Finzi-Contini Lectures

Alberto Manguel, author of A Reader on Reading and The Library at Night delivers the 2010 Finzi-Contini Lectures at Yale Universitys Whitney Humanities Center. Visit yalebooks.com for more information.

David Shulman was born in Iowa and studied at the Hebrew University, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and various sites in India. Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University, he specializes in the languages and cultural history of southern India with special emphasis on Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Sanskrit. Among his publications areMore than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India (2012) andTamil: A Biography(2016). He is an activist in Ta‘ayush, one of the most persistent of the Israeli-Palestinian peace and human-rights groups, and the author of a new book on this subject:Freedom and Despair: Notes from the South Hebron Hills(2018). He is a passionate devotee of Carnatic and Hindustani music.

David Shulman was born in Iowa and studied at the Hebrew University, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and various sites in India. Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University, he specializes in the languages and cultural history of southern India with special emphasis on Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Sanskrit. Among his publications areMore than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India (2012) andTamil: A Biography(2016). He is an activist in Ta‘ayush, one of the most persistent of the Israeli-Palestinian peace and human-rights groups, and the author of a new book on this subject:Freedom and Despair: Notes from the South Hebron Hills(2018). He is a passionate devotee of Carnatic and Hindustani music.

In 2015, Lançon was injured during the terrorist attack against the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. He spent nine months in different hospitals, including La Salpêtrière and Les Invalides, has undergone multiple reconstructive surgeries, and is still recovering. Three years after the attack, Lançon published Le lambeau (Disturbance), his memoir of the atrocity and the way it reshaped his life. A bestseller in France, the book won Femina, Roger Caillois, and special Renaudot prizes and has been translated into several languages. Lançon also writes for the French weekly Libération and XXI magazine and is the author of the novels L’élan and Les îles. A specialist in French and Latin American literature, he has taught on culture, society, and violence. Lançon is a recipient of the Henri de Régnier Prize from the French Academy and the Jean-Luc Lagardère Award for Journalist of the Year, and has been named a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

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? Hernan Diaz is the author ofthe novelIn the Distance(2017), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, aPublisher’s WeeklyTop 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 inCabinet,theNew York Times,theKenyon Review, Playboy, Granta, and theParis 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 theRevista Hispánica Moderna.

Namwali Serpellis the author ofThe Old Drift, which won the Windham-Campbell Prize in Fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Fiction, theL.A. Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, and was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by theNew York Times.Serpell’s essay collection,Stranger Faces(2020), was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in Lusaka, Zambia, Serpell received her BA at Yale and her PhD at Harvard. She is currently Professor of English at Harvard. “Race Off” tracks the persistent fantasy of race transformation—specifically, of “switching” from black to white or vice versa—in American fiction, journalism, and film from the nineteenth century to the present. Serpell will discuss the aesthetic, affective, and political implications of this fantasy; its resonance with and distinction from “passing” narratives; and how it tends toward different underlying ideas and tones depending on whether

Rachel Cusk Thursday, February 13, 2025 2025 Finzi-Contini Lecture at the Whitney Humanities Center, "Into the Light: A Woman Artist Uncovered" Welcome: Cajetan Iheka, Director, Whitney Humanities Center Introduction: Meghan O’Rourke, Editor, The Yale Review Using the life and work of the neglected Norwegian painter Anna Eva Bergman, the lecture examines the problem of justice in the context of female creativity and asks whether biographical and imaginative solutions are a means of constructing the missing value-system around works made by women. Can the techniques of fiction be bent to the service of the obscured reality that lies behind visual art? Rachel Cusk is the author of Second Place, the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life’s Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and nonfiction, including her most recent novel, Parade. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Paris.