The Core Conference consists of three types of sessions:

• Plenary Sessions with Internationally known speakers
• Breakout Sessions on the conference theme, where each attendee can choose the speakers and topics of greatest interest
• Special Sessions offering a range of topics and formats, including open sessions where any attendee can sign up to speak

Plenary Speakers 

Hazel Jones

Carol Medine Moss
Keynote Speaker

Expert on Jane Austen's Bath

Author of:

• Jane Austen's Journeys
• Jane Austen and Marriage 
• The Other Knight Boys: Jane Austen's Dispossessed Nephews

Hazel Jones will be our guide to the city of Bath that Jane Austen knew. 

Hazel has taught Austen courses and presented talks at a variety of venues in the UK, the Netherlands, United States, Canada, and Australia. In addition to her books on Austen, her work has appeared in JASNA's Persuasions and Persuasions On-Line, the Jane Austen Society of Australia's Sensibilities, the UK Jane Austen Society's Annual Report, and Jane Austen’s Regency World. She is the secretary and a co-founder of the UK Jane Austen Society South West Branch and editor of the UK Society’s Annual Report. 

In her keynote talk, “Bath is Still Bath,” Hazel will guide AGM attendees through her favorite city, Bath. Discover exactly what Jane Austen did in Bath during her visit of 1799 and during the period 1801 - 1806. Hazel will cover the houses in which the Austens lived, events they might have attended, people they might have seen, and places they are likely to have visited in the environs of Bath. She hopes to show that–although Jane Austen declared herself happy to escape Bath-she was not always unhappy in Bath, as the city afforded many opportunities for people-watching, theater-going, and walking–all useful material for future novels.

Devoney Looser

JASNA North American Scholar

Regents Professor of English, Arizona State University

Author or editor of 12 books, including:

• Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane
• Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës
• The Making of Jane Austen

Photo: Marilyn Roos

Prof. Devoney Looser is the USA Today Bestselling author or editor of a dozen books, most recently Wild for Austen. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an NEH Public Scholar. She has created audio-video lessons on Austen for The Great Courses and Audible, and her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, TLS, Salon, Slate, and The Washington Post. She has talked Austen on CBS Sunday Morning and CNN. Her next book, The Stunning Gunnings, is under contract to St. Martin’s Press. 

“It comes on faster and faster,” Catherine Morland says of the rain in Bath. In Devoney's talk, "Faster and Faster: The Speed of Life in Jane Austen's Bath Novels,” she will explore the need for speed in Bath in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, from John Thorpe’s horses and Captain Wentworth’s letter to Anne Elliot’s strategically refused sedan chair. Come prepared to consider the most proper (and improper) alacrity. 

Brandon Taylor

Novelist, essayist, editor, literary critic

Author of the introduction to Persuasion (Vintage Books, 2025)

Author of four novels, including:

• Minor Black Figures
• Filthy Animals, Winner of the Story Prize
• Real Life, Finalist for the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize

Brandon Taylor is critically acclaimed for his literary fiction and has gained a following for his essays on contemporary and classic authors and the craft of writing. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Bookforum, Salon, and his newsletter, Sweater Weather.

Taylor is acquiring editor at Unnamed Press and co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics, which curates underappreciated and progressive classic literature.

Persuasion, the book Brandon has re-read more than any other, is the focus of his AGM plenary talk, “Persuasion as a Novel of Second Chances and Transformations.”

Lidia Chang

Historical musicologist and flutist

Assistant Professor of Music at Colorado College

Research interests include:

• Music and gender
• Organology
• The long 18th century
• Print culture

Dr. Lidia Chang is known to many JASNA members for her research on musical culture and her historically informed performances at past AGMs, including "An Evening at the Bath Assembly Rooms" and "A Salon Concert at Hartfield." Her forthcoming book, Gentlemen Making Music in the Georgian Era, explores the untold musical histories of English gentlemen. As our Sunday speaker, Lidia will explore music as a social mediator, combining her talk with performance excerpts. 

Music plays an important yet sometimes subtle role in Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. In “Music as Social Mediator in Persuasion and Northanger Abbey," Lidia will show how Austen places heroines in musical situations that reveal much about the people around them and the values of the period. She will explore music making in Regency society and in Austen’s Bath novels with the help of her musical colleagues.

Special Guest Speaker

Gill Hornby

President of the UK Jane Austen Society

Author of three novels about Jane Austen and her family:

• Miss Austen (adapted for TV, starring Keeley Hawes)
• Godmersham Park
• The Elopement (TV adaptation in development)

Gill Hornby began her career in current affairs television at the BBC.  She later wrote features and book reviews for magazines and newspapers, including a weekly column for the Daily Telegraph.

In 2005, she published "The Story of Jane Austen," a short biography for young readers. Two contemporary social comedies followed, The Hive and All Together Now. In 2020, she published the novel she had wanted to write for two decades, Miss Austen, the story of Jane's relationship with Cassandra.