Literati is thrilled to partner with the University of Michigan History Department to showcase fifteen recent publications by fourteen U-M History faculty members.
Authors and editors include:
Rita Chin is associate professor of history at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany and the coauthor of After the Nazi Racial State.
Geoff Eley is Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History and Professor of German Studies at the University of Michigan, USA. He is the author of Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (2002), A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (2005) and Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930-1945 (2013).
Susan Juster is Rhys Isaac Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is author of Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution and coeditor of Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic, both available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Valerie A. Kivelson is Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is the author of several books, including Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2013) and Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2006). She is the editor of Witchcraft Casebook: Magic in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, 15th-21st Centuries [ Russian History/Histoire russe vol. 40, nos. 3-4 (2013)], and co-editor, with Joan Neuberger, of Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (2008).
Deborah Dash Moore has provided a magisterial history of the Jews of New York. A hub of both American and Jewish innovation, New York’s bustling metropolis became home to millions of Jews. New York gave Jewish life a distinct character, even as Jews helped to shape the essence of the city. This fascinating study explores the streets, synagogues, politics, and organizations of New York Jewry as well as its diverse cultural expressions. Moore’s mastery of New York Jewish history and deep knowledge of the urban rhythms of the city shine through on every page.-Beth S. Wenger, Moritz and Josephine Berg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
Dario Gaggio is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He holds a PhD in History from Northwestern University and is the author of In Gold We Trust: Social Capital and Economic Change in the Italian Jewelry Towns (2007). His research has pioneered the integration of cultural change and political economy from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining historical methodologies with the theoretical insights of sociology, anthropology and human geography.
Joel D. Howell is a physician, medical historian at the University of Michigan
Powel H. Kazanjian, MD, PhD is a professor and chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Internal Medicine, at the University of Michigan Medical Center and a professor in the department of history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Derek R. Peterson is Professor of History and African Studies at the University of Michigan
Helmut Puff is Professor of German and History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
LaKisha Michelle Simmons is assistant professor of history and women’s studies at the University of Michigan.
Scott Spector is Professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan. He is author of Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siecle.
Ronald Grigor Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and Senior Researcher at the National Research University-Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg.
Melanie S. Tanielian is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
Erin Adair-Hodges is visiting assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Toledo and is the co-creator and curator of the Bad Mouth Reading Series. Her poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, theGeorgia Review, Boulevard, and Green Mountains Review, among other venues. Winner of the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, she has also been a Bread Loaf Rona Jaffe scholar, and has received awards from the Rockland Residency and The Writer’s Hotel.
Jenny Molberg, originally from Texas, earned her BA at Louisiana State University, her MFA at American University, and her PhD at the University of North Texas. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Best New Poets, Poetry International, North American Review, Copper Nickel, and other publications. She teaches at the University of Central Missouri and is Co-editor for Pleiades
One MFA student of fiction and one of poetry, each introduced by a peer, will read their work. The Mark Webster Reading Series presents emerging writers in a warm and relaxed setting. We encourage you to bring your friends – a Webster reading makes for an enjoyable and enlightening Friday evening.
Readings by 2 U-M creative writing grad students, fiction writer Nell David and poet Franny Choi.
7 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 615-3710
Literati is proud to be partnering with the Helen Zell Writers Program to host author Lydia Davis at University of Michigan Museum of Art Apse
Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven story collections. Her collection Varieties of Disturbance: Stories was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award of Merit Medal, and was named a Chevalier of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Proust. Lydia Davis is the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.
Literati is pleased to partner with the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing and WCBN Radio for the latest installment of Writer to Writer, a series which puts a UM professor and member of the Sweetland faculty in conversation about writing.
Sweetland Center for Writing’s Writer to Writer series lets you hear directly from University of Michigan professors about their challenges, processes, and expectations as writers and also as readers of student writing. Each semester, Writer to Writer pairs one esteemed University professor with a Sweetland faculty member for a conversation about writing.
This month Writer to Writer welcomes Susan Scott Parrish. Susan Scott Parrish is a Professor in the English Department and the Program in the Environment at UM. Her research addresses the interrelated issues of the environment, race and knowledge-making in the Atlantic world from the seventeenth century up through the present, with a particular emphasis on southern and Caribbean plantation zones. Her new book, The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, 2017), examines how the most devastating, and publicly absorbing, US flood of the twentieth century took on meaning as it moved across media platforms, across sectional divides and across the color line. Her first book, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (UNCP, 2006), is a study of how people in England and in British-controlled America conceived of—and made knowledge about—American nature within Atlantic scientific networks. This book won both Phi Beta Kappa’s Emerson Award and the Jamestown Prize.
Writer to Writer takes place at the Literati bookstore and are broadcast live on WCBN radio. These conversations offer students a rare glimpse into the writing that professors do outside the classroom. You can hear instructors from various disciplines describe how they handle the same challenges student writers face, from finding a thesis to managing deadlines. Professors will also discuss what they want from student writers in their courses, and will take questions put forth by students and by other members of the University community. If there’s anything you’ve ever wanted to ask a professor about writing, Writer to Writer gives you the chance.
