General Public

The seventh in a weekly series on Wednesdays at 12 noon ET featuring 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize Recipients in a 30-40 minute pre-recorded streaming video presentation featuring a live chat box, followed by a Zoom Q&A with that week’s featured writer. Future sessions include:
11/3 – Dionne Brand
11/10 – The Windham-Campbell Lecture by US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo.
Kate Briggs is a writer and translator whose brilliant first book This Little Art (2017) defies categorization. It is at once a memoir, a treatise, and a history, considering Briggs’s own life as a translator from French to English, offering an account of the nature and stakes of translation, and presenting a history of three women translators in the twentieth century. The book articulates and refracts the many strangenesses and paradoxes of translation as a practice and an art. Translation, Briggs shows us, is both lonely and collaborative, disciplined and profoundly educational, a private devotion and a public project. It energizes and frustrates, requiring from its practitioners passion, precision, and an openness to transformation. Briggs is the translator of two volumes of Roland Barthes’s lecture notes at the Collège de France, The Preparation for the Novel (2011) and How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces (2013), and co-translator of Michel Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology (2008). She teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, Netherlands and is currently working on a new book: a novel-essay titled The Long Form.
Visit windhamcampbell.org for more information about Kate and the other 2021 recipients!

Jeffrey H. Jackson, is the author of “Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis,” based on research in the Beinecke Library for the book.
Zoom webinar registration: https://bit.ly/31TtTs7
Jackson is the first to tell a little-known WWII story of an anti-Nazi campaign undertaken by two French women in his gripping book. Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe were gender norm-defying artists, better known by their artist names Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, who used their art to courageously defy the Nazi occupation of their chosen home, the British Channel Island of Jersey. Over the course of four years, Schwob and Malherbe wrote and distributed anti-Hitler notes, insults and calls to desert – a tactic known as “Paper Bullets”- written under the disguise of a Nazi soldier called “The Soldier with No Name,” meant to sway other soldiers from believing in the Nazi rhetoric.
Schwob and Malherbe were braver for who they were: lesbian partners known for their provocative photography - Lucy was also half-Jewish and they had Communist ties. The pair were eventually betrayed by a neighbor in 1944 and sentenced to death for their actions; however even in jail, they continued to fight the Nazis by reaching out to other prisoners—including imprisoned German soldiers—to spread a message of hope. Jackson, a professor of History at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN, and an expert on European history and culture, vividly tells the hidden history of these two heroines, uncovering never before seen research and accurately describing the day-to-day life of civilians living in occupied territories and the tough decisions and sacrifices they constantly had to make to survive.

Please register at http://bit.ly/BritainEUafterBrexit
VERNON BOGDANOR CBE is Professor of Government at the Institute of Contemporary British History, King’s College, London. He was formerly for many years Professor of Government at Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences. He has been an adviser to a number of governments, including those of Albania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Kosovo, Israel, Mauritius. Romania, Slovakia, Sweden and Trinidad. He has written numerous books, including Beyond Brexit: Towards a British Constitution, and Britain and Europe in a Troubled World.

Sponsored by the George Herbert Walker, Jr. Lecture Fund at Yale University, the European Studies Council, and Program in European Union Studies

A discussion with Sissy Vovou, Activist, Feminist Movement Το Μωβ and Maria Pentrarki, Queen’s University Belfast.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Hernan Diaz to deliver spring 2021 Finzi-Contini Lecture
Why dwell on made-up stories? Why make them up in the first place? Can fiction, that pack of lies, aspire to some form of truth? Award-winning novelist Hernan Diaz will present a Finzi-Contini lecture titled “The Heart of Fiction” on Tuesday, March 16, at 4:30 pm EST via Zoom.
Hernan Diaz is the author of the novel In the Distance (2017), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, a Publisher’s Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year, and winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award. Diaz has received a Whiting Award and fellowships from Bread Loaf and the MacDowell Colony. He has also written a study of Borges’s influence on North American literature, Borges, between History and Eternity (2012), and published work in Cabinet, the New York Times, the Kenyon Review, Playboy, Granta, and the Paris Review. Born in Argentina, Diaz was raised in Sweden and studied in London and in New York, where he now serves as associate director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University and editor of the Revista Hispánica Moderna.
The Finzi-Contini Lectureship honors Bianca M. Finzi-Contini Calabresi, a scholar of European literature and a native of Ferrara who left fascist Italy for the United States. The lectureship was founded by her sons, the Honorable Guido Calabresi, Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and the late Dr. Paul Calabresi. The distinguished list of past lecturers includes Tzvetan Todorov, Orhan Pamuk, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amitav Ghosh, and Masha Gessen. The lectures are devoted to any aspect of comparative literature and culture.
This event is cosponsored by The Yale Review.