World Literature Lecture Series

Join us for a series of lectures on authors from around the world, presented by faculty from CU Boulder and Boulder area literati!

This lecture series is FREE and open to everybody! Please register in advance. Refreshments will be served. *Authors will not be present at the lectures in this series*

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Anna Maria Ortese was an Italian author who wrote novels, short stories, poetry, and travel writing. Neapolitan Chronicles and The Iguana, originally published in Italian in 1953 and 1965, are some of her best-known works in the English-speaking world. Elena Ferrante is a pseudonymous Italian novelist whose true identity is still a mystery. Her most widely recognized works are the four-book series of Neapolitan Novels originally published in Italian between 2011 and 2014.

Presented by Cosetta Seno, Associate Professor of Italian

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Manga, the umbrella term for Japanese comics, is both uniquely Japanese and throughout Global Pop Culture. This talk will look at the first volume of Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto, a series based on the classic Astro Boy, as a way of returning to the history of Manga and realizing its complex relationship with world literature.

Presented by William Kuskin, Professor of English

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This talk traces the Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s acts of literary self-fashioning in his memoirs The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood (1987) and Princesses’ Street (1993), which tell the story of a uniquely Palestinian identity taking shape. They start in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s and end in Baghdad, Iraq in the 1950s, after Jabra had been displaced from his country during the Palestinian Nakba of 1948. In these tellings, they help establish the topoi of family, education, land, and loss as foundational not only to Jabra’s own career as a novelist, but also to Palestinian national identity writ large. The talk ends with a discussion of the pertinence and persistence of these themes in Jabra’s fiction, especially his masterpiece In Search of Walid Masoud (1978), and a reflection on Jabra’s influence on contemporary Palestinian literature, historiography, and politics.

Presented by Karim Mattar, Associate Professor of English

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Carmen Maria Machado is an American short story author, essayist, and critic best known for Her Body and Other Parties, a short story collection, and her memoir In the Dream House. Her fiction has been a finalist for numerous prizes including the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award.

Presented by Annjeanette Wiese, Teaching Associate Professor of Humanities

Host or Publisher Boulder Book Store