F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has turned 100 this year. To discuss the enduring significance of the novel, we are excited to host literary scholar Professor Julia Stern on Tuesday, September 9. Dr. Stern has been teaching the novel since the mid-1980s, when she was a graduate student at Columbia University. Professor Stern will present the argument that by unpacking the epic dimensions of The Great Gatsby, according to criteria developed to understand Homer, Virgil, and Dante, the audience will gain a distinctive appreciation of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece.

Professor Julia Stern is the Henry Sanborn Noyes Professor of Literature and the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University. She is the author of The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early America Novel (a finalist for the MLA first book prize), Mary Chesnut’s Civil War Epic, and Bette Davis Black and White, all published by University of Chicago Press. Professor Stern teaches courses on American women and Black writers of the 19^th century, Faulkner’s novels, and the cinema of classical Hollywood, particularly the work of Bette Davis. Professor Stern is currently working on a collection of essays, tentatively titled, “The Many Skins of Bette Davis.”