juvenile Discipline in the Early Black Prison Memoir” (October 1, 2022 – Online)
  • Sarah Haley, “Gender and the Abolitionist Present” (September 30, 2022 – Elmira College Campus – Keynote Address)
  • Christopher Paul Harris, “The Last President: Notes on Abolition and the (un)Making of the World System” (October 1, 2022 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • remus jackson, “‘This is the kind of society I’m looking for, anyway’: Krysta Morningstarr & The Radical Potential of Prisoner’s Comics” (October 1, 2022 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • LaVelle Ridley, “Imaginative Abolition, Political Life Writing, and Black Trans Feminist Blueprints” (October 1, 2022 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Margarita Lila Rosa, “Riotous Women, Criminalization, and the Voyeuristic Press in 1890’s California (October 1, 2022 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Matt Seybold, “Mark Twain, The Abolitionist” (October 1, 2022 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Kia Turner & Darion Wallace, “Exploring Anti-Carceral Education: Towards Mapping and Historicizing Contemporary Educators’ Theory and Praxis in Abolitionist Terms” (October 1, 2022 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Michelle Velasquez-Potts, “Slow Death and the Domestication of Indefinite Detention” (October 1, 2022 – Online)

Fall Trouble Begins Lecture Series

  • Dwayne Eutsey, “There is no humor in heaven’: Mark Twain and Religious Liberalism” (October 5, 2022 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Shirley Samuels, “Haunting the River: Melville and Twain” (October 12, 2022: Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Martha Lyon, “Slate Mine, Country Estate, Dairy, and Suburban Home: Evolution of the Landscape at Quarry Farm” (October 19, 2022 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Judith Yaross Lee, “‘Mr. Stanley, I Presume’: Mark Twain’s 1872 Visit to England and His Growth as a Writer” (October 26, 2022 – Quarry Farm Barn)

2021

Spring Trouble Begins Lecture Series

Park Church Summer Lecture Series

Chemung County Historical Society Lecture Series

  • Alan Rankin, “Out of The Shadows: Nina, Mark Twain’s Granddaughter” (August 19, 2021 – Chemung Valley History Museum)
  • Ryan Heryfod, “‘Now don’t any of you gentleman get my bones mixed up with yours'” (September 2, 2021 – Chemung Valley History Museum) Lecture Images
  • Laura Rice, “A Turn of the Century Case of Serendipity: Lawrence Joseph ‘Cooney’ Rice, The Boys of Frog Hollow, and The Youth from Mark Twain’s Charmed Circle” (September 16, 2021 – Chemung County History Museum) Lecture Images

Quarry Farm Symposium “Mark Twain and The West: Celebrating the 150th Anniversary of Roughing It

  • Blake Bronson-Bartlett, “The Wild Traces of Calaveras in Notebook IV” (October 2, 2021 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • James E. Caron, “Mark Twain’s Rival Washoe Correspondents: William Wright and J.Ross Browne” (October 2, 2021 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Christopher Conway, “Postwestern Crossings in Phong Nguyen’s The Adventures of Joe Harper (2016) and Robert Coover’s Huck Out West (2017)” (October 2, 2021 – Quarry Farm Barn) Lecture Images
  • Kerry Driscoll, “Mark Twain’s Masculinist Fantasy of The West” (October 2, 2021 – Quarry Farm Barn) Lecture Images
  • Dwayne Eutsey, “‘Thick as Thieves’: Mark Twain and The West’s Spiritual Frontiers” (October 2, 2021 – Quarry Farm Barn) Lecture Images
  • Sarah Fredericks, “Thumbing the Nose and Maligning the Turnip: Mark Twain’s Western Rhetoric of Insults” (October 2, 2021 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Andrew Hebard, “Corruption and Reform in Mark Twain’s West” (October 2, 2021 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Myrial Holbrook, “The Terra Comica between Mark Twain and Sherman Alexie” (October 2, 2021 – Quarry Farm Barn) Lecture Images
  • B.Scott Holmes, “Roughing It from Missouri to Nevada Territory, The Journeys of Samuel L. Clemens and Richard F. Burton” (October 2, 2021 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • James Wharton Leonard, “Mark Twain’s Ambivalent Encounter with The Western Landscape” (October 2, 2021 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Jeffrey Melton, “Nature and Mobility in Mark Twain’s Roughing It“ (October 2, 2021 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Bruce Michelson, “Mercurial Texts and Turbulent Times” (october 1, 2021 – Cowles Hall – Elmira College Campus) KEYNOTE ADDRESS
  • Jeanne Campbell Reesman, “The Mountain Meadows Massacre, as Told by Mark Twain and Jack London” (October 2, 2021 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Matt Seybold, “The Mail-Bag Bed of Empire: Roughing It & The Gossamer Network” (October 2, 2021 – Quarry Farm Barn) Lecture Images
  • Todd Nathan Thompson, “‘WHY WE SHOULD ANNEX’: Reprints and Repercussions of Twain’s New York Tribune Letters on Hawai’i” (October 2, 2021 – Quarry Farm Barn) Lecture Images
  • Alex Trimble Young, “‘The Vigorous New Vernacular’: The ‘Goshoot’ Episode and the Politics of Irony in Roughing It“ (October 2, 2021 – Quarry Farm Barn) Lecture Images

