ELMIRA 2026: The Tenth International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies

The Second Quarry Farm Graduate Student Workshop: “From Seminar Paper to Academic Article”

 

Elmira 2026: The Tenth International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies

 

Conference Theme: Irreverence, Rebellion, and Resilience

“The first gospel of all monarchies should be Rebellion; the second should be Rebellion; and the third and all gospels and the only gospel in any monarchy should be Rebellion against the Church and State.” (Mark Twain’s Notebook, 1891)

Established in 1989, the quadrennial International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies is the oldest and largest gathering of scholars interested in the field of Mark Twain Studies. The host of the event was the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies (CMTS). The 3-day conference was held from Thursday, July 30 to Saturday, August 1 on the Elmira College campus in Elmira, New York. The conference consisted of traditional paper sessions, a keynote address, a number of special presentations, and comradery with old and new acquaintances.  The conference culminated in an evening picnic at Quarry Farm, one of the most important structures in the life of Mark Twain and for American Literature.

Highlights of Elmira 2026 included 60 delivered papers; 5 special panels; a live recording of the Amercian Vandal Podcast, featuring Lauren M.E. Goodlad, Jeff Jarvis, and Matt Seybold; and a keynote event featuring a conversation with Kerry Driscoll and Robert Hirst, both from the Mark Twain Papers and Project.

Center for Mark Twain Studies collaborated with the following groups and organizations for Elmira 2026:

  • Mark Twain Circle of America
  • American Humor Studies Association
  • Literature/Film Association
  • 2022 Quarry Farm Symposium “Abolition Studies”
  • 2023 Quarry Farm Symposium “Science Fiction, Invention, and Technology”
  • 2024 Quarry Farm Symposium “Gilded Age Humor”
  • 2025 Quarry Farm Symposium “Energy Studies”

Modern day image created by Angelina Addison ’28.  Original illustration comes from “St. Mark, the American Lion” by William H. Walker on the original cover of the August 15, 1901 Life Magazine.

Elmira 2026 Program and Schedule

 

The conference program and schedule for Elmira 2026 can be found HERE.

A hardcopy of the program will be given to all conference attendees.

A number of presentations will be videorecorded and posted in the CMTS Trouble Begins Lecture Archives.

Recorded Presentations

  • John Bird, “Irreverent Humor on Death and Dying: Mark Twain’s ‘The Undertaker’s Tale'” (July 31, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Zsanna Mária Bodor, “‘Extinction in the Smoke-Clouds of the Stake’: Evolution and Ecogothic in Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc” (July 31, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Gregg Camfield, “Is He Dead?” (August 1, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • David Carlyon, “Why Send Huck to a Circus? Why Bind Jim?” (July 30, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • James Caron, “Marietta Holley and the Gilded Age Women’s Movement” (July 31, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Kerry Driscoll, “‘Not for sin but for sentiment – and stupidity’: Mark Twain’s Brief (and Unhappy) Association with the Connecticut Prisoners’ Friends’ Society” (July 30, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Dwayne Eutsey, “‘I don’t take no stock in dead people’: Mark Twain’s Holy Irreverence” (July 31, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Kaine Ezell, “‘Showing Off’ for Who?: Twain’s Analysis of Spiritual Motivation in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer“
  • Edward Guimont, “Twain, Astronomy, and Speculative Fiction” (July 30, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Anjalee Gunaratnam, “Latimer’s Matter: The Decomposition of Self, Hegelian Dialectics, and George Eliot’s Physics of Sympathy in ‘The Lifted Veil'” (July 30, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Ryuzo Hamamoto, “An Unrealized Connection between Japan and Twain: Hannah Riddell’s Letter and Its Transnational Context” (August 1, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Harold Hellwig, “Connecticut Yankee and Innocents Aborad: Catholicism and Antithesis; Pilgrimage, Conversion, Reverence, and Betrayal” (August 1, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Robert Hirst, “Looking Back, Looking Forward” (July 31, 2026 – Elmira College Campus) KEYNOTE EVENT
  • Kumi Ikoma, “The Defiant Daughter and the Silent Father: ‘Wapping Alice’ and Susy Clemens” (July 31, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Holger Kersten, “Jim in a New Light: Revisiting Huckleberry Finn Illustrations in American and German First Editions (July 30, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Takuya Kubo, “Biocultural Reading of Huckleberry Finn: Huck’s Oscillation between Body, Thought, and American Dichotomies” (July 30, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • James W. Leonard, “Enumerating Myth: ROUGHING IT and the Disorder of Things (August 1, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Kevin Mac Donnell, “Mark Twain’s Black Muse: The Life and Legacy of His Butler, George Griffin” (July 31, 2026 – Elmira College Campus
  • Kotaro Nakagaki, “Dictating Grief: Writing as Mourning in Mark Twain’s Autobiography” (July 31, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Terry Oggel, “Twain and Tesla: The Twain Shall Meet” (July 30, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Nicholas Otranto, “Mark Twain and American Belonging” (July 30, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Susan Poulson, “Love, Marriage, and Murder: Samuel Clemens and the Perils of Passion” (July 31, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Patrick Prominski,“The Microscopist and Mark Twain: Expanding Twain’s Elmira Social Circle and Influence on ‘The Great Dark'” (July 30, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Stephen Rachman, “Thinking Fast and Slow: Daniel Kahneman and Mark Twain’s ‘How To Tell A Story'” (July 31, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Alan Rankin, “In Their Right Minds: Livy, Clara, Nina, and ‘Americanitis'” (July 31, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Jeanne Campbell Reesman, “The ‘Australasian Spartans’ of Tasmania: Classical Allusion as Satire in Following the Equator“
  • Laura Rice, “From Twain to Trump: A Genealogy of Incivility” (August 1, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Ann Ryan, “Cowards, Critics, and the Untold True Story of ‘The United States of Lyncherdom'”
  • Jeff Steinbrink, “Quantum Failure and Gunplay in Huck Finn“
  • Todd Nathan Thompson, “‘Siberia,’ Rechristened ‘Future’: Imaginative Mapping Meets Imperial Anxiety in Gilded Age Humor” (July 31, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)
  • Hillary Warolin, “Transmediality and Adaptation: Moby-Dick and Tom Sawyer” (July 30, 2026 – Elmira College Campus)

