History, Identity, Politics, and the Art of Writing

Thursday, February 8, 2018
Knafel Center
10 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

Photo by Jon Chase, Harvard Staff Photographer

What are the challenges for writers concerned with history, identity, and politics? How do writers respond to these themes in language, form, and story?

Viet Thanh Nguyen RI ’09 offers some answers through an exploration of his writing and criticism. His remarks will be followed by a discussion with the writer Gish Jen ’77, BI ’87, RI ’02.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015) and of The Refugees (Grove Press, 2017) and the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and a professor of English and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Gish Jen is the author of The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap (Knopf, 2017), Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self (Harvard University Press, 2013), and World and Town (Vintage Contemporaries, 2010), among other books.

This is a 2017–2018 Dean's Lecture in the Humanities.