The second Fall 2020 Forum for the Academy and the Public event will be held on November 16, 10:30am to 12pm. All academics, writers, journalists, and interested members of the public are invited to attend.
Jeff Wasserstrom, Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine, will convene a panel on Academic Historians Writing for General Audiences. This panel will feature historian Bathseba Demuth, whose Floating Coast won the George Perkins March Prize for best book in environmental history and is in the running now for other awards, and James Carter, whose Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai, has received strong reviews in publications such as the Economist. Demuth and Carter, both academics, published these recent trade books with W.W. Norton & Company. Special comment will be provided by Alane Mason, vice President and senior editor at Norton, and Amy Wilentz, Professor of English and Literary Journalism at UC Irvine and award-winning author of several books for general readers.
Register Here: http://bit.ly/WRITE1116
Jeff Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine, where he is also a Professor of Law, by courtesy, and Historical Writing Mentor for the Literary Journalism Program. He is on the editorial board of Dissent magazine, and is the advising editor for China for the Los Angeles Review of Books. His newest book, Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, is a short work written with non-specialist readers in mind that was published by Columbia Global Reports in February 2020. His newest book, Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, was published by Columbia Global Reports in February 2020.
Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian, specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. She moved to the Yukon at age 18 and, for over two years, learned the skills to survive in the taiga and tundra by mushing huskies, hunting caribou, fishing for salmon, and tracking bears. Since then, she has travelled visiting arctic communities around the world. Her work combines the histories of people, ideas, places, and non-human species and she employs a variety of methods from archival research to experiential work travelling on dog sleds through the arctic. Her writing on these subjects has appeared in academic publications like The American Historical Review to public-facing publications like The New Yorker. In 2019, she published Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait with W.W. Norton.
James Carter is an author and professor of history at St. Joseph’s University. His work focuses on the interaction between China and the West by writing, teaching, and researching smaller moments that illuminate the big story of Chinese-Western relations. His recent books include Creating a Chinese Harbin: Nationalism in an International City 1916-1932 (2002), Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth Century Monk (2010), and Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai (2020).
Alane Mason is a vice president and senior editor at W.W. Norton & Company, where she has edited prize-winning and bestselling works both of fiction and nonfiction. She has published reviews and essays in Vanity Fair, The Boston Review, and other publications. She is also the president and founder of Words Without Borders, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the translation, publication, and promotion of international literature (www.wordswithoutborders.org).
Amy Wilentz is a professor of literary journalism at UC Irvine and the author of Farewell Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti (2013), The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier (1990), Martyrs’ Crossing (2000), and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger (2006). She is the winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award. She won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for memoir for Farewell, Fred Voodoo. Wilentz is the former Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker and a long-time contributing editor at The Nation.