Chesterton Institute Online Conference: "Dickens & Chesterton--A Sesquicentennial Conversation"  

The G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture at Seton Hall University is pleased to announce an online conference on the theme of G.K. Chesterton and Charles Dickens titled "Dickens & Chesterton -- A Sesquicentennial Conversation." The conference speakers are Dr. Dermot Quinn and Dr. John M. L. Drew, and the moderator is Gloria Garafulich-Grabois, Director of the G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture. The event will be streamed online on Wednesday, February 17, 2021, from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. EST. Click here to join.

About the Conference
Charles Dickens brought out the best in G. K. Chesterton, and so it is fitting that he should also bring out the best in the G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture and The Chesterton Review, which has devoted its last issue to Charles Dickens. When Chesterton described Dickens, he seemed to be describing himself:

"Dickens stands first as a defiant monument of what happens when a great literary genius has a literary taste akin to that of the community. For this kinship was deep and spiritual. Dickens was not like our ordinary demagogues and journalists. Dickens did not write what the people wanted. He wanted what the people wanted … His power, then, lay in the fact that he expressed with an energy and brilliancy quite uncommon the things close to the common mind."

We invite you to join us for this conversation.

About the Speakers
John M. L. Drew is Professor of English Literature at The University of Buckingham, UK, where he has taught since 1998. The editor, with Michael Slater, of Volume IV of the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism (2000), and author of Dickens the Journalist (2003), he publishes and reviews widely on Victorian print culture and the works of Dickens. Since 2012, he has directed the open access web archive of Dickens's journalism at https://www.djo.org.uk

Dermot Quinn, D.Phil., is Professor of History at Seton Hall University and Editor of The Chesterton Review. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and New College, Oxford, where he was awarded a doctorate in 1986. He has written extensively on Chestertonian themes; has authored three books titled The Irish in New Jersey: Four Centuries of American Life (Rutgers University Press, 2004, and winner, New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance, Non-fiction Book of the Year, 2005), Patronage and Piety: The Politics of English Roman Catholicism, 1850-1900 (Stanford University Press/Macmillan, 1993), and Understanding Northern Ireland (Baseline Books, Manchester, UK, 1993); and many articles and reviews in the field of British and Irish history.

Categories: Faith and Service