The regular May 2018 Island Studies Lecture takes place on Tuesday, May 15, at 7 p.m. in the SDU Main Building Faculty Lounge on the UPEI campus and will feature L.M. Montgomery scholar Dr. Kate Scarth speaking about “Anne of Charlottetown and Summerside: L.M. Montgomery’s Urban PEI.” This presentation follows Anne of Green Gables to urban PEI: to Charlottetown and Summerside. In Anne of Green Gables, Anne goes to Queen’s College—a fictional version of Prince of Wales College—and in Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne is the principal of Summerside High School. Of course, Anne of Green Gables and its author L.M. Montgomery usually conjure up images of rural Avonlea and Cavendish, the beaches and farms of PEI’s north shore. Montgomery’s rural island is reflected in her own writings, and later film and TV adaptations and the many tourist sites like Green Gables that celebrate the author. While the rural looms large in her life and work, Montgomery was also a chronicler of urban Canada. She wrote journals and letters about her life in Charlottetown, Prince Albert, Halifax, and Toronto, while three novels, Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars, and Jane of Lantern Hill, have significant urban settings. How does one of the most insightful writers of PEI and Canada’s literary landscapes grapple with the tensions between modernizing, globally linked, growing towns and a traditional rural, agriculturally based island? The presentation offers an urban dimension to a writer usually steeped in rural tradition, but who was writing about a Canada starting to become the urban nation it is today. Dr. Kate Scarth is the Chair of L.M. Montgomery Studies and Applied Communication, Leadership, and Culture (ACLC) at UPEI. Her research focuses on English and Canadian literature written from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century and she is particularly interested in fiction about urbanism and the environment. Her book, Romantic Suburbs: Sensibility, Ecology, and Greater London, is under contract with the University of Toronto Press. She is also leading a digital humanities, public engagement project about literary Halifax, Nova Scotia. Admission to the lecture is free and everyone is welcome to attend. This concludes our regular lecture series for the spring ― unless something too good to pass up comes our way! Watch for the series to resume in the fall. For more information, please contact Laurie at iis@upei.ca or (902) 894-2881.