This year, the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard has invited the Pulitzer Prize winner and acclaimed author Viet Thanh Nguyen to deliver this year’s Norton Lecture series. His debut novel, The Sympathizer (2015), currently being adapted by Park Chan-wook for HBO, garnered him both the highly prestigious McArthur “Genius” Grant and the Guggenheim Fellowship. The story is continued in his sequel novel, The Committed (2021), which tells the story of “a man with two minds.” Themes of double-consciousness and split identities inform his latest work, a memoir titled A Man of Two Faces (2023), which is longlisted for the National Book Award. Aside from his fiction writing, Nguyen also published Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016), a discerning and incisive meditation on a conflict that continues to be fought in collective memory.
The Literary and Intellectual & Cultural Fellows are delighted to host Nguyen for a literary dialogue with Professor of Comparative Literature Annette Damayanti Lienau, followed by a casual reception!
No background or familiarity is expected: we only ask that you come with an open mind and an eagerness to learn!
Join us in celebration and for a chance to hear Nguyen reflect on his Lectures, ask questions, and meet like-minded individuals.
Founded as a graduate program in 1904 and joining with the undergraduate Literature Concentration in 2007, Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature operates at the crossroads of multilingualism, literary study, and media history.
© 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College
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