2022

6 October, ‘Strangers in a Strange Land: Displacement, Sanctuary, and the Traveling Tale’, The Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture, 6.30pm-8pm, The Lantern, Lenfest Center for the Arts, 615 West 129th Street, New York, NY 10027

Edward W. Said wrote that he habitually felt “out of place” and in his memoir movingly explores the strategies and theoretical ideas the experience inspired. Marina Warner will return to Said’s ideas about estrangement, the traveling tale and contrapuntal reading, through a reading of the Flight into Egypt. The legend spread through stories, cult, and pilgrimage and Memories of Mary/Mariam in Egypt live on in some form in both the Christian and Islamic traditions. In a time of ever greater displacements and tumult, this narrative offers a test case of storytelling’s role in living through exile and dislocation, and surviving somewhere that is not home.

The Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture is given once a year in honor of the public intellectual and literary critic, Edward W. Said, who taught in the English & Comparative Literature Department at Columbia from 1963 until 2003. 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 Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture, annually organized by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, pays tribute to Professor Said by bringing to Columbia speakers who embody his beliefs and the legacy of his work.

The event is co-presented by Columbia University School of the Arts and The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.

Register to attend here.

10 October, ‘Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin in conversation about their latest books: Esmond & Ilia and Accidental Gods’, 6pm, Rizzoli Bookstore (1133 Broadway New York, NY 10010). Book to attend here!

Saturday 26 November, ‘Sally Bayley, Marina Warner and Tomiwa Owolade ‘Memories’ Fault Lines’, Blackwell’s, Broad Street, Oxford, 2-3pm

Marina will be discussing Inventory of a Life Mislaid (2021), an unreliable memoir pieced together by objects from her parents’ lives, alongside Sally Bayley and Tomiwa Owolade. Sally Bayley is a fiction and non-fiction writer who lives on a narrowboat on the River Thames in Oxford. Her latest book, No Boys Play Here (William Collins, 2021) is the second part of a literary coming of age story that tells of a teen girl in search of her lost father and uncle. Tomiwa Owolade is a writer, critic and contributing editor to UnHerd. He is a New Statesman contributing writer and the author of the forthcoming This is Not America. His writing for the New Statesman includes analysis and comment pieces on various political and cultural subjects. Book to attend here!