The Whitney Humanities Center presents the 2018 Finzi-Contini Lecture:
Masha Gessen, Professor of American Institutions and International Diplomacy, Amherst College: “Imagining a Book about Imagining Democracy.”
Masha Gessen is the author of the National Book Award–winning The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia as well as The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin; The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy; and several other works.
A staff writer at the New Yorker and the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Fellowship, Gessen teaches at Amherst College, and lives in New York City.
The Finzi-Contini Lectureship honors Bianca M. Finzi-Contini Calabresi, a scholar of European literature and a native of Ferrara who left fascist Italy to establish herself in the United States. The lectureship was founded by her sons, the Honorable Guido Calabresi, Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Dr. Paul Calabresi. The distinguished list of past lecturers includes Umberto Eco, A. S. Byatt, Orhan Pamuk, W. S. Merwin, Azar Nafisi, Alberto Manguel, and Maxine Hong Kingston. The lectures are devoted to any aspect of European or comparative literature and culture.
Gessen’s talk will be followed by a conversation with Yale faculty on Thursday, December 6, at 10 am.