Reading Groups

Reproductive Rights and Resistance: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments with Shirley Tung

3 Sessions Saturdays, 11:00 am EDT - 12:30 pm EDT January 18 to March 1, 2025

Online via Zoom

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The ‘With Books’ option includes the titles required for this group at a 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
1/18, 2/8, 3/1
Held Online via Zoom

In the 40 years since its publication, The Handmaid’s Tale has become frighteningly timely, with the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade and increased state legislation restricting reproductive freedoms. Set in an alternative present where the United States is ruled by an authoritarian theocracy called Gilead that severely limits women’s rights, The Handmaid’s Tale is told from the perspective of a titular Handmaid who is subjected to ritualistic rape to increase the country’s dwindling population.

The Testaments (published in 2019) returns readers to Gilead fifteen years after the events of the first novel to examine the inner workings of Gileadean society and to complicate our relationship with the original antagonists of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Through these two novels, we will examine how Atwood’s dystopia speaks to our own deep-seated anxieties about how personal freedoms and bodily autonomy can be gradually and almost imperceptibly taken away or completely stripped by one well-timed military coup.

What to read before the first meeting: The Handmaid’s Tale

What to expect from this reading group: Sessions will begin with a contextual mini-lecture, followed by a conversation opener. Although the group leader will have passages on hand to illustrate the key concepts and to guide the discussion, participants are expected to shape the course of the conversation.

Reading List:

Capacity: 20

Please note: All virtual classes are recorded. Please click here for information about our recording policy.

Led by

Shirley F. Tung

Shirley F. Tung

Shirley F. Tung is Associate Professor of English at Kansas State University, specializing in the literature and culture of the Restoration and long eighteenth century. She is also a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Life-Writing. Dr. Tung’s scholarly work, which spans the genres of (auto)biography, epic and lyric poetry, early periodicals and print media, and travel writing, has been published in several top-tier academic journals such as European Romantic Review, Huntington Library Quarterly, and Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. At Kansas State, she teaches courses that range from medieval to modernist literature as well as classes on film and television. Her teaching has received awards at the international, national, and collegiate levels from the British and American Societies for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Kansas State’s College of Arts and Sciences, and the Student Association of Graduates in English. Currently, Dr. Tung is completing two books: a micro-biography on John Milton’s time as a pamphleteer during the English Civil War and a braided biography of three influential eighteenth-century women travel writers.

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

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