Date:
Location:
THE NORTON LECTURES
Speaker: Viet Thanh Nguyen
Interlocutor: Ken Chen, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Barnard College
Norton Lecture Four: On Crossing Borders
Colonization violated borders and redrew them, generating political, economic, and cultural consequences that are still being lived and felt. Part of the literary and cultural response has been to find the right forms that can speak back to colonization; the ones that interest this lecture cross or abolish (generic) borders and invent new styles like “horrific surrealism.”
"On Crossing Borders" is the fourth of six Norton Lectures with Viet Thanh Nguyen. For all Lecture dates and information, click here. Recordings of Viet's Norton Lectures are available to watch on our YouTube channel.
Free and open to the public, but tickets are required. Tickets will be available in advance two weeks prior to each lecture starting at noon, online, in-person at the Smith Campus Center box office, or by phone. Also available in-person at the venue starting two hours prior. Handling fees apply for online and phone sales. Limit of four tickets per person. Tickets valid until 5:45pm. Please note new ticket distribution procedure.
Free parking is available at the Broadway Garage, located at 7 Felton Street, between Broadway and Cambridge Streets.
About the Speaker
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. His other books are the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed; a short story collection, The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction); and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He has also published Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his son, Ellison. He is a University Professor at the University of Southern California. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.
Ken Chen is an Assistant Professor and the Associate Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College. His poetry collection Juvenilia was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award by Louise Glück, who wrote “Like only the best poets, Ken Chen makes with his voice a new category.” His forthcoming book, tentatively titled Death Star, follows his journey to the underworld to rescue his father and his encounters there with those destroyed by colonialism.
Introduction By:
Jesse McCarthy, Assistant Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
About the Norton Lectures
The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry was endowed in 1925. Harvard’s preeminent lecture series in the arts and humanities, the Norton Lectures recognize individuals of extraordinary talent who, in addition to their particular expertise, have the gift of wide dissemination and wise expression. The term “poetry” is interpreted in the broadest sense to encompass all poetic expression in language, music, or the fine arts.