KEYNOTE SPEAKER
PROFESSOR NANCY METZ
"Articulating America: Dickens at Work Among the Metaphors"
Author of the Companion to Martin Chuzzlewit and an associate professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.


JEROME MECKIER
"Chapter Four of American Notes: Self-Discovery in Lowell or Why Little Nell Would Have Been Happy There but Dickens Was Not"

NATALIE MCKNIGHT
"Dickens, Industry, and America"
Professor of English and American literature at Boston University. She is the author of Suffering Mothers in Mid-Victorian Novels, and Idiots, Madmen and Other Prisoners in Dickens.

JOEL J. BRATTIN
" 'A Mockery So Gross and Monstrous': Slavery in Dickens's Manuscript of American Notes"
Professor of Humanities and Arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He has just completed his most ambitious project, editing and annotating the 930-page version of Our Mutual Friend -the last full-length novel Dickens lived to complete - for the 21-volume Everyman Dickens series. He is president of the 800-member Dickens Society, an international non-profit group that encourages research on Dickens's life and work. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Dickensian, Dickens Quarterly and Dickens Studies Newsletter, among other publications.
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DAVID PAROISSIEN
"Shaping Pupils for Good and for Evil in Hard TImes and Our Mutual Friend: Mental Warehouses and Victorian Pedagogy"
Educated in England and in the United States, Dr. Paroissien received his PhD from UCLA. He now lives in Oxford, where he has recently retired as Emeritus Professor of English after teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst since 1968. He edits Dickens Quarterly and works with Susan Shatto as co-editor of The Dickens Companions. He has contributed two volumes to this series, most recently, The Companion to Great Expectations (2000).  He will be giving an additional lecture for the Parker Lecture series on Sunday, April 7^th at 2:00 p.m.   

JOHN BOWEN
"Dicken's Black Atlantic"
Lecturer of English at the University of Keele.  He is the author of Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit and has edited Barnaby Rudge for Penguin. He is a member of  the Dickens Project of the University of California, and gave the keynote address at their annual conference, the Dickens Universe in 1999. His articles have appeared in a number of leading journals, including Critical Quarterly and ELH.  He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Victorian Culture, a contributor to the Oxford Companion to Dickens and reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement

DAVID PARKER
"Dickens and the American Christmas"
Former director of the Dickens House Museum in London, England.

JOSS MARSH
"Dickens as Celebrity"