Viet Thanh Nguyen | History, Identity, Politics, and the Art of Writing || Radcliffe Institute

The writer Viet Thanh Nguyen (9:39) discusses how history, identity, and politics have intersected with his writing and life and about his efforts to take all those things and work with them simultaneously as a scholar, a writer, and a refugee.
His lecture is followed by a conversation with the writer Gish Jen (32:40) and an audience Q&A (1:07:23).
Introduction by
Lizabeth Cohen, dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies, Department of History, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015) and of The Refugees (Grove Press, 2017) and the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and a professor of English and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
Gish Jen is the author of The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap (Knopf, 2017), Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self (Harvard University Press, 2013), and World and Town (Vintage Contemporaries, 2010), among other books.
This is a 2017-2018 Dean's Lecture in the Humanities.
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