Literati is proud to be partnering with the Helen Zell Writers Program to host author Lydia Davis at University of Michigan Museum Helmet Stern Auditorium
Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven story collections. Her collection Varieties of Disturbance: Stories was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award of Merit Medal, and was named a Chevalier of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Proust. Lydia Davis is the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.
Literati is excited to partner with the University of Michigan Classical Studies Department to welcome poet Gail Holst-Warhaft! She will be sharing her new book The Fall of Athens.
About The Fall of Athens:
The Fall of Athens reflects the bleak state of present-day Athens and reminds the reader that there is nothing new about Greece’s suffering. Combining present observations with portraits of the Greek musicians and writers, Holst-Warhaft’s book is both a peon of praise for the music and poetry that the author first discovered in the Greece of the 1960’s, and a reminder of how much the country has changed since it returned to democracy in 1974. Having played in the orchestras of such legends as Mikis Theodorakis and Dionysis Savvopoulos, the author had a bird’s eye view of 20th century Greek music at its apogee. Translating Greek poetry and prose later brought her in close contact with some of the leading writers of the period. With the discovery of Greek music and poetry came the forging of lasting friendships with these giants of Greek culture. This eclectic compilation of poetry, prose, translation, memoir, and songs captures the enigmatic, hybrid nature of Greece, a country that has always had the ability to create extraordinary beauty out of suffering.
Gail Holst-Warhaft was born in Australia. Besides being a poet she has been a journalist, broadcaster, prose-writer, academic, musician, and translator. In the 1970’s, while researching a book on Greek music, Holst-Warhaft performed as a keyboard-player with Greece’s leading composers, including Mikis Theodorakis. Among her many publications are Road to Rembetika (1975, 5th edition 2013), Theodorakis: Myth and Politics in Modern Greek Music (Hakkert, Amsterdam, 1980), Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature (Routledge, 1992), The Cue for Passion: Grief and its Political Uses (Harvard, 2000), I Had Three Lives: Selected Poems of Mikis Theodorakis (Livanis, 2005), and Penelope’s Confession (poems, Cosmos, 2007), Losing Paradise: The Water Crisis in the Mediterranean (Ashgate, 2010). She has published translations of Aeschylus, and of a number of modern Greek poets and prose-writers. Her poems and translations of Greek poetry have appeared in journals in the US (Literary Imagination, Bookpress, Seneca Review, Antipodes, Per Contra, Literary Matters), the U.K. (Agenda, Stand), Australia (Southerly), and Greece (Poetry Greece). She was appointed Poet Laureate of Tompkins County for 2011 and 2012.
One MFA student of fiction and one of poetry, each introduced by a peer, will read their work. The Mark Webster Reading Series presents emerging writers in a warm and relaxed setting. We encourage you to bring your friends – a Webster reading makes for an enjoyable and enlightening Friday evening.
Readings by 2 U-M creative writing grad students, fiction writer Callie Collins and poet Clare Hogan.
7 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 615-3710.
Literati is excited to host author and actor Alexandra Silber who will be reading and sharing her new novel After Anatevka: A Novel Inspired by “Fiddler on the Roof”.
About After Anatevka:
The world knows well the tale of Tevye, the beloved Jewish dairyman from the shtetl Anatevka of Tsarist Russia. In stories originally written by Sholem Aleichem and then made world-famous in the celebrated musical Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye, his wife Golde, and their five daughters dealt with the outside influences that were encroaching upon their humble lives. But what happened to those remarkable characters after the curtain fell? In After Anatevka, Alexandra Silber picks up where Fiddler left off. Second-eldest daughter Hodel takes center stage as she attempts to join her Socialist-leaning fiancae Perchik to the outer reaches of a Siberian work camp. But before Hodel and Perchik can finally be together, they both face extraordinary hurdles and adversaries–both personal and political–attempting to keep them apart at all costs. A love story set against a backdrop of some of the greatest violence in European history, After Anatevaka is a stunning conclusion to a tale that has gripped audiences around the globe for decades.
Alexandra Silber is an actress and singer who starred most recently as Tzeitel in the Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof. She earlier played Hodel in the same show in London’s West End. Those two roles inspired her to write After Anatevka. Her other Broadway, New York, and West End credits include Master Class, Arlington (Outer Critics Circle nomination), Carousel (TMA Award and Ovation Nomination), Kiss Me Kate, and Hello, Again (Drama League nomination). She received a Grammy nomination for her portrayal of Maria in the recording of West Side Story with the San Francisco Symphony. She has appeared on all three incarnations of “Law & Order” and has performed in a variety of concert outlets including the 57th Grammy Awards, Royal Albert Hall, and Carnegie Hall. She lives in New York.
Reading by GVSU creative writing lecturer Gale Thompson, whose 2015 collection, Soldier On, examines the relationship between living spaces and memories. The program begins with open mike readings.
7-8:30 p.m., Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea, 123 W. Washington. Free. 994-6663
