Events

The first of Kennedy’s novels to be published in his native country after a decade of literary success in Europe, this story of trauma and healing is set in Copenhagen. Haunted by the torture he suffered in Pinochet’s Chile, Nardo cautiously approaches Michela, herself the survivor of abusive relationships. Kennedy will be in conversation with André Dubus III, author most recently of The Garden of Last Days.

Ernest Gaines’s novel stages a fascinating argument between doubt and faith. This argument unfolds in the relation between the teacher-narrator, Grant, and his antagonist, the Reverend, but it also involves the women in the novel and the imprisoned young man, Jefferson. GWU English Professor Gayle Wald, a specialist in 20th-century African American literature and culture and author of Shout, Sister, Shout!, a 2007 biography of the gospel performer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, will lead this session, which includes opening remarks and a community discussion of skepticism and belief, secular and sacred, in Gaines’s award-winning book

The latest work from the venerable scholar of American history recounts the Compromise of 1850, focusing on Henry Clay’s pivotal role. Though it held off Southern secession and the Civil War for just a decade, the agreement was a master stroke of bipartisan politics in an unsettled and deeply divided time.