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Looking for a small, close-knit campus filled with incredible, hands-on learning opportunities? Our Admissions Office can help make Elmira College YOUR place.
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“The Author’s Memories,” illustration by Truman W. “True Williams. First appearing as the frontispiece to A Tramp Abroad (1880).
The public is invited to attend the 2026 Fall The Trouble Begins Lecture Series, presented by the Center for Mark Twain Studies and supported by the generous donations of The Mark Twain Foundation. The second free lecture is 7:00 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 14 in the Barn at Quarry Farm, with a presentation by Todd Nathan Thompson, Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Director of the Cook Honors College.
Entitled “Mark Twain, Hemispheric Humorist,” Thompson shares how, typically, “American humor” is studied only in relation to the United States alone. However, Twain traveled throughout the Americas, and his early comedy was formed in a part of the U.S. that had been part of Mexico only two decades before. Thompson wants to take a broader view of humor across the Western Hemisphere and analyzes Twain’s early-career comic writing, which reveals Twain’s awareness of the interconnectedness of different locations in the Americas and his insight into U.S. imperialism. Thompson argues that this broader perspective challenges the idea that American humor helps create a distinct American national character.
Thompson is the author of A Laughable Empire: The US Imagines the Pacific World, 1840-1890 and The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire. His work has also appeared in American Periodicals, Scholarly Editing, Early American Literature, ESQ, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Teaching American Literature, the Mark Twain Annual, and elsewhere. His current book project is tentatively titled “Manifest Jestiny: Comic Cartography and Humor as US Foreign Policy, 1840-1870.”
The remaining lectures in this year’s Fall Trouble Begins Lecture Series are listed below. All lectures begin at 7:00 p.m. at the Barn at Quarry Farm. They are free and open to the public. Find recordings of previous lectures here.
Wednesday, Oct. 14: “Mark Twain, Hemispheric Humorist,” by Todd Nathan Thompson, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Wednesday, Oct. 21: “Mark Twain’s Election Advice: Vote Your Conscience! Elect Candidates of Integrity Who Put Your Country’s Interest above Party Loyalty and Aggrandizement” by Donald T. Bliss, Independent Scholar
Wednesday, Oct. 28: “The Mundane Transcendence of Mark Twain’s Late Style” by Ray Horton, Murray State University
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 spring of each year, in the Barn at Quarry Farm or at Peterson Chapel in Cowles Hall on Elmira College's campus. All lectures are free and open to the public.
