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…
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…
Urban landscapes are augmented layers of hegemonic power that materializes in buildings, street maps, and monuments in the public space. After the killing of George Floyd in 2020, the removal of white supremacist statues and symbols from cities across the world has become one of the central demands of protesters. While removing monuments to past figures and events can be…
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,…
Scandinavia House continues its series, Nordic Authors You Should Know--this time with a focus on literature from the Faroe Islands. Join this lecture and discussion featuring Rakel Helmsdal, Carl Johan Jensen, and Marjun Syberdo Kjaelnes. The event will begin with short readings of each of the author's work in both the original language and in English, followed by interviews with the authors and…
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…
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…
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…
Facing an escalating demand for entry into the United States by German-speaking Jews in Shanghai in early 1941, the United States Consulate called the JDC for help. No one forewarned Laura Margolis, a translator for immigration interviews, about the living conditions of 16,000 Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, all desperate for food and housing. She set up…
At a time when nearly everyone else was writing about nature as something to be conquered, Eisenstein was joining personal experience with Romantic and Indigenous tropes to write about self-immersion in nature as a a source of individual liberation, a model for understanding film reception, and a blueprint for a utopian socialist collective. This presentation will examine his 1945 essay,…
