Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: an HSC Masterclass

This HSC Masterclass focuses on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the ‘Worlds of Upheaval’ that the text explores.
About this Event

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has extraordinary relevance for the present moment, despite being over two centuries old. It challenges us to reckon with what it means to be human in an age of scientific discovery and technological innovation, artificial intelligence, human community, feminism, loneliness and regret.

Join this HSC Masterclass, led by the world’s leading expert on Mary Shelley, to learn about the author and unpack the extraordinary scientific and intellectual contexts that enabled her to write one of the most enduringly loved, enduringly frightening classics of the modern age.

The Masterclass will include:

• a short lecture by Professor Eileen Hunt (University of Notre Dame), who is visiting Sydney this month

• a conversation between Professor Hunt and Professor Sophie Gee (Princeton University/University of Sydney), co-host of The Secret Life of Books podcast

• a display of books and other items held by the State Library of NSW relating to Mary Shelley, her mother Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), and their contemporaries.

This Masterclass is co-organised by the Australian Catholic University’s Western Civilisation Program and the State Library of NSW. It will be hosted by Dr Johanna Harris, Associate Professor of Literature in the Western Civilisation Program, ACU.

Suitable for Year 11 and Year 12 students and their teachers. All Year 11 students must be accompanied by an adult, however Year 12 students can attend independently. We recommend a supervision ratio of 1 adult per 20 students. All attendees must have a ticket.

Professor Eileen Hunt is Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA). She is the author of a trilogy of books on Mary Shelley: Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in 'Frankenstein' (2018); Artificial Life After Frankenstein (2021); The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination (2024). She has also published Portraits of Wollstonecraft: The Making of a Feminist Icon, 1785–2020 (2023), and is editing Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman for Oxford University Press.

Professor Sophie Gee is Professor of English at Princeton University and Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Sydney, from where she leads several important projects promoting the value of the humanities. She is the author of Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination (2010) and The Barbarous Feast: Eating & Writing in the Eighteenth-Century World (2026). Sophie is the co-host (with Jonty Claypole) of the award-winning podcast The Secret Life of Books.

Thank you for your interest in attending a program at the State Library of NSW. Please see the Terms and Conditions on our website which apply to all our programs and events.