Latest Past Events

Sergei Eisenstein and Immersion in Nature (with Joan Neuberger)

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,…

The American Jewish Distribution Center to the Rescue Shanghai

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…

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…