Indiana State University Newsroom

The Indiana State University Schick Lecture Series on Language, Literature and Lexicography will feature Juliet McMaster on Wednesday, March 6, and Edward Copeland on Thursday, March 7.

Both presentations will take place at 3:30 p.m. in Root Hall A-264. Receptions will follow in Root Hall A-269-270.

Juliet McMaster is university professor emeritus of the University of Alberta, where she spent all of her professional career. A native of Kenya, McMaster studied at Oxford and Mount Holyoke before receiving her doctorate degree at Alberta.

McMaster was the first doctoral student to finish the university's doctorate program in the Faculty of Arts, graduating in 1965. That same year, she placed second in the Canadian fencing championships. Since then, she has taught some 20 courses at the university, including a fencing course for drama students.

A notable author and scholar, McMaster has written and co-authored books about Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens. She has written dozens of articles and reviews on 18th and 19th-century British fiction, totaling more than 70 articles and books. She is currently writing a critical biography of James Clarke Hook.

More than a dozen awards speak to McMaster's scholarship, including the $50,000 Canada Council Molson Prize, Canada Council Killam Research Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

McMaster is also co-editor of the "Jane Austen Cambridge Companion" (1997), a book she co-wrote with Thursday's speaker, Edward Copeland. Copeland is a professor emeritus of English at Pomona College, a liberal-arts college in Southern California. He will speak about "Jane Austen: Adaptations and Appropriations."

During his three decades of teaching, Copeland taught English literature courses focusing on Jane Austen, 18th-century literature, literature of the American South and early women's fiction.

Copeland has published more than five books, recently serving as the editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of "Sense and Sensibility" (2006) and the author of "Women Writing about Fiction: Women's Fiction in England, 1790-1820" (1995). He has published essays on Richardson, Defoe, Fielding, Cleland, Burney and other 18th-century figures.

Copeland is the recipient of several honors, including a Fulbright, a National Endowment of the Humanities summer fellowship, and an Andrew W. Mellow Foundation Emeritus Fellowship, for which Copeland received a unanimous nomination by a special collegiate committee.

The Schick Lecture Series in Language, Literature and Lexicography began in 1988 and is made possible through a bequest from Joseph S. Schick, professor emeritus of English.

Contact: Keith Byerman, professor of English, department of English, Indiana State University, at 812-237-3208 or keith.byerman@indstate.edu.

Writer: Bethany Donat, media relations assistant, Office of Communications and Marketing, Indiana State University, at 812-237-3773