Franke Visiting Fellows

Ali Oppenheimer
Rozina Ali and Mark Oppenheimer
Tuesday, February 20, 2024 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
Alice Cinema (L01)

How to Think about Antisemitism and Islamophobia

A panel discussion featuring Rozina Ali (journalist, contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, and 2024 Franke Visiting Fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center) and Mark Oppenheimer (author of Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood and Vice President of Open Learning at American Jewish University).

The first 80 attendees will receive a copy of Squirrel Hill by Mark Oppenheimer.

Open to all Yale ID holders, but preregistration is required.
 

Co-sponsored by Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism; Yale Program for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration; MacMillan Council on Middle East Studies; Jewish Studies; and Whitney Humanities Center

Poster

Rozina Ali
Rozina Ali
journalist, Franke Visiting Fellow
Tuesday, February 6, 2024 | 4:30 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
Alice Cinema (L01)

Islamophobia Yesterday and Today

Thinking through similarities and differences between the post­–9/11 and the post–10/07 eras.
 
Rozina Ali is a journalist, and currently a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. Her work focuses on the Middle East and South Asia, conflict, immigration, and Islamophobia. She also writes about literature and poetry. Previously, she was on the editorial staff at the New Yorker, and was a senior editor at the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, based in Cairo, Egypt. In 2022–23, she was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and is a current fellow at Type Media Center.
 
Open to all Yale ID holders, but preregistration is required.

Poster

Sheila Heti
Tuesday, November 8, 2022 | 4:00 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
136

What Is a Process?

In her public lecture, “What Is a Process?” novelist Sheila Heti, our Fall 2022 Franke Visiting Fellow, invites us into the processes she uses in the writing of her books—both the expected and the unexpected. She offers a glimpse into the novel she’s currently writing while she’s with us here in New Haven, and speaks about the role of collaboration with other people, and other domains, in the shaping of her ideas.

Sheila Heti is the author of ten books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be? She recently published her second children’s book, A Garden of Creatures, illustrated by Esmé Shapiro. She was named one of “The New Vanguard” by the New York Times; a list of fifteen writers from around the world who are “shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.” Motherhood was chosen by New York magazine and the critics of the New York Times as the Best Book of the year, and How Should a Person Be? was named one of the 12 “New Classics of the 21st century” by Vulture. Her nonfiction collaboration Women in Clothes, which includes the words of 639 women from around the world, was a New York Times bestseller. She is the former Interviews Editor of The Believer magazine, and has interviewed many writers and artists, including Joan Didion, Elena Ferrante, Agnes Varda, Sophie Calle, Dave Hickey, and John Currin. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages. She lives and works in Toronto.

Poster

4:00pm, Humanities Quadrangle (HQ), 136

You Can’t Translate What You Can’t See: Between Languages in the U.S. Immigration System

How are power structures and empathy implicated in translation? What do we owe asylum seekers, and the stories they bring? What does it mean to bear witness, or to take action? Based on her experiences as an observer and translator in different parts of the U.S. immigration system, Alejandra Oliva reflects on the ways, both big and small, that the system fails the people within it—and the shift required to fix it.

Jewish Survival and Holocaust Memory: Salo Baron and the Twentieth Century

This talk will examine the life and thought of Salo Baron, one of the great twentieth-century historians who was among the first to bring Jewish Studies to the American university. The talk will trace Baron’s commitment to rebutting the so-called lachrymose conception of Jewish history by emphasizing the theme of survival, but it will also examine that critique in the context of Holocaust memory that gradually began to emerge after the Second World War.

Alejandra Oliva
Thursday, April 21, 2022 | 4:00 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
136

You Can’t Translate What You Can’t See: Between Languages in the U.S. Immigration System

How are power structures and empathy implicated in translation? What do we owe asylum seekers, and the stories they bring? What does it mean to bear witness, or to take action? Based on her experiences as an observer and translator in different parts of the U.S. immigration system, Alejandra Oliva reflects on the ways, both big and small, that the system fails the people within it—and the shift required to fix it.

Alejandra Oliva is an essayist, embroiderer, and translator working in immigration advocacy. Her writing has been included in Best American Travel Writing 2020, nominated for a Pushcart prize, and helped her secure an Aspen Summer Words Emerging Writers Fellowship. She is the translator for a bilingual edition of A Is for Asylum Seeker by Rachel Ida Buff (2020, Fordham University Press).

Her nonfiction chapbook, Declaration, was published by Guillotine Books (2016). She holds a Master of Theological Studies degree from Harvard Divinity School and works as a communications coordinator at the National Immigrant Justice Center. She lives in Chicago with her husband and their dog. You can see her latest work at olivalejandra.com

During her Franke Visiting Fellowship, Oliva plans to complete her upcoming book project on translation at the U.S.-Mexico border. Her book, Rivermouth, is forthcoming from Astra House in 2023.

Poster

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James McAuley
Thursday, April 7, 2022 | 4:00 pm
Humanities Quadrangle (HQ)
136

Jewish Survival and Holocaust Memory: Salo Baron and the Twentieth Century

This talk will examine the life and thought of Salo Baron, one of the great twentieth-century historians who was among the first to bring Jewish Studies to the American university. The talk will trace Baron’s commitment to rebutting the so-called lachrymose conception of Jewish history by emphasizing the theme of survival, but it will also examine that critique in the context of Holocaust memory that gradually began to emerge after the Second World War.

James McAuley is a contributing columnist for The Washington Post writing on European affairs. During his Franke Fellowship at the Whitney, he is continuing research on his next book, “Black Milk of Dawn.” While at Yale, he will also be finishing a short biography of the Zionist benefactor Edmond de Rothschild, for the Jewish Lives biography series at Yale University Press. This follows the publication in 2021 of his first book, The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France, also with Yale University Press. He earned his PhD in Modern European History at Oxford in 2016, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar.

Poster

Original event page

The Two Silos: Literature, Science, and Agents of Overlap in Twenty-First-Century Science Studies

Meyer teaches English and American literature and modern intellectual history at Washington University in St. Louis, where he specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry, literature, and science. He is the author of Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science.

The Walk: a reading

Als is a staff writer and chief theater critic at The New Yorker. He is the author of two acclaimed works of nonfiction that explore gender, race, and identity: The Women (1996) and White Girls (2013), which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Lambda Literary Award. Als received a Windham-Campbell Prize for Literature in 2016 and the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2017. A former fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, Als is an associate professor in the writing program at Columbia University.

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