Past Events

Victoria Kahn argues that the literature of the English Reformation (written during the fraught years of the late 16th and 17th centuries) marks a turning point in Western thinking about literature and literariness.

Jeannie Suk Gersen is a feminist legal scholar and contributing writer at the New Yorker. She is joined in conversation by political theorist Wendy Brown.

Joyce Carol Oates, author of over 70 works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, talks with poet John Shoptaw.

Christopher Tomlins offers a new interpretation of Nat Turner and the slave rebellion that stunned the American South.

Jeremy Geffen, SanSan Kwan, and Myra Melford discuss the role of the performing arts in a time when the very act of congregation is seen as problematic and potentially dangerous.

James Porter and poet Gillian Conoley discuss how the massive systems collapse of the late Bronze Age is expressed in Homer’s epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Ian Duncan offers a major rethinking of the European novel and its relationship to early evolutionary science.

Sugata Ray talks with visual artist Ranu Mukherjee about the relationship between nature and the sacred, with a focus on India during the rise of the Anthropocene era.

Ellen Oliensis offers a fresh approach to the Amores emphasizing the masochistic pleasures of the elegiac writing project.

This conversation on the process of artistic composition brings together visual artist Michael Hall, scholar and dancer SanSan Kwan, and musician Dean Wareham.