VIRTUAL EVENT. Burning Books: Akram Aylisli, Literature, and Human Rights in Today’s Azerbaijan

Register here for the Zoom webinar or tune in on YouTube Live. Please join the Harriman Institute and PEN America for a discussion with Akram Aylisli, author of Farewell Aylis: A Non-Traditional Novel in Three Works (Academic Studies Press, 2018), translator Katherine E. Young, and journalist Alex Raufoglu. Moderated by Professor Mark Lipovetsky. This event is part of our Contemporary Culture Series. The three novellas…

Ode to the Hybrid: Writing as a Russian-American

Olga Livshin is an English-language poet of Jewish descent, via Russia and Ukraine. The Los Angeles Review of Books described her 2019 book as follows: “In her inventive collection of ‘poems with translations,’ A Life Replaced, … Livshin writes in conversation with Akhmatova, using the older poet’s grief as a guide to navigate the depressing present.” In conversation with Eliot Borenstein, Livshin will discuss…

On Les Inséparables, Simone de Beauvoir’s Unpublished Novel

Join professor and publisher Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir along with author and New Yorker  staff writer Judith Thurman and as they discuss Les Inséparables, a novel by Simone de Beauvoir written in 1954 and released for the first time this fall. In her memoir Force of Circumstance, de Beauvoir mentioned that she gave the manuscript of Les Inséparables to…

Peter Brooks, Balzac’s Lives

In conversation with Claudie Bernard REGISTRATION INFORMATION TO COME. Balzac, more than anyone, invented the nineteenth-century novel, and Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac had invented the nineteenth century. But it was above all through the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters that Balzac dreamed up and made flesh—entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes,…

GLOBAL UPRISING: The Protracted Present of Uprising

Global Uprising  // A year-long series 2020-2021: Global Uprising is a year-long series that revolves around one question: how do we rethink collective action from our present?  Taking the current anti-racist uprising in America and the tenth anniversary of the Arab revolts as launching points for a set of workshops this series delves into the global coordinates of uprising today.  Read more about…

20/20 Philosophers: Yves Citton

REGISTRATION INFORMATION TO COME. Organized by François Noudelmann. Sponsored by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. Philosophy, in the 21st century, has changed: its practices and languages are no longer those of the previous century. A turning point has been taken by new generations and thinkers from diverse origins who, more than commenting on the old masters, are taking philosophy…

Three Rings: An Evening with Daniel Mendelsohn

Join best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn as he presents his latest book Three Rings, just published by University of Virginia Press, over Zoom. Combining memoir, biography, fiction, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own—works that pondered the very…

Deutschland 89

The German Film Office partners with SundanceTV to present a free advance screening of the first two episodes of Deutschland 89 along with a virtual panel discussion with the cast and creators. Season 3 of the critically acclaimed series following superspy Martin Rauch will debut on SundanceTV on October 29. When the “anti-fascist” Berlin Wall falls on November 9, 1989,…

Challenging “The Imam of Atheism”: Islamist Anti-Communism and the Soviet Union, 1958-1979

Between the Soviet Union’s outreach to countries like Egypt and Afghanistan in the mid-1950s and the growing role of Communists in Iraq following that country’s 1958 revolution, Muslim intellectuals and ulema feared the expansion of Communism in the Middle East. They began to conceive of Islam as a distinct ideological system and alternative to capitalism and socialism, and they looked…