Fall Trouble Begins Lecture Series

  • Jeffrey Weissman, “Becoming Mark Twain” (October 6, 2021 – Online)
  • Joe B. Fulton, “Sick of War or just the War Stories? Reading the Harper’s Weekly Civil War Stories with Mark Twain” (October 13, 2021 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Richard Coronado, “Complementary Genius: The Sardonic Humor of Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain” (October 20, 2021 – Online)
  • Sheri-Marie Harrison, “[T]ie some buttons on their tails, and let on they’re rattlesnakes”: Twain’s Anti-sentimentality and Contemporary African American Satire” (October, 27, 2021 – Quarry Farm Barn)

2020

  • Jocelyn A. Chadwick, “Why We Who Have Dedicated Our Lives to Mark Twain Studies Must Now Interleave His Life, His Works, and His Time with a 21st Century Lens for Teachers and Students” (July 22, 2020 – Online)
  • Stephen Pasqualina, “Between Spectacle and Structure: Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialism” (July 29, 2020 – Online) Lecture Images
  • Max Cavitch, “Twains Meet” (August 26, 2020 – Online)
  • Jalylah Burrell, “‘Strange and Beautiful Country’: Era Bell Thompson’s Boundary-Crossing Humor” (October 3, 2020 – Online Video)
  • James E. Caron, “Gender Matters: Addison and Steele’s Amiable Satirist as a Regime of Truth in Antebellum America” (October 3, 2020 – Online Video)
  • Darryl Dickson-Carr, “Apocalypse Always: The End of Empire in African-American Writing Since World War II” (October 3, 2020 – Online Video)
  • Christopher Gilbert, “The Issue with Empire and a Comic Stretch of the Imagination” (October 2, 2020 – Online Video)
  • Bambi Haggins, “Stand-Up Comedy & Survival” (October 2, 2020 – Online Video)
  • Maggie Hennefeld, “‘Tyranny at Home’: Feminist Slapstick Comedy on the Brink of Global Catastrophe” (October 3, 2020 – Online Video)
  • John Wharton Lowe, “Coyote’s Jokebook: Native American Humor and the Dismantlement of Empire” (Keynote Address – October 2, 2020 – Online Video)
  • Kate Morris and Linda Morris, “Continental Drift: On Monuments, Memory, and Kent Monkman” (October 2, 2020 – Online Video)
  • Stanley Orr, “I wonder which of you is real: John Kneubuhl’s Indigenous Confidence Man” (October 3, 2020 – Online Video)
  • Matt Seybold, “The Funny Man vs. the Butcher: Anti-Imperialist Trolling & the International Reception of King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (October 3, 2020 – Online Video)
  • Todd Nathan Thompson, “[W]e could enter into the spirit of his wit and humour’: Lessons from Native Pacific Studies for American Humor Studies” (October 3, 2020 – Online Video)
  • Mark Dawidziak, “Mark Twain Meets Dracula” (October 7, 2020 – Online Video)
  • Avery Blankenship, “Viral Twain: The Reprinting of Mark Twain in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers” (October 14, 2020 – Online Video)
  • Susan K. Harris, Interview about her book Mark Twain, The World, and Me (October 21, 2020)
  • Matt Seybold, “”Twain, Redpath, & the Vigilante Origins of American Police” November 18, 2020 – Online Video)
2019
  • Todd Nathan Thompson, “‘Views of Mark Twain’: Antics and Annexation in Twain’s New York Tribune Letters on Hawai’i” (August 7, 2019 – The Park Church) Lecture Images

