The 2025 Fall Trouble Begins Lecture Series presented by the Center for Mark Twain Studies (CMTS) continued its lecture series on October 16, 2025.
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.
Kerry Driscoll, Ann Ryan, and Matt Seybold presented “Beyond the White Suit: Mark Twain in the 21st Century.”
In 1910 William Dean Howells published My Mark Twain. In the world of Twain scholarship, the possessive pronoun—yours, mine, ours—surfaces in a number of titles, as authors struggle to interpret the meaning of Twain’s life and literature. And as we’ve seen in recent publications, the desire to understand, contain, or revise that legacy continues—generating even more complicated readings of his history and our own. Join us at Quarry Farm for a conversation about Twain in the world today.
Kerry Driscoll, author of Mark Twain Among The Indians (University of California, 2019), a groundbreaking study of Twain’s “deeply conflicted representations” of indigenous peoples, a topic long ignored by Twain Studies scholarship. She is Associate Editor at the Mark Twain Papers and Project at University of California, Berkeley.
Ann Ryan, author of the forthcoming The Ghosts of Mark Twain (University of Missouri Press, 2025), which “calls into question the ‘St. Mark’ school of criticism, and invites readers to question Twain’s easy relation to Black culture.” She is Professor of English at Le Moyne College.
Matt Seybold, editor of the annotated digital edition of Mark Twain & The Russians produced by CMTS in 2022, and a series of essays on “The Twain Doctrine,” the Cold War propagandization of Twain’s works and legacy by both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. He is Associate Professor of American Literature at Elmira College.
See additional 2025 Fall Trouble Begins Lectures:
- Wednesday, October 29, “‘I have always preached’: Mark Twain and Liberal Religion” by Dwayne Eutsey, Independent Scholar (Quarry Farm Barn at 7pm)
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.