English professor Margaret Maurer has nurtured a love of literature in thousands of Colgate undergraduates and has cultivated that love through book club sessions she leads each summer for alumnae.
For the first time, Maurer’s book club talk will be available through a live webcast available to everyone with Internet access. She will lead a discussion about The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides at 7:45 p.m. today. Just go to livestream.com/colgateuniversity on a computer or mobile device to watch and participate in the conversation.
Maurer has been talking books with alumnae for many years. This year, she will be making stops in Hamilton, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. Alumnae who live or who are traveling to these areas are encouraged to attend. Complete details are here.
The book tour is one of the programs offered by the Women at Colgate affinity group.
Maurer, the William Henry Crawshaw Professor of literature, works with the group on selecting a book for discussion each summer. This year’s selection, The Marriage Plot, was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2011 and a Publisher’s Weekly Top 10 Book of 2011.
Eugenides, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex, was at Colgate three years ago as part of the university’s Living Writers course.
Maurer’s specific area of expertise is Shakespeare and 16th- and early 17th-century English literature. Her latest book is Three Shrew Plays: Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew; with The Anonymous The Taming of a Shrew; and Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed, which she edited with Barry Gaines.
She was one of three resident scholars for the NEH-sponsored Teaching Shakespeare Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2010.