Chemung County Historical Society Lecture Series

  • J.Mark Baggett, “‘Practicing the Wild’: Twain and Thoreau at the Lakes (October 5, 2019 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Katherine E. Bishop, “‘A Wilderness of Oil Pictures’: Reframing Nature in A Tramp Abroad” (October 5, 2019 – Quarry Farm Barn) Lecture Images
  • Michael. P. Branch, “Made in Nevada” (Keynote Address – October 4, 2019 – Cowles Hall – Elmira College Campus) Video Clip
  • Charles C. Bradshaw, “Animal Welfare and the Democratic Frontier: Mark Twain’s Condemnation of Bullfighting in A Horse’s Tale” (October 5, 2019 – Quarry Farm Barn) Lecture Images
  • Ryan Heryford, “‘the breath of flower that perished’: The Imperial Ecologies of Mark Twain’s Early Letters” (October 5, 2019 – Quarry Farm Barn) Lecture Images
  • Barbara Ladd, “‘Night after Night, Day after Day’: Mark Twain and the Natural World” (October 5, 2019 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Delphine Louis-Dimitrov, “Nature in Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc: Pastoralism Revisited” (October 5, 2019 – Quarry Farm Barn) Lecture Images
  • Don James McLaughlin, “Microphobias: Medicine after Miasma in Twain’s 3,000 Years among the Microbes” (October 5, 2019 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Lisa Vandenbossche, “Nature as Historian in Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii” (October 5, 2019 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Emily E. VanDette, “‘A Dog’s Tale’ in Context: Twain & the Transatlantic Anti-Vivisection Campaign” (October 5, 2019 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Alan Pell Crawford, “Mark Twain Invades Washington” (October 9, 2019 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Tim DeRoche, “‘He ain’t a-comin’ back no mo’: Huck Finn as American Myth” (October 16, 2019 – Cowles Hall – Elmira College Campus) Lecture Images and Video Clip
  • Pieter Roos, “‘We found we had a little cash leftover’: Sam and Livy’s Dream House and Its Architectural Roots” (October 23, 2019 – Quarry Farm Barn) Lecture Images
  • Judith Yaross Lee, “Sociable Sam: Mark Twain among Friends” (October 30, 2019 – Quarry Farm Barn) Lecture Images
2018
  • Ron Powers, “Travelin’ Man” (March 21, 2018 – Cowles Hall – Elmira College Campus)
  • Walter G. Ritchie, Jr., “High Style in Mid-Nineteenth Century Elmira: The Architecture & Interiors of the Jervis Langdon Mansion (May 9, 2018 – Quarry Farm Barn) Lecture Images
  • Rebecca Nisetich, “Raising the Bar: Satirizing Law in Puddn’head Wilson and The Sellout” (May 16, 2018 – Quarry Farm Barn) Lecture Images
  • Todd Nathan Thompson, “An American Cannibal at Home: Comic Diplomacy in Mark Twain’s Hawai’i” (May 23, 2018 – Cowles Hall – Elmira College Campus) Lecture Images
  • Ben Click, “‘My penchant for silence’: Mark Twain’s Rhetorical Art of the Unspoken” (May 30, 2018 – Cowles Hall – Elmira College Campus) Lecture Images
  • James W. Leonard, “Fingerprints and Microbe Time: Mark Twain and Scientific Skepticism” (June 13, 2018 – The Park Church) Lecture Images
  • Barbara Snedecor, “‘…there is only one thing of real importance…’:Selected Letters of Olivia Langdon Clemens” (June 20, 2018 – The Park Church) Lecture Images
  • Kerry Driscoll, “Mark Twain and the American Indian” (July 11, 2018 – The Park Church)

