Regina Exchange Lecture with Professor Anne James

Regina Exchange Lecture

by Professor Anne James
University of Regina

Friday, March 13 at 2:30 pm

Arts 212

Reception to follow in Arts 312

The annual celebration of the plot’s discovery, popularly referred to as “Bonfire Night” or “Guy Fawkes Night,” began finally dying out in the twentieth century, apparently taking Fawkes’s memory with it. Just when his popular and literary life seemed about to be extinguished, however, he staged a revival in Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta, and from there launched a new career as a symbol for the group Anonymous.

As several historians have pointed out, Fawkes’s portrayal in the graphic novel, and subsequent movie, are at odds with his historical intentions, transforming him from “Catholic supremacist” (as one writer puts it) to anarchist.

Anne James has taught as a Sessional Instructor at Luther College at the University of Regina since 2011. Her research interests include John Donne, John Milton, the early modern sermon, particularly its role in memorializing historical events, and, most recently, digital humanities. With co-investigator Dr. Jeanne Shami, she is engaged in a four-year SSHRC-funded project to increase access to early modern English sermon manuscripts by creating a group-sourced bibliographic database (GEMMS: Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons). In 2016 she published Poets, Players, and Preachers: Remembering the Gunpowder Plot in Seventeenth-Century England. She currently participates in a collaborative project editing John Donne’s letters and contributes the annual review of publications in Donne studies for the Year’s Work in English Studies.