Main JAD Team
Inger S. Brodey
Inger is a professor and Associate Dean at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has published extensively on Jane Austen and the history of the novel. She serves as president of the Jane Austen Collaborative Board and director and co-founder of the Jane Austen Summer Program (JASP). She is Principal Investigator for our National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Projects for the Public grant and Co-Creator of Jane Austen’s Desk. Her book, Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, is forthcoming with Johns Hopkins, June 2024. Read more about Inger.
Sarah Schaefer Walton
Sarah is an Assistant Professor of English and the Director of Digital Humanities at Marshall University. She has been a part of the Jane Austen Collaborative since 2014. She is an Associate Director of the Jane Austen Summer Program (JASP) and the Project Manager and Co-Creator of Jane Austen’s Desk. Read more about Sarah.
Harriet Wu
Harriet is the owner and designer of Luma Design, providing graphic design services for small businesses and nonprofit organizations. Wu has designed logos and graphics for the Jane Austen Summer Program and is the principal illustrator for Jane Austen's Desk. Read more about Harriet.
Humanities Consultants
Janine Barchas
Janine is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor in English Literature at the University of Texas, Austin. In addition to authoring multiple books on Austen, she co-curated the “Will and Jane” exhibit at the Folger Museum. She also created What Jane Saw , which offers digital reconstructions of two museum events attended by Jane Austen. Barchas is also a former president of the North American Friends of Chawton House (NAFCH).
Katie Childs
Katie is Chief Executive of Chawton House, the former home of Jane Austen's brother Edward Austen-Knight—a house that Austen knew and loved, and which is now home to a world-class library of early women's writing. Katie has worked tirelessly to evolve Chawton House into an inspiring and sustainable historic estate that tells the story of the Knight family and brings early women's writing to life.
Lizzie Dunford
Lizzie is the Director of Jane Austen's House, the home of the globally beloved author and the birthplace of all six of her era-defining and influential novels. A trained conservator and experienced museum leader, Lizzie has worked in the museums and heritage sector for over 15 years, with a focus on house museums.
Caitlin Donovan
Caitlin is assistant director of Duke University's Master of Arts in Teaching Program. Her research interests center on critical digital literacy, teacher preparation, writing communities, and memes. She is a National Board-Certified educator, formerly teaching middle and high school in North Carolina, where her content areas spanned English/Language Arts, social studies, and creative writing. Caitlin is co-chair of the Jane Austen Summer Program's enrichment programming for educators and consults on educational content for Jane Austen's Desk.
Susan Allen Ford
Susan is Professor of English Emerita, Delta State University, and has been editor of Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal and Persuasions On-Line since 2006. She has also faithfully attended and contributed to the Jane Austen Summer Program (JASP) since its founding. She is JASP's context corner coordinator and a member of the Board of Directors of the Jane Austen Collaborative. Her book What Jane Austen's Characters Read (and Why) is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic Press in June 2024.
Sheila Johnson Kindred
Award-winning author Sheila brings the naval world of Jane Austen to life through her meticulously researched and vivid writing. Her Jane Austen's Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017) is a revealing account of a naval officer's young wife, her life during the Napoleonic wars, and her influence on Jane Austen's fiction. Sheila consults on the naval aspects of Jane Austen's Desk.
Devoney Looser
Devoney is Professor of English at Arizona State University. She is the author or editor of nine books on literature by women, a Guggenheim Fellow, and an NEH Public Scholar. Her recent book The Making of Jane Austen (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017), was named 'Best Summer Book' (nonfiction, 2017) by Publisher's Weekly and won an Inside Higher Education Reader's Choice Award (2017). Known also for her public facing-work, Looser has published essays in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon, Slate, and the Times Literary Supplement.
Technical Consultants
Erica Freed
Erica is a graduate student in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has a bachelors degree in English and Political Science from the University of South Carolina. Erica is interested in prioritizing accessibility in digital spaces for educational purposes, and in creating safe, interesting, non-commercial websites. She is the database developer and manager for Jane Austen's Desk.
Firestream Media
FireStream Media, owned by Carol Thomson, has been building websites and web applications since 2006. Carol and Emily Gillcoat are the co-developers for Jane Austen's Desk. Carol is also the project manager. Carol and Emily have worked together for over 15 years building custom database applications. FireStream is located in downtown Durham, NC. Read more about FireStream.
Emily C. Friedman
Em is Associate Professor of English at Auburn University and the Director of 18thConnect: Eighteenth-Century Scholarship Online, a site that aggregates and peer reviews online primary and secondary sources as well as digital projects. She is also the creator of Manuscript Fiction in Age of Print, a digital project that describes, transcribes, and encodes fiction that survives in manuscript form between 1750-1900.
Brian Norberg
Brian is currently a DevOps Engineer at NetApp, where he architects and builds automated publication processes and apps for the product documentation team. Before NetApp, Brian worked for over a decade at NC State University, Duke University, and Marist College consulting, designing, and building services and tools to support faculty and student use of technology in the classroom and research projects.