Chemung County Historical Society Lecture Series

  • M.M. Dawley, “‘Well, ain’t you innocent!’: Mark Twain’s Attack on the American Adam” (August 9, 2018 – Chemung Valley History Museum)
  • Dwayne Eutsey, “‘Never Be In A Hurry to Believe’: How Joe Twichell’s Visits to Elmira and Cornell May Have Saved Huck Finn’s Soul” (August 23, 2018 – Chemung Valley History Museum)
  • Michael Anesko, “The Man of Business as a Man of Letters: William Dean Howells and the Paradox of Monopoly” (October 6, 2018 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Mary McAleer Balkun, “Getting What We Deserve in The (New) Gilded Age” (October 6, 2018 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Sean X. Goudie, “An Archipelagic Gilded Age: Turn-of-the-Century Caribbean Literature, US Empire, and the ‘New’ Protectionism” (October 6, 2018 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Sheri Marie Harrison, “Russell Banks’ Global Gilded Age” (October 6, 2018 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Andrew Kopec, “Twain’s Habits: Pudd’head Wilson and Institutional Economics” (October 6, 2018 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Ann Ryan, “Mark Twain and the Price of a Haunted House” (October 6, 2018 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Henry Wonham, “The Marginal Revolution in American Literature” (October 6, 2018 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • David Sloan Wilson, “Mark Twain, Cultural Multilevel Selection, and the New Gilded Age” (Keynote Address – October 5, 2018 – Meier Hall – Elmira College Campus)
  • Miki Pfeffer, “Getting to Know Mark Twain through the Eyes of Grace King, a Southern Woman of Letters” (October 10, 2018 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Melissa Scholes Young, “Writing from Roots in ‘America’s Hometown’: FLOOD, a Novel” (October 24, 2018 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • John Bird, “‘At the Farm’: Reliving Mark Twain’s 1884 Summer at Quarry Farm” (November 7, 2018 – Quarry Farm Barn)
2017
  • Joseph Csicsila, “‘These Hideous Times:’ Mark Twain’s Bankruptcy and the Panic of 1893” (April 26, 2017 – Cowles Hall – Elmira College Campus)
  • Hoi Na Kung, “The Mechanical Woman in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” (May 24, 2017 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Molly Ball, “Twain and The Hawaiian Nation” (June 14, 2017 – The Park Church)
  • Sarah Ingle, ““Conjuring the Superstitions of a Nation: Magic, Memory and Huckleberry Finn” (June 21, 2017 – Park Church)
  • John Pascal, “Artemus Ward: The Man Who Made Lincoln Laugh.” (June 28, 2017 – The Park Church)

Chemung County Historical Society Twain Lectures

  • Mark Dawidziak, “Mark Twain and Rod Serling: Moralists in Disguise” (July 13, 2017 – Chemung Valley History Museum)
  • Ronald Jenn, “Mark Twain and Joan of Arc” documentary (August 4, 2017 – Tripp Lecture Hall – Elmira College Campus)
  • Bruce Michelson, “Mark Twain in the Po-Mo Twilight” (August 4, 2017 – Kolker Hall Auditorium – Elmira College Campus)
  • Jarrod Roark, “Providence of the Pistol” (August 4, 2017 – Tripp Lecture Hall – Elmira College Campus)
  • Ben Tarnoff, “Vulgarity from Below Versus Vulgarity from Above: Twain in the Age of Trump” (Keynote Address – August 4, 2017 – Gibson Theater – Elmira College Campus)
  • Emily E. VanDette, “‘That heart-breaking bitch’: Aileen Mavourneen & The Transatlantic Anti-Vivisection Movement” (October 4, 2017 – Cowles Hall – Elmira College Campus)
  • Nathaniel Williams, “Mark Twain and the Inventor Fiction Boom: Technology Meets American Conceit, 1876-1910” (October 11, 2017 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Liam Purdon, “Mark Twain and the Narrative Magic of Medieval Literary Spunk-Water Stumps” (October 18, 2017 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Hal K. Bush, “Collecting Mark Twain: Obsessions over the Great Authors and The Hemingway Files” (November 1, 2017 – Cowles Hall – Elmira College Campus)
2016
  • Peter Messent, “You know the secret places of our hearts:’ The Mark Twain-Joe Twichell Letters” (October 19, 2016 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Martin Zehr, “Dressing For Success: Mark Twain Fashions an Image to Suit His Disguise” (October 26, 2016 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Judith Yaross Lee, “Mark Twain’s Brand: Comic Performance and the Modern American Self (November 2, 2016 – Cowles Hall – Elmira College Campus)

