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A live crossover podcasting event with the This Guy Sucked podcast, hosted at the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. The question is not only whether and how much Mark Twain might have sucked, but also the potential for Twain’s complex legacy to be altered by politics, propaganda, education, and scholarship.
Date Recorded: May 6, 2026
Music: Danny Weiss Quartet
Featured Guests
Claire Aubin is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University with appointments in the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, & Transnational Migration, and the Whitney Humanities Center. She is the executive producer and host of This Guy Sucked.
Erin Bartram is the Associate Director of Education at the Mark Twain House & Museum and the founding editor of Contingent Magazine.
Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.
Episode Bibliography
Jonathan Arac, Huckleberry Finn as Idol & Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time (U. Wisconsin, 1997)
Joshua Chadwick, The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn (U Mississippi, 1998)
Kerry Driscoll, Mark Twain Among The Indians & Other Indigenous Peoples (U. California, 2018)
Susan K. Harris, The Courtship of Olivia Langdon & Mark Twain (Cambridge UP, 1996)
Susan K. Harris, God’s Arbiters: Americans & The Phillippines, 1898-1902 (Oxford UP, 2011)
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain & African-American Voices (Oxford UP, 1994)
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Lighting Out For The Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain & American Culture (Oxford UP, 1998)
Fred Kaplan, The Singular Mark Twain (PenguinRandomHouse, 2005)
Cody Marrs, Nineteenth-Century American Literature & The Long Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2015)
Linda A. Morris, Gender Play in Mark Twain: Cross-Dressing & Transgression (U. Missouri, 2011)
Ann Ryan, The Ghosts of Mark Twain: A Study of Manhood, Race, & The Gothic Imagination (U. Missouri, 2025)
Ann Ryan & Josephy B. McCullough, Cosmopolitan Twain (U. Missouri, 2011)
Matt Seybold, “The Twain Doctrine” Mark Twain Annual (2023)
Matt Seybold, “The Twain Doctrine: Citizen Holbrook & The Geopolitics of Colloquial Humor” Center For Mark Twain Studies (July 28, 2022)
Matt Seybold, “The Twain Doctrine” Center For Mark Twain Studies (May 10, 2022)
Matt Seybold, “Darnella Frazier’s Smartphone & Mark Twain’s Notepad: The Vigilante Origins of American Police” Center For Mark Twain Studies (August 6, 2022)
Matt Seybold, “Mark Twain’s Playground” North American Review (Spring 2024)
Matt Seybold, “The Gospel of Revolt: Mark Twain in Elmira” C19 Podcast (December 17, 2019)
Laura Skandera-Trombley, Mark Twain in The Company of Women (U. Pennsylvania, 1997)
Barbara E. Snedecor, Gravity: Selected Letters of Olivia Langdon Clemens (U. Missouri, 2023)
Mark Twain, The Diaries of Adam & Eve (1906)
Mark Twain, Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909)
Mark Twain, “Does The Race of Man Love of Lord?” The Spectator (April 19, 1902)
Mark Twain, “What Have The Police Been Doing?” Virginia City Territorial Enterprise (January 18, 1866)
Mark Twain, Letters From Hawaii (Appleton-Century, 1966)
Marcia A. Zug, You’ll Do: A History of Marrying For Reasons Other Than Love (PenguinRandomHouse, 2025)
Event Copy
