Series of events celebrates 250 years of Jane Austen

20 October 2025

Series of events celebrates 250 years of Jane Austen

King’s Faculty of Arts & Humanities is hosting a series of events to celebrate 250 years since the birth of Jane Austen on 16 December 1775, featuring cross-disciplinary expertise.

250 Years of Jane Austen features academics from the Department of Digital Humanities, the Department of English and the Department of Music, who use their expertise to reimagine Austen for modern-day audiences.

King's is an important centre for the study of Austen's work. Jane Austen's novels explore key themes of modern life: class mobility, gender politics, power relations, and social hypocrisy. Austen's writing has had a profound influence on how we think about our identities and our relationships. Experts in the Departments of English, Music and Digital Humanities are all bringing new perspectives to the continuing impact of Austen's brilliant storytelling.
Professor Daniel Orrells, Head of Cultures, Faculty of Arts & Humanities

On 22 October, a recital of Jane Austen’s Music Collection hosted by the Department of Music will explore the interplay between Austen’s musical world and literary imagination by drawing on her personal music books.

Featuring soprano Louisa Hunter-Bradley from the Royal Academy of Music London, tenor Paul Bentley-Angell from Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, and pianist and composer Chris Gardner, the performance offers rare insight into the sounds that shaped Austen’s daily life and artistic sensibilities.

Images of Austen’s own writing will be projected during the recital, allowing the audience to experience the repertoire as Austen would have.

Dr Erik Ketzan, Lecturer in Digital Humanities & Cultural Computation in the Department of Digital Humanities, delivers a lecture on The Past and Future of Computational Jane Austen Studies on 13 November.

Scholars have used code and computation since at least the 1970s to analyse Austen’s texts. At this event, Dr Ketzan traces the methods used by digital humanists to interpret and understand Austen’s fiction, as well as offering new ways to apply code and data to reveal more about her work.

The late Professor John Burrows, a true pioneer in digital humanities, published an incredible book in 1987 on how Austen distinguished her characters through word choice. As computational literary studies has been growing exponentially in recent years, there's been exciting new work in digital Austen studies, as well. But one major topic that computation can still bring more insight to is Austen's style. If we think about style as a deviation from a linguistic norm, what kind of British English was Austen diverging from, and how, exactly, did she do so in her writing? Professor Burrows laid the groundwork, and computational methods could reveal even more ways, at the word and syntax level, that Austen's style innovated literary English.
Dr Erik Ketzan, Lecturer in Digital Humanities & Cultural Computation

Austen and Us: Why read Jane Austen in 2026? on 21 January brings together novelist Tessa Hadley with actor-writers Anni Domingo (Mansfield Park) and Romola Garai (Emma) to examine Austen’s enduring popularity.

In a discussion chaired by Professor Lara Feigel, Professor of Modern Literature and Culture in the Department of English, they will use Austen’s work to analyse the value of studying English in today’s world. Half of the spaces at this event are reserved for A-Level pupils studying English and considering coming to King's.