Chemung County Historical Society Twain Lectures

  • Matthew Seybold, “The Making of Chimerica: Globalization, Economics, and Mark Twain’s ‘Fable of the Yellow Terror” (September 29, 2016 – Chemung Valley History Museum)
2015
  • Jeanne Campbell Reesman, “Mark Twain vs. God: The Story of A Relationship” (September 30, 2015 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Susan K. Harris, “Searching For The Ornithorhynchus: Mark Twain and Animal Conservation” (October 7, 2015 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Andrew Levy, “Fraternizing With the Enemy: Revisiting Mark Twain’s Writings For, and About, Children” (November 30, 2015 – Cowles Hall – Elmira College Campus)
2014
  • Paula Harrington, “The French Face of Twain” (May 14, 2014 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Harriet Elinor Smith, “The Autobiography of Mark Twain: Did He Speak His ‘Whole, Frank Mind?” (May 21, 2014 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Martin Zehr, “Mark Twain’s Chinese Connection: Empathy, Politics, and Race” (June 4, 2014 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Harry Wonham, “Mark Twain and Money” (September 17, 2014 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Chad Rohman, “John Woolman, Quaker Saint. Mark Twain, Quaker Son?” (September 24, 2014 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Kerry Driscoll, “Mark Twain, The Maori, and The Mystery of Livy’s Jade Pendant” (October 1, 2014 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Benjamin Griffin, “Mark Twain At Home: An Edition and Its Challenges” (November 30, 2014 – Cowles Hall – Elmira College Campus)
2013
  • Donald Tiffany Bliss, “Mark Twain on the State of American Politics Today” (May 8, 2013 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • R. Kent Rasmussen, “Dear Mark Twain: Letters from His Readers” (May 15, 2013 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Ann Ryan, “The Ghosts of Mark Twain” (September 25, 2013 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Steve Courtney, “The Loveliest Home That Ever Was’: The Story of the Mark Twain House in Hartford” (October 2, 2013 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Tom Reigstad, “Scribblin’ For A Livin’: Mark Twain’s Pivotal Period in Buffalo (November 30, 2013 – Hamilton Hall – Elmira College Campus)
2012
  • Victor Fischer, “Editing Tales from Inside the Mark Twain Project” (May 23, 2012 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Susan K. Harris, “Mark Twain and the Philippine-American War: “Hogwash” and “Pious Hypocrisy” (May 30, 2012 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Joe B. Fulton, “‘The Noblest and Best Man after Washington’: The Role of President Abraham Lincoln in Mark Twain’s Reconstruction” (June 6, 2012 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Hilary Iris Lowe, “Mark Twain’s Homes and Haunts: Mark Twain Museums and Public History” (October 3, 2012 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Lawrence Howe, “Mark Twain and America’s Ownership Society” (October 17, 2012 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Philip McFarland, “Mark Twain and America’s ‘Worst President'” (November 30, 2012 – Cowles Hall – Elmira College Campus)
2011
  • Sharon McCoy, “Anything But Inoffensive: Mark Twain, the San Francisco Minstrels, and the Unsettling Legacy of Blackface Minstrelsy” (May 11, 2011 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Randall Knoper, “Mark Twain and the Brain” (May 18, 2011 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Henry Wonham, “Work and Play in Mark Twain” (May 25, 2011 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Barbara E. Snedecor, “…the quietest of all places…” (September 21, 2011 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Michael Pratt, “Mark Twain’s Nature in Roughing It, Naturally” (September 28, 2011 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • David Foster, “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc: Mark Twain’s Best Book?” (October 5, 2011 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Cindy Lovell, “Mark Twain: Words & Music” (November 30, 2011 – Hamilton Hall – Elmira College  Campus)
2010
  • Judith Yaross Lee, “Comic Imperialism and Connecticut Yankee” (April 28, 2010 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Lance Heidig, “Mark Twain’s Cornell: Venturing Far Above Cayuga’s Waters with Sam Clemens” (May 5, 2010 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Alex Effgen, “Mark Twain Illustrated and Impersonated” (May 26, 2010 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Michael Shelden, “Mark Twain: Man in White – The Grand Adventure of His Final Years” (September 22, 2010 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Jerome Loving, “Mark Twain on the Eve of Huckleberry Finn” (September 29, 2010 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Lawrence I. Berkove and Joseph Csicsila, “The Faith of a Heretic: Mark Twain’s Religious Thinking in His Literary Works” (October 6, 2010 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Laura Skandera Trombley, “Which One Do You Want? The Binary Mark Twain” (November 29, 2010 – Hamilton Hall – Elmira College Campus)
2009
