Launch | Reading with Austen: The Digital Recreation of an Eighteenth-Century Library
Join Peter Sabor and Catherine Nygren for the launch of the Burney Centre's new website, Reading with Austen (www.readingwithausten.com), a digital recreation of the Library of Godmersham Park, the home of Jane Austen’s wealthy brother Edward Austen Knight. Learn about the library as Austen herself saw it with each book in its exact shelf location and photographs of the very books she handled.
Enjoy a display of RBSC's copies of the same editions of books that Austen read, and of one book that was on the shelves of the Library itself: the only ex-Godmersham Park book in any collection in Canada.
Peter Sabor holds the Canada Research Chair in Eighteenth-Century Studies at McGill University, where he is Director of the Burney Centre. He is the author and editor of more than twenty works on eighteenth-century novelists and playwrights. Most recently, his pioneering work as an editor and scholar has shaped the field of Jane Austen and Frances Burney. He has also written about Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Henry and Sarah Fielding, John Cleland, Horace Walpole, Samuel Johnson and other eighteenth-century authors. He is currently working on editions of the letters of John Cleland and of Dr. Charles Burney.
Catherine Nygren is a Ph.D. candidate in McGill's English department, exploring how eighteenth-century British travel writing changed over time using computational methods. She's worked on several other digital projects, including the Grub Street Project and Distant Reading Early Modernity, and she is the current Project Manager for Reading with Austen, where she supervised the design and implementation of the project's data, design, and website.