Keynote Event

“Looking Back, Looking Forward”

A candid, wide-ranging conversation with emeritus General Editor of the Mark Twain Papers and Project, Robert Hirst. Bob—who Twain biographer Ron Powers has described as “the best friend Mark Twain ever had”—will discuss the Project’s evolution during his forty-five years at the helm, reflecting on both the challenges he faced and the landmark editorial achievements that are his scholarly legacy.

Born in New York City, Robert Hirst received his baccalaureate degree from Harvard in 1963. He then relocated to the Bay Area, entering the Ph.D. program in English at UC Berkeley. Bob began working in the Mark Twain Papers as a graduate student and completed his doctoral dissertation on “The Making of The Innocents Abroad: 1867–1876” under the supervision of Henry Nash Smith in 1976. In 1980, Bob was appointed General Editor of the Mark Twain Papers and Project, a position he held for forty-five years until his retirement in September 2025. During his distinguished decades-long tenure as General Editor, he shepherded over thirty authoritative critical editions of Mark Twain’s works into print, including three magisterial volumes of the writer’s Autobiography.

Robert Hirst, General Editor Emeritus
of the Mark Twain Papers and Project

The Second Quarry Farm Graduate Student Workshop: “From Seminar Paper to Academic Article”

 

The Center for Mark Twain Studies is happy to announce their second Graduate Student Workshop: “From Seminar Paper to Academic Article.” This in-person workshop will provide an intensive writing experience for students to transform a seminar or conference paper into an article ready to submit for publication. Although all approaches are welcome—and interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged – the paper must give substantial attention to Twain.

Ph.D. candidates are invited to apply for the five-day workshop which is scheduled to take place immediately following Elmira 2026: The Tenth International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies. After the conclusion of the conference, students will work with two senior, well-established American literature scholars, Sandra Gustafson and Shirley Samuels, and with each other, affording ample time for writing and access to the Mark Twain archive and library at Quarry Farm. Successful applicants will have their Elmira 2026 conference registration waived, be housed for free in Elmira College dormitories during the conference and workshop, and be provided with food throughout the conference, then breakfasts and lunches for the duration of the workshop.  The workshop will take place both on the Elmira College campus and at Quarry Farm in Elmira, NY. Participants will receive a $200 stipend and $500 towards travel expenses.

Workshop participants are strongly encouraged to attend Elmira 2026 and deliver a paper. Preference will be given to those applicants who intend to present at Elmira 2026: The Tenth International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies.

Workshop Faculty
Jillian Spivey Caddell 2021 Quarry Farm Fellow
SANDRA M. GUSTAFSON
Sandra M. Gustafson is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and concurrent Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is currently writing a one-volume Introduction to American Literature for Routledge. Her previous works include Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840-1900 (Oxford, 2023), Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic (Chicago, 2011), and Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (North Carolina, 2000). She is the editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. A (9th and 10th editions), as well as the co-editor of Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion Tourgée (Fordham, 2022) and Cultural Narratives: Textuality and Performance in American Culture before 1900 (Notre Dame, 2010). 
Shirley Samuesl 2024 Quarry Farm Fellow
SHIRLEY SAMUELS
Shirley Samuels is the Picket Family Chair of the Literatures in English Department at Cornell University. She has recently published Haunted by the Civil War: Cultural Testimony in the Nineteenth Century United States (Princeton, 2025). Her books include Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. (Lexington Books, 2019), The Cambridge Companion to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, 2012), Reading the American Novel 1780-1865 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War (Oxford, 2004); Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004); Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (Oxford, 1996); and The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th Century America (Oxford, 1992).

Students and Faculty of the 2026 Quarry Farm Graduate Student Workshop

Back Row, Left to Right: Sandra Gustafson, William Hancock, Hillary Warolin, Thomas Bryant, Shirley Samuels

Front Row, Left to Right: Alexis Schmidt, Zsanna Bodor, Samuel Clemens