  • Steve Courtney, “‘This Damned Fool’s Example’: The Rifts Between Mark Twain and Joe Twichell” (May 13, 2009 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • James E. Caron, “Mark Twain, Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter” (May 20, 2009 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • M. Thomas Inge, “Hank Morgan on Film: Adaptations of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (May 27, 2009 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Mark Dawidziak, “‘Mark Twain Tonight!‘, Today, and Tomorrow’: The Impact and Importance of Hal Holbrook’s One Man Show” (August 8, 2009 – Tripp Lecture Hall – Elmira College Campus) includes response by Hal Holbrook
  • David Fears, “The Making of Mark Twain Day By Day: Rudyard Kipling Meets Mark Twain” (September 9, 2009 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Abraham Kupersmith, “Twain and Freud on Personality and Politics” (September 30, 2009 – Quarry Farm Barn)
2008
  • Tom Quirk, “How Mark Twain Changed His Very Own Mind” (May 7, 2008 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Peter Krass, “Mark Twain: His Business (Mis)-Adventures” (May 14, 2008 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Forrest Robinson, “The Author-Cat: Bad Faith in Clemens’s Life and Work” (May 28, 2008 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Jeffrey Steinbrink, “Did Quarry Farm Matter?” (October 1, 2008 – Quarry Farm Barn)
2007
  • Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “The ‘War-Prayer’ Revisited: A Text for Our Time” (May 3, 2007 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Hal Bush, “Mark Twain and Spiritual Crisis” (May 16, 2007 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Joe B. Fulton, “The Reverend Mark Twain: ‘This Career of Sparkling Holiness, Usefulness, and Health-Giving Theological Travel” (May 30, 2007 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Laura Skandera Trombley, “Mark Twain’s Annus Horribilis of 1908″ (September 19, 2007 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Terrell Dempsey, “Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens’s World” (October 3, 2007 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Gary F. Scharnhorst, “Mark Twain’s Interviews: The Final Report” (October 10, 2007 – Quarry Farm Barn)
2006
  • Bruce Michelson, “Mark Twain and the American Media Revolution” (May 10, 2006 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Steve Courtney, “How Mark Twain’s Good Friend and Confidant Handled Three Tough Years in the Army of the Potomac” (May 17, 2006 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • David Caplan, “‘That Grotesque and Laughable Word, Patriotism’: Rethinking Mark Twain on Patriotism” (May 24, 2006 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Michael Pratt, “A Fossil Guide to Mark Twain’s Essay ‘Was The World Made for Man?'” (September 20, 2006 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Philip Ashley Fanning, “Mark Twain, Orion Clemens, and the Mysterious Stranger” (September 27, 2006 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Donald Hoffman, “Sailing to Bermuda with Mark Twain” (October 11, 2006 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Stephen Railton, “Mark Twain, Virtually” (November 30, 2006 – Tifft Lounge – Elmira College Campus)
2001
  • Victor Doyno, “Twain Writes with Burning Ink: King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (August 2001 – Gibson Theater – Elmira College Campus)
1999
  • Victor Doyno, “How Mark Twain Parented His Young Children” (May 26, 1999 – Quarry Farm)
  • Lawrence I. Berkove, “The Secret Source of Roughing It(s) Humor” (November 30, 1999 – Hamilton Hall, Elmira College Campus)
1998
  • Charles Mitchell, “Mark Twain’s Puritan Dilemma” (April 22, 1998 – Quarry Farm)
  • Chad Rohman, “‘Yours Truly, Mark Twain’: Reconsidering the Intellectual and Epistemological Dimensions of an Ironic and Elusive Mind” (May 6, 1998 – Quarry Farm)
  • Allison Ensor, “‘Noble Fight’ or ‘Long Tragedy’?: Mark Twain on the Civil War” (May 20, 1998 – Quarry Farm)
  • Louis J. Budd, “Been There, Done That (Not): Stalking Mark Twain” (September 15, 1998 – Quarry Farm)
  • Gail Levitt, “‘Animal Rights’, Elmira, and Mark Twain” (October 7, 1998 – Quarry Farm)
  • Kerry Driscoll, “‘Eating Indians for Breakfast’: Racial Ambivalence and American Identity in The Innocents Abroad” (October 21, 1998 – Quarry Farm)
1997
  • P. Leland Krauth, “Mark Twain: Bostonian Pilot” (April 30, 1997 – Quarry Farm)
  • Michael J. Kiskis, “Mark Twain in the Tradition of Literary Domesticity” (May 7, 1997 – Quarry Farm)
  • Andrew Hoffman, “Inventing Sam Clemens: Biography, Personae, and Fame” (October 8, 1997 – Quarry Farm)
  • Nick Karanovich, “Mark Twain in the Movies” (October 29, 1997 – Quarry Farm)
1996
  • Jim Zwick, “The Loss of a Daughter, the Death of a Republic: Personal and Political Dimensions of Mark Twain’s Despair” (May 1, 1996 – Quarry Farm)
  • Howard G. Baetzhold and Joseph B. McCullough, “The Bible According to Mark Twain: The Way It Was” (May 15, 1996 – Quarry Farm)
  • Richard Bucci, “Editorial Practice at the Mark Twain Project: The Example of Mark Twain’s San Francisco Correspondence for the Territorial Enterprise” (May 29, 1996 – Quarry Farm)
