Roedde House Speaker Series, June 26th: “Psychology and Allegory for the Victorians in “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”

Please join us for our monthly speaker series event, in which scholars and professionals in Victorian literature, regional and local history, and heritage preservation will give talks on a variety of interesting subjects. Topics and speakers will change monthly! For our June event, Richard Bergen will discuss allegory and space in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.Stevenson’s story about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is an allegory of good and evil, but a particularly Victorian one with social as well as individual valence: one widely exposes the disrepair of Victorian London and its professional spaces. About the speaker: Richard Angelo Bergen is a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia. He works in late medieval and renaissance literature (with an interest in gothic and fantasy), and has won 2 Canada Graduate awards from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, for his MA and his PhD. He has a wide range of interests, from heavy metal concept albums to devotional poetry, but his chief vein of research concerns allegory, as a genre of literature, and as a variety of interpretation. His dissertation focuses on the use of space and place in allegorical narratives.