Events

Best known for the volume Suite Française, posthumously published in 2004, Russian-French novelist Irène Némirovsky perished at Auschwitz at the age of 39. Dr. Susan Suleiman (Harvard University) will address decisions that Némirovsky and her family faced in the last two years of her life. At the time of Nazi occupation under the Vichy regime, Némirovsky was writing Suite Française, among many other works, while residing in a small village in France’s Burgundy region.

This event is free and open to the public and is co-sponsored by Humanities Texas and The University of Texas at Austin Department of English, Program in Comparative Literature, and Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies.

Choices and Choicelessness in Wartime France:
Irène Némirovsky’s Final Journey

Thursday, April 28, 2016
4:00 p.m.
@ Calhoun (CAL) 100
The University of Texas at Austin

Calhoun (CAL) 100 is the auditorium on the ground floor of Calhoun Hall, located in the Tower area of the University of Texas. Nearby parking is available in the garage of the AT&T Conference Center.

Susan Rubin Suleiman was born in Budapest and emigrated to the U.S. as a child with her parents. She obtained her BA from Barnard College and her PhD from Harvard University and has been on the Harvard faculty since 1981, where she is currently the C. Douglas Dillon Research Professor of the Civilization of France and Research Professor of Comparative Literature. Suleiman has won many honors, including the Radcliffe Medal for Distinguished Achievement (1990), and a decoration by the French Government as Officer of the Order of Academic Palms (Palmes Académiques) in 1992. She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, and several NEH Fellowships. In 2015-16, she is an invited Fellow at the Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Study.

She is the author of numerous books on contemporary literature and culture, including Crises of Memory and the Second World War (2006); Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (1994); Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (1990); Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (1983); and the memoir Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (1996). Her latest book, The Némirovsky Question, to be published by Yale University Press in fall 2016, is about Irène Némirovsky and issues of “foreignness” in twentieth-century.