Michael Dirda
Main Street Chestertown and The Bookplate are pleased to offer two literary talks this Saturday as part of the Dickens of a Christmas festival. Michael Dirda, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book columnist for the Washington Post, will present “The Classic English Ghost Story” at noon. Dickens scholars Katherine Charles and Michelle Allen-Emerson will present “The Making of ‘A Christmas Carol’ and Why We Still Read It’” at 2:30. Both events are free and open to the public. The Bookplate is located at 112 S. Cross Street.
Michael Dirda is the author of five collections of essays—Readings, Bound to Please, Book by Book, Classics for Pleasure and Browsings—and of the memoir An Open Book. His biographical/critical study, On Conan Doyle, received a 2012 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.
Dirda graduated with Highest Honors in English from Oberlin College and earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature (focusing on medieval studies and European romanticism) from Cornell University. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement and several other literary periodicals, as well as an occasional lecturer and college teacher. His current project is an appreciation of British popular fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Katherine Charles is Assistant Professor of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature at Washington College. Her research focuses on how early novels developed new techniques for representing point of view and social differences. Trained as a journalist as well as a literary scholar, she has a special interest in Charles Dickens, the great Victorian novelist who first made a name for himself as a periodical essayist, the Inimitable Boz.
Michelle Allen-Emerson is Professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy. Publications include Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London (Ohio University Press) and the six-volume edited collection of primary source material, Sanitary Reform in Victorian Britain (Routledge). When she is not teaching midshipmen, she is working on her current book project, “Why We Don’t Read Dickens (And Why We Should).”
The Dickens of a Christmas festival is a production of Main Street Chestertown. For more information and a complete festival schedule, please visit mainstreetchestertown.org.
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