Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/08/2026
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
4010 JFSB
Category(ies)
We hope you’ll join us for the second installment of the Humanities Center’s Out of the Best Books series on Thursday, October 8th @ 3:30 pm in 4010 JFSB. Leslee Thorne-Murphy will reflect on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, exploring the novel’s enduring insights into ambition, relationships, community, and the search for a meaningful life. Refreshments will be served.
Title: Out of the Best Books: George Eliot’s Middlemarch
Out of the Best Books” is a new Humanities Center lecture series that invites faculty members from throughout the college to reflect on a literary work they regard as among the “best books.” Each month, a different scholar will introduce a foundational text, addressing whatever dimensions of the book most appeal to them (e.g, aesthetic quality, historical significance, spiritual dimensions, enduring capacity to shape human thought and experience, etc.). The series aims to foster broad conversations about the nature of literary excellence and the continuing relevance of great books in contemporary intellectual life.
About our presenter:
Leslee Thorne-Murphy is a professor in the Department of English, and she currently serves as an associate dean in the College of Humanities. She teaches and studies British literature, in particular Victorian literature, with specialties in social reform fiction, prose genres, and print culture. Her most recent book, Bazaar Literature: Charity, Advocacy, and Parody in Victorian Social Reform Fiction, examines fundraising as a means of better understanding the methods and aims of nineteenth-century realist fiction. Her current projects include co-editing a digital anthology, The Victorian Short Fiction Project (vsfp.byu.edu) with her students, and compiling a volume of nineteenth-century children’s literature on a range of religious and faith traditions.
