Amitava Kumar

January 29, 2020.

Vassar Professor of English on the Helen D. Lockwood Chair Amitava Kumar returns to the program to talk about his acclaimed novel Immigrant, Montana (Knopf, 2018). The novel was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by the New Yorker, was on the New York Times 100 Most Notable Books list of 2018, and on President Obama's Favorite Books list of the same year.  

"This is a deeply American novel, one that delves into the messiness of love (and sex!), and the meeting point between identity, character, place, and the constant cultural stuff floating around. . . . Kumar's novel is uproariously funny and deeply moving."
—David Means, author of Hystopia

"Amitava Kumar's Immigrant, Montana is a beguiling meditation on memory and migration, sex and politics, ideas and art, and race and ambiguity. Part novel, part memoir, this book is as sly, charming, and deceptive as its passionate protagonist, a writer writing himself into being."
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer

Gloria Kury

November 9, 2016.

Art historian, editor, and publisher Gloria Kury (VC '65) talks about art history, literature, education, and the fabrication of the Renaissance in the 19th century and her book When Giorgione Died: A Rebuildungsroman in Two Volumes (Periscope, 2016).

"A memory book with a fierce verve for piercing the false enchantments of memory, its dangerous nostalgias, its zombies and composite monsters, its necrophilia and kitsch. Exuberantly in love with art, Gloria Kury works to disentangle the blind-paths of connoisseurship and historical scholarship, what so often gets forgotten there - and what hides in plain sight. A brilliant story teller herself, she trusts other storytellers - Shakespeare, Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Gaddis, Cindy Sherman among others - to lay bear the strangeness of things, even as she invites the wild-eyed prophets, the crystal gazers, the code breakers, the hypnotists, the psychics, the psychologists, the parapsychologists, the time travelers, the explorers of the fourth dimension to say their part. Seeded within this complex slide show is a sharp, cohesive, often comic and sometimes chilling meditation on how any life is lived and remembered, how smoke gets in your eyes." --  Kenneth Gross, author of The Dream of the Moving Statue and Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life

59:30 minutes.

Listen

Leah Price

May 8, 2013:  SEASON FINALE.

Leah Price, Professor of English at Harvard University and Senior Advisor in the Humanities at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, discusses her book: How To Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain, published by Princeton University Press in 2012.

“Leah Price has challenged every book historian, librarian, and reader of secular or spiritual scripture to think through the object we fondle or maul and the ways in which it circulates in whole and in pieces through our home and global economies. . . . [T]here's no doubt in my mind that this is a potent intervention in the study of material culture. No one who cares about books should miss handling and reading it." -- Robert L. Patten, Review of English Studies

1:05:23 minutes.

Listen