2024 Quarry Farm Symposium on “Gilded Ages: Humor, Literature, and Society”
Oct 11 and Oct 12, 2024
Elmira, New York
The Center for Mark Twain Studies hosted its annual Quarry Farm Symposium during the Fall 2024 semester, from October 11 to October 12. The theme for the Symposium is “Gilded Ages: Humor, Literature, and Society.”
The annual symposium gathers scholars from various fields each year around a theme related to Mark Twain Studies or the nineteenth century more broadly and is held at the historic Quarry Farm site in Elmira, New York. The organizers of the symposium are comprised of CMTS staff members, specifically Joseph Lemak (Director) and Matt Seybold (Scholar-in-residence).
The symposium focused on a wide range of subjects related to numerous aspects related to the Gilded Age, including literary humor; political cartoons; social satire; periodical humor; visual arts; contemporary representations of the Gilded Age; gender, race, class and Gilded Age Humor; nationalism and transnationalism; and Mark Twain.
If you have any questions, please contact Joseph Lemak ([email protected]).
SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Nathan Wolff, “First as Farce: Structures of Feeling in The Gilded Age“
SESSION ONE: THE GILDED AGE IN THE MARKET PLACE
Stephen Rachman, “Buying Siberia: Fraud, Speculation, and Revolution from The Gilded Age to The American Claimant“
Matt Seybold, “Colonel Sellers, Doc Rockefeller, & The Technofeudal Enclosure of Everything”
Kyhl Stephen, “Twain, Humor, and the Fashioning of Gilded Age Consumer Society”
SESSION TWO: THE GILDED AGE IN THE HOME
Charline Jao, “Mark Twain’s False Alarms”
Barbara Snedecor, “‘She is the best girl in all the world’: Gilded Age Domestic Humor and Resilience in Olivia Clemens”
James E. Caron, “Marietta Holley’s Samantha Allen, Humorous Housewife, Satiric Suffragette”
SESSION THREE: THE GILDED AGE ON THE PAGE
Christopher J. Gilbert, “Dear God, Let Us Praise Mark Twain’s Satanic Sense of Humor”
Ann M. Ryan, “Gilding Jim and Nat: Mark Twain and the Specter of the Angry Black Man”
Bruce Simon, ““Rereading Jim’s Coat of Arms: The Badge of Servitude and the Device of Race in Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne”
SESSION FOUR: THE GILDED AGE ON THE COMEDY STAGE
Teresa Prados-Torreira, “The Comic Lecturer in the Gilded Age”
Lawrence Howe, “Skewering Gilded Age Corruption: The Visual Satire of Thomas Nast”
Todd Nathan Thompson, “‘Mr. Seward’s Real Estate Transactions’: Comic Imperialism in the Reconstruction Era”
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Nathan Wolff
Nate Wolff is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age (Oxford University Press, 2019), which uses readings of Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age and The American Claimant to frame a literary prehistory of today’s emotional politics: the cynicism and exhaustion of democratic life in an age of inequality and corruption. He is currently working on a new book, Disentangled: Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature’s Political Ecologies, contesting the influence of New Materialist ecocriticism on Americanist literary studies. Two pieces from this project—the first on Twain and Charles Chesnutt, the second on Frank Norris and W.E.B. Du Bois—have been published in American Literary History. His writing has appeared in other venues including English Literary History, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, and The Washington Post. A second new project, tentatively titled Dirty Jobs, looks to nineteenth-century literature for lessons about the formation of, and alternatives to, the American work ethic.
PRESENTERS
James E. Caron
James E. Caron retired as Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa, where he taught American literature for thirty-six years. He has published articles on satire, the tall tale, antebellum comic writers, laughter and evolution, Mark Twain, George Washington Harris, Frank Norris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, Charlie Chaplin, Hunter S. Thompson, and Bill Watterson. In addition, he has published Mark Twain, Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter (2008), co-edited a collection of essays on Charlie Chaplin, entitled Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon in Critical Contexts (2013), and authored Satire as the Comic Public Sphere: Postmodern “Truthiness” and Civic Engagement (2021). His new book is The Modern Feminine in the Medusa Satire of Fanny Fern (January 2024). He is the former president of the American Humor Studies Association and former senior associate editor of its journal, Studies in American Humor. He is the recipient of the 2023 Charlie Award from the American Humor Studies Association, given for lifetime achievement in service to the AHSA and for research in American humor.
Joe Conway
Joe Conway is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. His work engages with questions of monetary representation in literature, film, and television. His articles address economic themes from the Puritans to Black Mirror and have appeared in journals like Early American Literature, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Studies in American Humor, Women’s Studies, LIT, and CR: The New Centennial Review.
Christopher J. Gilbert
Christopher J. Gilbert, PhD. Chris is Associate Professor of English (in Communication & Media) at Assumption University. He is author of Caricature and National Character: The United States at War (2021) as well as the forthcoming book, When Comedy Goes Wrong (April 2025). He is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture (November 2024). In addition, he has also published many articles in various academic journals and contributed numerous book chapters in edited volumes.
Lawrence Howe
Lawrence Howe, Professor Emeritus of English in Film Studies at Roosevelt University, is a past editor of Studies in American Humor and author Mark Twain and the Novel: The Double-Cross of Authority,and co-editor of Mark Twain and Money: Language, Capital, and Culture, and Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon Through Critical Lenses, as well as numerous articles on a wide range of topics in American studies. In 2014-15, he was the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies in Denmark, and in 2020-2022 he was president of the Mark Twain Circle of America. He has enjoyed the generous support and recognition of the Center for Mark Twain Studies for more than a decade, including being honored with the Henry Nash Smith Award in 2022.
