The Spring Trouble Begins Lecture Series Continues On May 21

The spring 2025 The Trouble Begins Lecture Series presented by the Center for Mark Twain Studies (CMTS) continues at 7:00 p.m., Wednesday, May 21, at Quarry Farm and will continue each Wednesday through May. The lectures are free and open to the public.

Next week’s lecture will feature Jess Libow, Interim Director of the Writing Program and Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College. Her speech, titled “Mark Twain and the ‘Commerce of Disease,’” will examine the different metaphors found in Twain’s unfinished 1905 novel, Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes. Libow draws connections between Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which depict unhygienic and impoverished environments to convey the microscopic yet immense threat of disease. In Twain’s story, the microbes can be seen as stand-ins for American workers, yet Libow also argues that the unseen germs are also a metaphor for the public health threat posed by industrial capitalism.

Libow’s first book, Vigorous Reforms: Women Writers and the Politics of Health in the Nineteenth-Century United States, will be available this fall. Her writing has appeared in multiple journals.

The Trouble Begins Lectures are open to the public. The Series will continue on Wednesdays throughout May at the Quarry Farm Barn.

The final 2025 Spring Trouble Begins Lecture:

• 7:00 p.m., Wed., May 28: “Mark Twain’s Political Critique of Divine Providence: Joan of Arc and Personal Recollections” Bernard J. Dobski, Assumption University

About The Trouble Begins Lecture Series

In 1984, the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies initiated a lecture series, The Trouble Begins at Eight lecture series. The title came from the handbill advertising Mark Twain's October 2, 1866 lecture presented at Maguire's Academy of Music in San Francisco. The first lectures were presented in 1985. By invitation, Mark Twain scholars present lectures in the fall and