Rytting presents at Global Jane Austen Conference

In July, Dr. Jenny Rytting presented at a conference and visited several Jane Austen sites in the United Kingdom in honor of the 250th anniversary of the author's birth. (Submitted photo)

Dr. Jenny Rytting, a professor of English and assistant chair of the School of Language, Literature and Writing at Northwest Missouri State University, presented at the Global Jane Austen Conference in Southampton, United Kingdom in July.

Rytting's presentation, titled "Two Global Figures: Jane Austen and Carl Jung," contributed to the conference celebrating Austen's birth year in 1775. Her paper explored connections between Austen's writing and Jung's psychological ideologies. 

Rytting teaches several courses at Northwest focused on Austen and early British literature. She says her experience at the conference and others she has attended help enhance her knowledge and coursework.  

"I think in a variety of ways, going to conferences is energizing, and it puts me in touch with other scholars," Rytting said. "I get great ideas from them, and I learn additional perspectives based on the panels I attend and bring back ideas that then I can tell my students about, which is really exciting."  

The conference was part of a larger celebration for the 250th anniversary of Austen's birth, with events occurring around the world.  

"When I first heard of it from one of my colleagues in Brazil, I was immediately excited," Rytting said. "Certainly, it's not the only big Jane Austen conference. They're kind of springing up all over because of this anniversary year, but this one was really special because it was held in a town where Austen actually lived for part of her life." 

After the conference, Rytting also visited other significant places related to Austen and her work. They included Chawton, where Austen revised most of her books; Winchester, where she died; and Steventon, where she was born. Winchester College opened No. 8 College Street, Austen's last residence, to visitors for the first time during the summer.

"It was surprisingly moving," Rytting said. "They had one sofa because Austen writes about sitting on the sofa and looking out into the garden. Being able to stand at the window and look out and imagine Austen in the last days of her life, seeing that same view, was neat. They had quotations from her final letters and her sister Cassandra's final letters, and reading those words aloud in that space was really powerful."

To benefit students, Rytting implements techniques and content from conferences she attends into her classroom.  This fall, she is collaborating with students in her Studies in Language course on an Austen-related project to be presented in November at another conference celebrating the 250th anniversary of the author's birth year.

"Sometimes I'm able to find a published version of something I've heard at a conference and bring that into the classroom as well," Rytting said. "Another thing that I like to do is in my graduate classes, we often end with a class symposium where I ask students to write papers as if presenting at a conference, and we put them into a panel and small-scale replicate that kind of experience." 

Rytting joined the Northwest faculty in 2006 and also specializes in medieval visionary literature, history of the English language, and children's and young adult literature, in addition to her academic interests in early British Literature and Jane Austen and her contemporaries.

She earned her bachelor's degree in English in 1995 from Brigham Young University, followed by her master's degree in 1996 from Acadia University and her Ph.D. in 2005 from Arizona State University.