Frankenstein’s Dark and Stormy Birth

Mary Shelley found herself on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816, during a “cold, wet, ungenial summer” – just one of the global climatic effects of a volcanic explosion in Indonesia. Gillen D’Arcy Wood of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment, University of Illinois, explores that fateful summer when the writers Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, housebound by incessant rain, embarked on a ghost story contest that led to Frankenstein.

*The exhibition It’s Alive! Frankenstein at 200 will open at 5:30 pm for program attendees.