Events

Past Event

The Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture: Marina Warner

October 6, 2022
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
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Lenfest Center for the Arts, 615 West 129th Street New York, NY 10027
Portrait of Marina Warner

Click here to register for the event, hosted at the Lenfest Center for the Arts (615 West 129th Street)

"Strangers in a Strange Land: Displacement, Asylum and the Travelling Tale" is the title of the talk by Marina Warner, a writer of fiction, cultural history, and criticism. Her study of the Arabian Nights, Stranger Magic (2011) won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and a Sheikh Zayed Book Award. In 2015, she received the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, Professorial Research Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London; Distinguished Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and President of the Royal Society of Literature. Recent books include Once Upon a Time: A short history of fairy tale and Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art and Artists. She has just finished Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir, about her childhood in Cairo, and is writing a study of the concept of Sanctuary. She has been working, in Sicily and the UK, with the project www.storiesintransit.org since 2016.

The Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture is given once a year in honor of Edward W. Said, who taught in the English & Comparative Literature Department at Columbia from 1963 until 2003, and who was a member of the board of guarantors at the Italian Academy. Professor Said was perhaps best known for his books Orientalism, published in 1978, and Culture and Imperialism, published in 1993, both of which made major contributions to the field of cultural and postcolonial studies. The Annual Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture pays tribute to Professor Said by bringing to Columbia speakers who embody his beliefs and the legacy of his work.

The Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture is made possible in part by the generosity of The JKW Foundation and The Abraaj Group.

Co-sponsors: Columbia University School of the ArtsThe Society of Fellows and The Heyman Center for the Humanities

There is a limit of one (1) reservation per person. Seating is limited and first come, first served. Priority will be given to those who register in advance. Check-in begins one (1) hour before the event and early arrival is suggested.