  • Mary Boewe, “Mark Twain and James Whitcomb Riley: Tracing a Literary Friendship” (October 9, 1996 – Quarry Farm)
  • Susan K. Harris, “Love Texts: The Role of Books in the Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain” (November 13, 1996 – Quarry Farm)
1995
  • John R. Cooley, “Mark Twain’s Angelfish: In Fact and in Fiction” (May 17, 1995 – Quarry Farm)
  • Louis J. Budd, “Mark Twain’s Visual Humor” (June 5, 1995 – Quarry Farm)
  • Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Mark Twain and African-American Voices” (September 12, 1995 – Quarry Farm)
  • Holger Kersten, “‘Human natur in a forren aspeck’: Mark Twain’s Encounter with German Culture” (October 4, 1995 – Quarry Farm)
1994
  • William Loos, “Revelations and Reunion: The Recent Adventure of Huckleberry Finn (April 13, 1994 – Quarry Farm)
  • Victor Doyno, “Mark Twain at Work: Discoveries in the Huck Manuscript” (May 4, 1994 – Quarry Farm)
  • Richard A. Kastl, “Archaeological Investigations at Quarry Farm” (June 1, 1994 – Quarry Farm)
  • David L. Smith, “Humor, Sentimentality, and Mark Twain’s Black Characters” (September 21, 1994 – Quarry Farm)
  • Pamela A. Boker, “The Humorist’s Tragedy-Trap: Loss and Repressed Grief in Mark Twain’s Fiction” (October 5, 1994 – Quarry Farm)
  • Marlene Boyd Vallin, “Mark Twain: A Great American Orator” (October 12, 1994 – Quarry Farm)
  • Laura E. Skandera-Trombley, “Mark Twain’s Elmira Revisited: Through a Woman’s Eye”
1993
  • Lawrence I. Berkove, “The Ethical Records of Twain and his Circle of Old West Journalists” (March 24, 1993 – Quarry Farm)
  • Alice Hall Petry, “Cable, Twain, and The South” (May 5, 1993 – Quarry Farm)
  • Resa Willis, “Mark and Livy: The Relationship of Olivia Langdon Clemens as a Reflection of a Woman’s Role in Victorian Society.” (October 27, 1993 – Quarry Farm)
1992
  • Jeffrey Steinbrink, “The Industrial Revolution of Mark Twain” (April 22, 1992 – Quarry Farm)
  • Susan K. Harris, “Olivia Langdon Clemens’s Reading” (April 29, 1992 – Quarry Farm)
  • Alfred Bendixen, “Mark Twain and the Tradition of American Female Humor” (May 11, 1992 – Quarry Farm)
  • Janet Kinch, “Mark Twain and Germany” (May 27, 1992 – Quarry Farm)
  • Thomas Quirk, “Is Huckleberry Finn ‘Politically Correct?'” (July 13, 1992 – Quarry Farm)
  • Gretchen Sharlow, “In Favor of the Farm” (September 9, 1992 – Quarry Farm)
  • Steven Pinsker, “Mark Twain and the Jews” (September 21, 1992 – Quarry Farm)
  • Roger Solomon, “The Gothic Mark Twain: Some Thoughts about Horror in His Work” (October 12, 1992 – Quarry Farm)
  • Michael Kiskis, “‘A Complete and Purposed Jumble: The Problem with Mark Twain’s Autobiography” (October 28, 1992 – Quarry Farm)
1991
  • Darryl Baskin, “Boss Morgan: Mark Twain, His Connecticut Yankee, and American Political Culture” (April 3, 1991 – Quarry Farm)
  • M. Thomas Inge, “Mark Twain and Comic Art” (April 17, 1991 – Quarry Farm)
  • James D. Wilson, “Providence Gone Awry: Religion in Mark Twain’s Later Career” (May 29, 1991 – Quarry Farm)
  • Victor Doyno, “Solving and Re(-)solving the Ending of Huckleberry Finn” (September 18, 1991 – Quarry Farm)
  • Howard Baetzhold, “The ‘Autobiography of Eve’: Mark Twain’s First Attempt to Tell Eve’s Story” (October 2, 1991 – Quarry Farm)
  • Myra Glenn, “Love, Sex, and Death in the Victorian Marriage: The Case of Thomas K. Beecher, Olivia Day, and Julia Jones” (November 6, 1991 – Quarry Farm)
1990
  • Kerry Driscoll, “A Tramp Abroad: Mark Twain in Heidelberg” (March 28, 1990 – Quarry Farm)
  • Alan Gribben, “Huckleberry Finn’s Missing Twin” (April 11, 1990 – Quarry Farm)
  • Richard B. Carter, “Yankee Ingenuity as the Foundation for the New Social Order (May 9, 1990 – Quarry Farm)
  • David E.E. Sloane, “Mark Twain, Literary Comedian – The Influence of the Northeast on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (May 23, 1990 – Quarry Farm)
  • Susan K. Harris, “Overcoming Sin: The Audiences for Mark Twain’s ‘Hadleyburg'” (July 23, 1990 – Quarry Farm)
  • Stanley Brodwin, “Mark Twain: The Presbyterian Connection” (October 10, 1990 – Quarry Farm)
  • David Sewell, “Mark Twain as Liar” (October 24, 1990 – Quarry Farm)
  • John McLaughlin, “Risking Hell in Private and Public: The Cases of Huckleberry Finn and Mario Cuomo” (November 7, 1990 – Quarry Farm)
1989
  • Herbert A. Wisbey, Jr, “Jervis Langdon, Christian Businessman” (March 22, 1989 – Quarry Farm)
  • Thomas J. Reigstad, “Mark Twain in Buffalo: The Making of a Gentleman Journalist” (April 26, 1989 – Quarry Farm)
  • Jeffrey Steinbrink, “Rappaccini’s Daughter and Jervis Langdon’s Son-in-Law: A Contrast of Fathers” (May 3, 1989 – Quarry Farm)
  • Edgar M. Branch, “Old Times on the Mississippi: Biography into Art” (May 17, 1989 – Quarry Farm)
  • Hamlin Hill, “Late Mark Twain: From Bad Philosophy to Worse Literature” (July 24, 1989 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Malcolm Marsden, “Mr. Micawber and Colonel Sellers” Transatlantic Cousins” (September 13, 1989 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Pascal Covici, Jr., “Western Pleasure versus Eastern Propriety, or Eastern Repression and Western Guilt? A Quick Look at Mark Twain’s Humor” (September 27, 1989 – Quarry Farm Barn)