Charline Jao
Charline Jao is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Her dissertation “Early Lost” examines scenes of child death and separation in nineteenth-century American women’s writing. She is the creator of two digital humanities projects: Periodical Poets, which examines poetry in nineteenth-century Black-edited periodicals, and No Stain of Tears and Blood, which compiles material from the free produce movement. She was previously a Brown Family Collection Short Term Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, and the Michael J. Kiskis Fellow at Quarry Farm last summer. Her work has been published in American Periodicals.
megan mcNamara
Megan McNamara (also published under M. M. Dawley) teaches in Writing, Rhetoric and Professional Communication Program at MIT in Cambridge. She earned her doctorate from the American & New England Studies program at Boston University. Her work focuses on the literary history of the Gilded Age in the United States with an emphasis on satire. She was named to the inaugural cohort of Affiliated Faculty at BU’s Center for Antiracist Research and collaborated with Gene Andrew Jarrett on the creation of the African American Studies module for Oxford Bibliographies Online. Her writing appears in American Literary Realism and the Edith Wharton Review, and she is the book review editor for The Mark Twain Annual as well as the executive coordinator of the Mark Twain Circle of America.
teresa Prados-torreira
Teresa Prados-Torreira is Professor of America History at Columbia College Chicago. She was President of the American Humor Studies Association through most of the pandemic (June 2020-June 2022). She is the author of multiple articles on U.S., and Spanish history and culture, as well as of two books on Cuban history.
stephen rachman
Stephen Rachman is Associate Professor in the department of English, former Director of the American Studies Program and former head of Digital Humanities at Michigan State and former Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Literary Cognition Laboratory at Michigan State University. He is the co-editor and translator of Chinese Women Writers and the Environment (McFarland). He is the editor of The Hasheesh Eater by Fitz-Hugh Ludlow (Rutgers University Press). He is a co-author of the award-winning Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow (Oxford University Press) and the co-editor of The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (Johns Hopkins University Press). He has written numerous articles on 19th-century American literature, the history of medicine, cities, popular culture, and an award-winning Web site on Sunday school books for the Library of Congress American Memory Project. He was a 2023 Quarry Farm Fellow and his most recent work on Mark Twain is “‘The £1,000,000 Bank-Note’: Mark Twain and the 19th-Century Monetary Imagination” Mark Twain Journal 59:2 (Fall 2021).
ann m. ryan
Ann M. Ryan is Professor of American Literature at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. She is the past president of the Mark Twain Circle, the former editor of The Mark Twain Annual, and co-editor of Cosmopolitan Twain. Her research focuses primarily on issues of race and racism in Mark Twain’s life, his writings, and the society that produced him. She also writes on the intersections of the gothic and humor in American culture. Her current project, The Ghosts of Mark Twain: A Study of Memory, Masculinity, and Race, will be available in spring 2025.
matt seybold
Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies, Resident Scholar at Center For Mark Twain Studies, Editor-in-Chief of MarkTwainStudies.org, and Executive Producer of The American Vandal Podcast. He teaches courses on all periods of American Literature, is founding director of the Media Studies, Communications, & Design program. Dr. Seybold’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of economics, mass media, and literary culture in the United States from the founding of the New York Stock Exchange in 1817 to the 2008 financial crisis. He is co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics (2018). Recent articles can be found in American Literary History, Mark Twain Annual, T.S. Eliot Studies Annual, American Studies, Reception, Henry James Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books. For a full list of publications, visit MattSeybold.com.
Bruce simon
Bruce Simon is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York at Fredonia. His research and teaching interests span the range of U.S. literatures and their intersections with American studies, Black studies, critical race/ethnicity studies, and postcolonial studies. His primary research focus is on pre-Civil War America, but he is also interested in the history, governance, and funding of higher education; the nature and value of academic and intellectual work; the structure and status of the profession; and the conditions of teaching and learning. His publications may be found in Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century; The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the United States; Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature; Exploring Shared Governance in Higher Education, Vol. 1: Demands, Transitions, Transformations; Book XI: A journal of literary philosophy; Electronic Book Review; Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor; and Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender, and Culture.
barbara e. snedecor
Barbara E. Snedecor served as Director of the Center for Mark Twain Studies and as assistant professor of American Literature at Elmira College. In addition to editing the second edition of Mark Twain in Elmira, she has contributed pieces to the Mark Twain Annual and American Literary Realism and is the editor of Gravity: Selected Letters of Olivia Langdon Clemens (University of Missouri Press, 2023).
kyhl stephen
Kyhl Stephen is a Humanities Scholars Program Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University, where his dissertation American Fiction and the Textual Basis of Corporate Personhood, 1871-1921 won the Guilford Prize for the best written dissertation in 2023-24. He is the recipient of a 2023 Quarry Farm Fellowship.
todd nathan thompson
Todd Nathan Thompson is Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and a Contributing Editor to Studies in American Humor. Todd is author of A Laughable Empire: The US Imagines the Pacific World, 1840-1890 (Penn State University Press, 2023) and The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015). Todd has earned research fellowships through the Center for Mark Twain Studies, the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Clements Library, and the Lilly Library. His work on political satire and pre-1900 American literature has also appeared in American Periodicals, Scholarly Editing, Early American Literature, ESQ, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Teaching American Literature, the Mark Twain Annual, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a new book project, tentatively titled “Manifest Jestiny: Comic Cartography and Humor as US Foreign Policy, 1840-1870.” Todd serves as Executive Director of the American Humor Studies Association and Contributing Editor to Studies in American Humor. At IUP, Todd teaches graduate and undergraduate literature and writing courses, including classes on humor and satire, literature and activism, and pre-1900 American literature.