Upcoming Roth Lecture--Roth's Other Haunts--May 2nd!

Please join us on Monday May 2 at 4:30pm central time for a hybrid lecture/discussion, of “Philip Roth’s Other Haunts,” with Brett Ashley Kaplan. In person: Siebel Center for Design, 1208 South Fourth Street, Champaign Il. Via zoom register go.las.illinois.edu/RothLecture or scan the QR code on the attached poster (which also has a clickable registration link). You may think of Philip Roth as a quintessential Jewish-American author grounded in Newark, New Jersey where many of his novels are set. But Roth was invested in other haunts abroad: London, where he lived part-time with his former wife, the Jewish-British actress Claire Bloom; Prague, where he set some of his fiction and which became the springboard for his Writers from the Other Europe Series; Italy, where he wrote parts of his early novels and then, years later, interviewed Primo Levi at his home in Turin; Israel: where important scenes and novels take place. Roth announced his retirement from writing in a French journal and has experienced huge success in France. This talk moves beyond Kaplan’s Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth to explore Roth’s time abroad and his global reception. Brett Ashley Kaplan Directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies at the University of Illinois where she is a professor of Comparative and World Literature and Director of Graduate Studies. She publishes in Haaretz, The Conversation, Salon.com (picked up from Conversation), Asitoughttobemagazine, AJS Perspectives, Contemporary Literature, Edge Effects, and The Jewish Review of Books. She has been interviewed on NPR, the AJS Podcast, and The 21st, and is the author of Unwanted Beauty, Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory, and Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth, and editor of the Handbook to Cultural Memory Studies (forthcoming). Her novel, Rare Stuff, will be released on 1 August. She is at work on a second novel, Vandervelde Downs, about the recovery of Nazi-looted objects found in a Vietnamese Refugee Center in provincial England and a biography of the painter (and UIUC alumna) Louise Fishman (co-written with Amy Powell). Please see brettashleykaplan.com for more information. The Greenfield Lynch lecture series sponsors a lecture on Jewish American literature and literary studies, jointly organized by the Program in Jewish Culture & Society and the Department of English. The series is a gift from Deborah Lynch in honor of her parents, Dr. and Mrs. Michael Greenfield, and her daughter, Samantha Lynch. We are so grateful for the Greenfield Lynch series, which has supported dynamic programming at Illinois including visits from Nicole Krauss and others.