1988

  • Robert Regan, “The Art Ignoramus and the Art Snob: Mark Twain and John Ruskin (March 9, 1988 – Quarry Farm)
  • Myra Glenn, “Thomas K. Beecher and the Anti-Slavery Movement” (March 28, 1988 – The Park Church)
  • William Loos, “An Illustrated Talk on How Huckleberry Finn Came to New York State” (April 13, 1988 – Quarry Farm)
  • Nicholas Karanovich, “Collecting Mark Twain” (May 4, 1988 – Quarry Farm)
  • Jim Gibb, “A View from the Turf: An Archaeological Perspective on Quarry Farm” (May 18, 1988 – Quarry Farm)
  • James D. Wilson, “Mark Twain, Olivia Langdon, and the Struggle for Orthodoxy” (June 29, 1988 – Quarry Farm)
  • Victor Doyno, “Mark Twain’s Family Life at Quarry Farm” (July 27, 1988 – Hamilton Hall – Elmira College Campus)
  • Gretchen Sharlow, “The Cranes of Quarry Farm” (September 28, 1988 – Quarry Farm)
  • Carl Dolmetsch, “Mark Twain and the Jews” (October 12, 1988 – Temple B’Nai Israel)
  • Susan K. Harris, “Four Ways to Kill a Mackerel: Mark Twain and Laura Hawkins” (November 3, 1988 – Quarry Farm)

1987

  • Everett Emerson, “Mark Twain’s Quarrel with God” (October 8, 1987 – The Park Church)
1986
1985
  • Hamlin Hill, “The Many Faces of Mark Twain” (September 16, 1985 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • James Cox, “Mark Twain: The Outlaw in Literature” (September 23, 1985 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • John S. Tuckey, “Mark Twain: The Youth Who Lived on in the Sage” (October 14, 1985)
  • Henry Nash Smith, “How True are Dreams? Fantasy as Refuge or Nightmare in Mark Twain’s Later Work (October 28, 1985 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Leo Marx, “Mark Twain, ‘Classic’ American Literature, and the Belief in Progress” (November 11, 1985 – Quarry Farm Barn)