Pulitzer Finalist Hernan Diaz Delivers Finzi-Contini Lecture
"In the Distance" author and 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist in Fiction Hernan Diaz will deliver a Finzi-Contini Lecture on March 16, 2021 at 4:30 p.m. Eastern time.
As part of the event, which is sponsored by The Yale Review and Whitney Humanities Center, Diaz will address such questions as: Why dwell on made-up stories? Why make them up in the first place? Can fiction, that pack of lies, aspire to some form of truth?
The Finzi-Contini lectureship was endowed in 1990 by the Honorable Guido Calabresi, Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and former Dean of the Yale Law School, and Dr. Paul Calabresi, in memory of their mother, Bianca Maria Finzi-Contini Calabresi.
A scholar of European literature and a native of Ferrara, Bianca Maria Finzi-Contini fled fascism in Italy, along with her husband, Dr. Massimo Calabresi, and settled in New Haven, Connecticut. She earned a PhD in French at Yale, with a dissertation on Ernest Renan. She became Professor of French and Italian at Connecticut College, then was for many years Professor and Chair of the Department of Italian at Albertus Magnus College. She died in 1982, at the age of 80.
The lectureship sponsors a distinguished speaker in the field of comparative literature, broadly defined.