Under the tutelage of their patron deity Janus—the two-faced Roman god of thresholds, transience, and simultaneity—Jhumpa Lahiri and Alessandro Giammei will roam Rome remotely through five postcards. Tossing five coins in a virtual fountain, they will visit stairways and bridges, homes and piazzas, ruins and starships. They expect to be joined by the spirits of several fellow Romans and adoptive ancestors—such as Ovid, Ennio Flaiano, Petrarch, Amelia Rosselli, Raphael, and the characters of Roman Stories/Racconti Romani.
Welcoming Remarks:
Barbara Faedda (Italian Academy; Columbia University)
Speakers:
Jhumpa Lahiri (Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing, Barnard College)
Alessandro Giammei (Assistant Professor, Department of Italian Studies, Yale University)
Click here to register.
Registration is at capacity. We hope to be able to accommodate standby guests at the door.
Registration does not guarantee a seat. Check-in for registrants begins 30 minutes before the event (and any open spots are offered to the stand-by line 10 minutes before the event).
This event is in-person only; there will be no video recording for publication.
Jhumpa Lahiri, a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her novel The Namesake, a New York Times Notable Book and Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, was adapted into a motion picture directed by Mira Nair. Her other books include Unaccustomed Earth, winner of the Frank O'Connor Prize, The Lowland, finalist for both the Booker Prize and the National Book Award, and Translating Myself and Others, finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. In Italian, she is the author of In altre parole (In Other Words), Il vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani (partially self-translated as Roman Stories). She received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024.
Alessandro Giammei, a bilingual scholar and translator, is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Yale University. His most recent books include Ariosto in the Machine Age (University of Toronto Press, 2024), which won both the Howard R. Marraro Prize of the Modern Language Association and the Book Prize of the American Association for Italian Studies, Gioventù degli antenati: Il Rinascimento è uno zombie (Einaudi 2024), and Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting (Verso, 2023, with Ara H. Merjian). Across English and Italian, he edited and/or translated Lytton Strachey’s letters to Virginia Woolf, Arthur Conan Doyle’s treatise on spirit photography, Giulia Niccolai’s avant-garde nonsense, Dario Villa’s complete poems, and Michela Murgia’s posthumous books.
Image: Renato Mambor, Angel and Colosseum, 1995.
